Communism – Page 33 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Best Monopoly Game For Your Leftist In-Laws

“World Socialism will be achieved peaceably. Our military role is strictly defensive. Is that understood?” – Octopussy

A capitalist, a socialist, and a communist were meeting up. The socialist was late. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “I was standing in line for sausage. The capitalist asked, “What’s a line?” The communist asked, “What’s sausage?”

When I was a kid, say, younger than sixth grade, I loved to play Monopoly® at Thanksgiving. It was great – it was simple to understand, and it involved buying properties to make money from the other players. My Mom and Grandma would play along. The fun part for young-me was that if you played the game right and got lucky roles you could reduce the other players to bankruptcy and evict them from your house. I’ll miss Mom.

After a while Monopoly™ became not a game I looked forward to, but one I dreaded at Thanksgiving. Why? The game goes on forever, and the biggest determiner to who wins isn’t great playing ability – it’s luck. It’s like playing Candyland© with houses. So, I guess in that respect, it’s like owning real estate in California. Also, at Thanksgiving I decided that eating enough tryptophan-drenched turkey to knock me on my sorry Thanksgiving butt was more fun, and the couch was as soft as the Cowboy™ defense. But that was before Monopoly© Socialism™.

But is it a gluten and conflict-free toilet paper made in a sustainable carbon-neutral factory?

Through whatever mechanism that Amazon© uses to track my purchases, it decided that I might be interested in a copy of Monopoly™ Socialism® as well as the tree-free-vegan-bamboo toilet paper. I’m sure the toilet paper is carbon neutral, but I was more interested in the game, but sadly, Monopoly© Socialism™ was out of stock. Amazon™ assured me it would be back in stock soon enough. Part of the charm for me were some of the (actual) questions that other purchasers asked on Amazon®:

Do I have to wait in a long line for the privilege of purchasing this game, like a breadline in Venezuela?
Is the board waterproof so Progressive tears won’t ruin it?
Are there rolling blackouts? Do the players get to eat zoo animals?

With purchasers asking those questions, I knew I was in with my people. I hit “add to cart” and it was on its way. It arrived last Wednesday.

Before candles, what did socialists use for lighting? Electricity. Which might explain why there were no utilities on the board.

The box was smaller than the usual Monopoly© box – the reason being that instead of just folding up the game board into halves, it folded up into quarters. No biggie. I thought that we’d keep the board game on a shelf, and perhaps pull it out next month to Make Thanksgiving Uncomfortable Again©, but Pugsley saw it, and convinced The Mrs. that we should play it on Saturday night. As it didn’t look like learning the rules wouldn’t require an advanced degree in game design nor require the Supreme Court to weigh in on disputes, I agreed.

I hear that after Ginsburg is gone, Leftists are worried that the decisions will be Ruth-less.

I have only one piece of advice when it comes to playing Monopoly® – do not allow The Mrs. to be the banker – she cheats. I’m not making this up. The Mrs. cheats gleefully and more-or-less openly (though she thinks she’s being sneaky) after a few glasses of wine. It wasn’t three rolls into the game that I saw The Mrs. had been pilfering from the bank’s funds. But The Mrs. obviously hadn’t been listening when I read the rules – the game is based on socialism, so you don’t win by having the most money. You win by “helping” in the most projects, things like the “Rise Up” collective bakery. If you help, you can put one of your Virtue Signal* tokens on the project while the community fund donates to the project.

*The game does not call these tokens Virtue Signal tokens, but the idea is to openly and publicly have other people pay for something that makes you look virtuous, so, to-may-to, to-mah-to.

A Marxist, a Socialist, and a Communist tried to get into a bar. The bouncer kicked them out after checking their IDs – “Come on back when you’re 21, guys.”

Money comes from the collective. The game starts with 1848 dollars in the community fund, since the Communist Manifesto™ was published in 1848. There is absolutely no reason to use one dollar bills in the game, so they tossed them in just for that joke so you can have 1848 dollars. Nice touch.

I said the game starts with that much money in the community fund. Every individual player starts with an socialist approved equal amount of zero dollars, so it was easy to see that The Mrs. was in a full on cheat when I saw she had a little pile of currency snuck back. How does the game go if players don’t have money? Easy. If you don’t have money to buy property start a project or pay a fine, it comes from that initial pile of 1848 dollars, which gets replenished when you pass “Go” and get your living wage of 50 dollars, and you put in five for the community.

It’s not like that happened. We didn’t make it all the way back to Go. None of us even made it all the way around to Go.

The game ends either when a single player wins by playing all of their Virtue Signal tokens. The game also ends when all of the 1848 dollars of community money is gone. And if you run out of the 1848 dollars? You lose. Heck, everyone loses.

1848 dollars doesn’t last long. And we’re not good socialists, so we all lost.

That loss, I think, is the underlying message of the game. In socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people’s money to spend and everyone loses. The game cost me $19.99, and it will be worth it to bring it out during Thanksgiving to be slightly more interesting than whatever snoozefest is going on in Detroit®. It’s not like we wanted to talk to the Leftist side of the family anyway, right?

I think if there Batman©-type Virtue Signal™? It would have Justin Trudeau’s face. I mean, without makeup.

But you can’t buy the game for $19.99. It seems like Hasbro® has stopped making it. Why? I don’t know, and it’s useless to speculate if it sold out or if Hasbro™ folded to political pressure. If you want to buy it on Amazon™ now, it’s selling for (cheapest price with free shipping) about $45, though it looked to be a bit cheaper elsewhere. After playing the game, I certainly can’t recommend it at that price, unless you really want to trigger your Leftist neighbor/friend/relative.

Maybe we should start calling Facebook™ and Twitter© Socialist media?

The reviews by purchasers at Amazon© are very positive, and they’re by verified purchasers. The negative reviews, however, aren’t by verified purchasers, and one of them is obviously by someone who never even bought the game.

The reviews by websites on the Internet weren’t really reviews. They were a listing of complaints that Monopoly® Socialism© didn’t accurately portray socialism. I’m thinking that the talent of these people has been wasted – where were they when they could have been complaining that Marvel® movies don’t accurately portray superpowers or that Breaking Bad© isn’t a realistic view of teacher insurance policies in the Albuquerque Public School System?

It was as if this minor and humorous critique of socialism in the form of a board game had to be beaten back because the one thing that Leftism cannot stand is . . . being made fun of. My favorite line from a review was this one where the reviewer almost (but not quite) achieves self-awareness:

Reading between the lines, the game’s designers are saying that with no incentive to work nothing gets done.

Somehow, that was intended as a dig against the game designers. But it turns out that it’s an accurate representation of reality. If there is no incentive to work, nothing gets done. Period.

The simplest version of that statement is, “if you don’t’ work, you don’t eat.” I’m pretty sure the reviewer (who has written thousands of posts for a clickbait site) would probably not show back up to work if they stopped paying him – he wouldn’t keep writing what the boss said if he couldn’t pay the rent or buy soy milk and chicken tendies.

Socialism looks great on paper. Unless that paper is in a history book.

It’s clear this game isn’t a real take on socialism, because the end of the game doesn’t feature a failed government, a population in near-starvation, shattered lives, and a blasted economy that will take a generation or more to heal. In our house, the game ended up with a second bottle of wine, a different game, and a nice evening.

The one negative review that’s correct is this one, and it’s mine: Socialism is a silly basis for a game, because everyone always loses. And that’s why Monopoly® Socialism™ caused so many Leftist panties to twist: because it got it 100% right.

Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft

“Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” – Office Space

“That’s what she said.”

I had just gotten the greatest performance review of my life. It was outstanding in every way. My boss (let’s call him Miller, it goes with the song) went on and on about how I was a stunning example of every possible good quality a person could have, and how I was universally loved, admired, and generally made women fertile just through a fleeting glance, and made men better than they thought they could be through the slightest example. If the company needed someone to walk across a pond, on the top of the water, John Wilder was your guy.

For about a second, I bought it. Flattery works because your mind really wants to believe all those nice things. It’s like a horoscope, keep using nice adjectives, and you’ll find one that the person is already predisposed to agree with.

Then I thought about it – this guy Miller, my new boss, has been with the company about a month. He barely knows where his office is and he’d only visited my office once. For him to write a performance review like this? I didn’t believe it. As much as I’d like to think of myself in such glowing terms, I rejected his flattery.

Beyond mentally rejecting his praise as an attempt at manipulation, I also made the mental note never to trust Miller.

Why?

Anyone who will be quick to praise will be quick to condemn. Besides, when I looked at him while he was smiling, he only smiled with his mouth – never with his whole face. He was smiling because he was “supposed” to be smiling, not because the smile was genuine. During those smiles Miller had the dead, flat eyes of a predator, like he was attempting to see if you were fooled and really believed the smile.

I never did meet Miller’s wife – I think her invisibility suit worked pretty well.

I was careful to document every conversation with him. Always trust your gut, people, unless your gut says socialism is a good deal. If your gut says that, remember: never go full Bernie.

I worked pretty far away from the company headquarters, where Miller’s office was. I set up weekly calls to keep him informed on what I and my team were doing. I’d done this in the past for my previous bosses. These calls allowed them to understand what we were doing, and digest it for top management if they needed to.

Except.

Except I found out from a colleague that during these meetings, most of the time Miller was shopping for things online, teaching himself to play the banjo, translating Garfield® into cuneiform (did they even have lasagna in ancient Sumeria?) or, in general, not paying any attention to what I was saying. My colleague noted that Miller generally wasn’t listening at all.

If you get the cuneiform wrong and accidentally translate a passage from the Necronomicon© this is what you get.

Normally, that’s not a problem, I ran had been running my end of things for years, and after a few years you get used to the usual problems – and are expected just to handle them. But my boss had a boss – call him my Grandboss. When my Grandboss wanted to know about some aspect of what I was doing, he’d ask my boss, Miller. Since Miller had literally no idea (despite weekly written reports and the phone call mentioned above) what I was doing, he did the simple thing: he made it up.

Most of the time, it worked fine. My Grandboss generally had an idea of what was going on, even if the specifics were a bit off. But when the results my boss made up promised didn’t happen? The Grandboss got mad. Very mad.

So mad, in fact, that my Grandboss called me up one day and was yelling. I explained, calmly, the real situation and the plan, and that seemed to calm him down. He checked up a few more times to make sure what I said was really happening, and then went away. But the troubles with Miller continued. Our conversations became a random affair – one day he would be polite. The next day, he would be literally yelling over the phone. What had started out as a bad feeling based on that too-good-to-be-true performance review had morphed into a full-blown sitcom level bad boss.

I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

I had one or two advantages – first, I had been at the company much longer and had several well-placed friends, and second, I wasn’t a deceitful sack of weasel meat. I’m certain that my boss was lying based on my informants at headquarters, and I’m equally certain that the things Miller was saying weren’t very positive. It’s been several years, and my career is still recovering from his “help.”

I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Miller got fired. “But, you can’t fire me! You don’t even know what I do!” were his comments as they took away his keys and allowed him to pop his personal possessions in a box and gave him a complementary cement bag (for the weight, dear). And, he’s right – the Internet sure won’t surf itself.

As near as I can tell, the company didn’t skip a beat in his absence. I’ll also admit that on the day he got fired, I had one of the best workouts of my life. The entire time I worked out that lunch, I just listened to Mack the Knife on a loop for 45 minutes of the best treadmill time I’ve ever put in. I smiled every second. Why Mack the Knife? I have no idea. I rarely listened to it before, and haven’t listened to it even one time since that day until tonight. As I write this, it’s on a loop in the background.

It may be a song from a Marxist play written by a Leftist, but it makes me happy that it made so much money – after the Marxist author died. Also? The most upbeat song about multiple murders. Bonus trivia: Lotte Lenya, mentioned in the song, played Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

As you can see, she’s the perfect Bond® girl for 2019.

I’ve tried to feel bad about feeling so good because Miller was fired. Even years later, it’s still a pleasant memory. Yeah. I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do.

Okay, the choice was a single post that was twice as long as this, or this broken into two parts. I chose two parts. Next part is on Friday.

Freedom: Violence is the Answer

“A new age has begun, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it.” – 300

One night I heard a noise on the deck. A raccoon was bringing me back a book that I had lost a few years ago. “It’s a miracle!” I said. “Not really,” said the raccoon, “your name was written on the inside cover.”

The dogs barked.

The dogs never bark, unless a Terminator® is here yet again looking for that stupid Sarah Conner. The dogs were safely in their crates for the night. I’ve spent thousands of hours (yes, thousands) downstairs writing hundreds of thousands of words at night after the family was safely asleep, and not one time ever (yes, ever) had our silly dogs ever barked.

As they barked, I heard something on the deck above. It sounded like a piece of deck furniture sliding. Yeah, sure, you say, there aren’t a lot of burglars that move furniture to announce their presence, especially not at 1 AM. You’re right.

But . . .

There is one thing that I do know – if there was an actual burglar upstairs, the consequences could get bad, and quickly. Nonviolent burglars try to rob you in the day when they think that nobody’s home. But a burglar that’s coming into your house when they know that someone is there?

They mean you harm.

Bad guys at night are actually looking forward to doing bad things. The sound of a shotgun ratcheting a shell into the chamber will scare the Schumer out of a daytime burglar, but it won’t deter an attacker at night. They’re looking for violence, and fully expecting to kill everyone in the house.

I blame violent video games, or maybe gluten or high fructose corn syrup, or worse yet, them playing video games about violent gluten while snorting high fructose corn syrup.

Regardless, I got up from the solitude of writing on my couch and got a pistol. Oh, sure, you may leave pistols lying about your palatial residences like we Wilders leave our PEZ® on the coffee tables for the crowned heads of state that come by to feel the perfect shapes of our skulls, but we keep ours out of the public areas. Mine are in places that I would normally sleep, like under the dining room table, in the hot tub, or behind the wheel of my car while driving to work.

Oh, yeah, I left one on the bridge!

So I went upstairs. I quietly opened my bedroom door and had to decide: the .45ACP or the 9mm? I chose the 9mm. Why? It was closest to the door, and all it required was a longish reach upwards. Could anyone else in the house reach it? Nope, but is a 9mm all that dangerous anyway? I mean, if a Pope can survive it, it can’t be that bad.

I pulled it out of its case as I walked towards the back door. As I got near the back door, I activated the best feature of the 9mm – the laser mounted right under its barrel, which I bought for $10 from Amazon®. The idea of the laser mounted on a pistol, for all three of my readers that never saw Terminator®, is to show the shooter right where the bullet is going to go. In my case, I turned it on because any actual person on the back deck, seeing a laser, would probably think twice about their “invading Wilder Manor” plan.

9mm – what I teach my daughters to shoot gnats with.

The dogs were still unsettled as I reached for the doorknob. As these dogs are really not dogs, but barking rats that have tails that wag when you call them a good boy, they’re really always unsettled. I turned on the outside lights and painted every piece of deck furniture with the laser.

Nothing, except for the overly ambitious spider that builds a web face-high across the back door every day. I didn’t really expect there to be anything, since I live in Modern Mayberry.

In checking the crime statistics to prepare for this post, I looked up Modern Mayberry. It shows up as being a crime-ridden area, since there actually was a murder here in 2016. It was, as I recall, a guy who killed his girlfriend (or vice versa) over infidelity. But random murders? Not here. Gang violence? Not here, since the closest thing we have to a gang is the pre-school soccer program. I hate those monsters.

I believe there are petty burglaries that occur here, but those are almost all during the daytime. Why?

Everyone here has guns. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I would estimate that at minimum, 10% of the households could be armed and lethal in 2 minutes or less. I would estimate that 50% could be armed in 10 minutes or less. And I would estimate that 80% would have a gun in their hands in 20 minutes or less, but by then you’re dead or the cops are here. However, if you are a criminal, this isn’t good.

Why?

Me. And my neighbor. When he moved in, he had no idea that he was living next to The John Wilder, but he showed me his latest toy – a nice AR tricked out with a green laser and a bunch of other bling. I have no doubt that he’d be happy to explain to the Sheriff why he perforated someone breaking into his house. That explains most of the residents of Modern Mayberry. And you can be certain that the District Attorney is one of us, too. He declined to prosecute a homeowner for emptying a magazine into a criminal that had shot the homeowner, even though the homeowner had shot the fleeing criminal in the back more than once.

Would this be a neighbor you prefer? Put me in the “yes” category.

The homeowner is a valued member of the Modern Mayberry community. The criminal? In jail. The criminal’s civil suit against the homeowner? Yeah. That was dismissed. Nobody could be found guilty of that here.

If you were to try to rob a house here at night, the next time you took a drink of water you’d look like a fountain. A fourteen-year-old kid trying to boost a bike at 3 in the afternoon? Probably not going to get shot. But that same kid at 3AM? You have as much chance of surviving the night as a Snickers® bar does at Rosie O’Donnell’s house.

And let me stress again: no one here has a problem with that.

But that’s not how it always was. It used to be that violence was the exclusive right of our rulers. And it was so not only for legal reasons, but for practical reasons.

Plus who knows how much for hair spray.

Let’s go back to the middle ages. Technology had advanced to the point where a knight in a full suit of armor was pretty much only going to be at risk from another knight, and they never fought except over who got the remote control at Knight School. Their armor was strong steel, and penetrating it was difficult. To a normal citizen serf of the day? A knight might as well have been a superhero – there was no reasonable way a normal citizen could hurt a knight.

What did it cost to outfit a knight and his horse? In the area of $500,000 to $3.5 million. The higher cost was probably due to the need to decorate it with the 15^th Century equivalent of Hello Kitty® stickers, but $500,000 was daunting. Even the armor of a “man at arms” was probably in the range of $20,000 or more, but one of those would be a poor competitor for a mounted knight.

Swords were huge, double-handed affairs. Why? To penetrate the armor of a knight you had to swing a heavy mass of steel at them.

Until.

Until the English longbow came to the front. The beauty of the English longbow is that, when fired all at once, a mass of them could penetrate all but the best armor of the day. At Agincourt, Henry V’s archers and knights took down 10,000 French, to (possibly) fewer than 500 English deaths. It is written on Henry V’s tombstone about conquering the French: “Look, Ma, no panzers!”

Oh, sorry. I’ll leave you to go back to smoking, Ma’am.

A longbow takes, in modern times, at least six weeks to learn to shoot well. A sword? Years.

The longbow made warfare more accessible to the common man. The result is well known – increased freedom for the common man. Before the king required Englishmen learn the longbow, a knight got pretty much what he wanted. After the longbow? A bit more difficult, because if the knight’s demand was too much? A group of men could make his demand as null and void as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb.

This levelling of force included fortresses. A tall castle with stone walls was impregnable short of a long siege, having been designed to resist stone thrown from catapults. But after cannon, castles were as done as Facebook® to a teenager after grandma started “Liking” their posts.

This trend continued. Soldiers shed armor, and the most potent weapons became affordable by even the most common man. By the time of the Revolution®, any American could hold in their hands the equivalent weapon of a British soldier. And not be trained in years like a swordsman, or in weeks like an archer, but in days. The investment in money went down, too – a good musket would cost about a month’s earnings for an American around the time of the Revolution™.

The Second Amendment wasn’t written about this – it was written about freedom.

People talk about democracy? In this way violence was democratized. Never in the history of mankind had a place been as free as America, but only part of it was philosophy – the rest was applied engineering. The Brown Bess was a British weapon, but it was the most common weapon used on both sides of the Revolution. Ordinary American citizens had the same weapon as the best armed British soldier. The result?

Tyranny lost. Arbitrary will could not be imposed upon free men. The Congress was stopped from legislating tyranny not only by the Constitution, but by the willingness of good men to accept the legislation.

This situation of increasing freedom kept going. “God created men. Sam Colt made them equal.” Any American could put 12 rounds in a pair of Colts® on his hips after the Civil War, plus another 15 in a Winchester™ in the scabbard on his saddle. Was the Old West© a killing field? Well, yes. In Dodge City, the murder rate at its peak was probably a little over twice what it is today in Baltimore today, but at least there wasn’t any rap music.

Where’s Selleck? This picture needs more Selleck.

Today, legal firearm ownership is through the roof. The weapons are of high quality: these firearms are nearly the same ability as firearms used commonly by the military. In many cases, a family home is better armed than the local police department – I’ve been to Modern Mayberry’s office and wouldn’t trade. We’re better prepared, too. It might take me three minutes to have an AR ready to go, but it would take our local police twenty minutes at least to mount an effective force to come “save” me. More than likely if I were unarmed, they’d just be there to photograph the bodies. Police aren’t the first responders. Police are second responders.

Prepared or not: you are the first responder.

In no case have I ever seen a cop do anything but get ready to fill out paperwork. The good news? You’re on your own.

There is no nation on Earth as armed as the United States. Modern Mayberry is a good example of that, where I’d expect 90% of citizens have more than one gun, and the cost of a decent firearm is $500 or less. Are we free here? Certainly. Do we fear our neighbors shooting us? Certainly not. I could toss a pistol on my hip and the biggest thing most people would worry about would be that I got to the counter at Burger King™ to order before them.

Ten drones hit the Saudi oil processing plants recently, taking out millions of barrels a day of the world’s oil production. Ten drones. And from what I can see, the drones cost a few thousand dollars each to make. Today, the parts and programming to make those drones isn’t hard to come by. Even the GPS tracking wouldn’t add much to the cost. The ability to destroy targets from hundreds of miles away is less expensive than a used car. A crappy used car.

Hey, he went on to drive the Pork Chop Express.

Millions of barrels of world oil production was taken down for less than the cost of a new Camaro®, and a new Camaro™ won’t even get you a date with the local meth tramp.

The implications on freedom of drone technology aren’t clear. I’d expect, however, that a government would have to take into account the fact that, at least in the United States, they govern a people that that wishes to be governed. This puts in place limits on government. The second the government wants to push the people too far, the calculus of violence will rapidly favor the people, and not the government.

Despite all of the nonsense-bragging from the left that a dozen people from flyover Red States aren’t equal to an aircraft carrier, I know who I’d pick. I’m not stupid, I’d pick both of them – I want the people and the aircraft carriers. But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the dozen people from flyover states. They won’t shoot down many F-35 fighters, but I’d be willing to bet if you asked any soldier if he’d rather fight Afghans or Red State Americans unleashed, he’d want to go up against the Afghans any day.

When a country’s leaders want to enforce tyranny, the first thing they do is to take away the weapons of the common man. After that, atrocity is the playbook. A free people, with arms, will not suffer tyranny.

Here is Vladimir Lenin’s order to his henchmen in about (I haven’t found the date) 1918:

“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.

Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
Publish their names.
Seize all their grain from them.
Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”.

Telegraph receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

Find some truly hard people”

Would Lenin’s order work in Texas? Would that work in Kentucky? Would that work in Indiana? In Michigan? In Ohio?

No. Not in 2019.

The war on guns isn’t about keeping schools safe – that’s actually trivial to do without taking guns away. It’s trivial to do without Red Flag (Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote) laws.

I hear that Lenin’s ghost wants universal health care. But with rope.

The only thing taking guns away from Americans does is to make it easier for the Lenin Squad® in the House to take whatever they want. And if Americans are disarmed? They will take whatever they want.

In Modern Mayberry, it was likely a raccoon or an opossum on my deck. But if it wasn’t, the red dot of the laser playing across the forest near my house probably convinced the bad guys that this house certainly wasn’t worth ending their life for. More than likely it convinced a raccoon that a world-famous blogger was willing to fight him to the death for the rights to lick a cat food can clean.

He didn’t have to worry. A raccoon going after a cat food can isn’t what I worry about – even though it might scare the dogs.

But if it was a government raccoon? Hmmmm.

The Global Warming Memo They Don’t Want You To See (Okay, I wrote it.)

“Yes, it keeps me up at night. That and the Loch Ness Monster, global warming, evolution, other fictional concepts.” – House, M.D.

Looks like she uses Coppertone® for her sunscreen.

I intercepted a note from the Global Warming Community(C) to the media using the extremely old technique of making it up. Here it is in it’s entirety, with no further commercial interruptions.

It’s the end of summer, so the Global Warming Community™ would like to take a moment to remind you that hot summer weather is a sure sign of Global Warming®. Cold winter weather is just weather. And if there are more hurricanes, you can bet that it’s a sign of Global Warming©. If there are fewer hurricanes, you can also bet that is a sign of Global Warming™, too.

Firstly, please ignore that our models aren’t even close to accurate:

Please ignore previous climate predictions that had the 97% Consensus© like the one by “42 top American and European investigators,” which stated . . . “The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.” Please ignore these other predictions, too:

Worldwide famines by 1975. You remember those, right? On August 10, 1969, Paul Ehrlich stated that “The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead.” Ehrlich is still alive.
On April 16, 1970, it was announced that there would be an ice age starting in the first third of the new century because there would be enough air pollution to “obliterate the Sun.”
Ehrlich wasn’t happy to have just one spot on the list. In 1970, he stated that there would be water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. And the oceans would be as dead as Lake Erie. Please ignore the tilapia your wife had for dinner last month.
In 1974, it was noted that sea ice had increased 12% between 1967 and 1972. It was also noted in the article that “This appears to be in keeping with other long-term climatic changes, all of which suggest that after reaching a climax of warmth between 1935 and 1955, world average temperatures are now falling.”
Time® magazine noted in June, 1974, that, “Telltale signs are everywhere – from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7°”
From the New York Times Book Review, July, 1976: “The Cooling, so writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”
From the New York Times, January, 1978 headline: “No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.”
1980: Reports were that acid rain will kill us. Please ignore that in 1990 the report came in: acid rain is not really a thing.
June 24, 1988, Dr. James Hansen said, “Our climate model simulations for the late 1980s and the 1990s indicate a tendency for an increase in heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and Midwest United States.” Please ignore that 1988 was the driest year in the upper Midwest in the last 31 years.
In September of 1988, it was noted that “A gradual rise in sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation [The Maldives] of 1196 small islands in the next 30 years.” Please ignore that the Maldives are still there.
Hansen also noted that “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water (by 2018).” Please ignore that it’s not.
In 2004, one prediction was that Great Britain would be “Siberian” by 2020. Four months to go!
In June of 2008, Dr. Hansen said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013 to 2018. Please ignore that it’s not even close.
In December of 2008, Nobel Prize Winner® Al Gore noted that the Arctic “polarized (sic) cap will disappear in 5 years.” Please ignore the 14,000,000 square kilometers of ice that was in the “polarized” area. And please ignore all of the other people who said the same thing.
Please don’t go to the CEI blog where all of the above (and more) is documented (LINK).

I wonder if she can say “indeed” as deeply as Brian Blessed?

Please remember how charming the clinically depressed, autistic child suffering from whatever “selective mutism” is and obsessive compulsive disorder. Realize that this is certainly the best leader the Global Warming Community® can offer for climate change because if you make fun of her you’re making fun of clinically depressed autistic that suffer from “selective mutism” and OCD, and to dispute anything she says is hate filled. Please note that the Global Warming Community™ did nothing manipulative or unethical in having a child with mental issues be our spokesperson. Thankfully, the Global Warming Community© has managed to get the Global Warming Agenda® into schools so impressionable children with mental issues can become so upset that they lose 22 pounds due to worry.

Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a “Green” (read communist) who is the handler for Greta Thunberg. The Internet says she works for Soros, but I find that connection a bit tenuous – I think being communist is probably enough.

Please ignore how the primary discussion during climate conferences has been how much money developed countries would have to pay to undeveloped countries. Thankfully, the media has ignored projections that the Paris Treaty™ might cost the United States as much as $2.5 Trillion a year, and only make the climate slightly cooler, as low as 0.17°C cooler in the year 2100 than without the agreement.

Please ignore how many Global Warming™ temperature graphs start in 1978, one of the coolest years on record. This is like picking that day you drank fifty beers and saying you’ve made progress because you’ve cut down consumption by 50%. Please ignore Dr. Roy Spencer’s (LINK) graph, even though it also starts at the cool period in the 1970’s:

Also, please ignore that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s advisor stated about her Green New Deal™: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Please ignore that the primary driver for many Global Warming Agenda™ items are about control of people and economies, and if we really wanted to eliminate carbon emissions the Global Warming Community™ would have embraced nuclear power thirty years ago.

Also, Please ignore these Greenland Ice Cores from Joanne Nova’s site (LINK):

Also, please make sure you don’t publish “stop having babies because a person in the United States has a bigger Carbon Footprint™ and adds more to Global Warming© than the wonderful citizens of the third world” articles right next to “we need more immigrants to replace all the babies we’re not having.” It’s okay in the same issue, but not right next to each other.

And whatever you do, please don’t let anyone know that we’re at the characteristic end (more or less) of a typical interglacial warm period (LINK) and that our demise is much more likely to come by ice than fire, unless you read George R.R. Martin (and I must note it takes him about 415,000 years per novel nowadays:

Lastly, please, please, please ignore the fact that the International Panel on Climate Change® came up with the conclusion that variance in the Sun’s output doesn’t impact climate. Yes, even though there is ample evidence that the gigantic thermonuclear reactor in the sky just might have something to do with climate (Climate Change, Solar Output, Ice Ages, The Planet Vulcan, And Old Guys With Beards).

We’ll be back next spring to remind you that if we don’t act in the next (checks watch) five minutes . . . WE ARE ALL DOOMED!

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting! They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow. “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.” The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously. This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high. I looked around for cameras. Aha! There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener. They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected. Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

Also? Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic. He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**. I had trained. I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©. I put it in my palm. Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate. In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place. I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth. Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane. The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts. I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education. My heart, despite all of the training began to race again. The door knob turned.

Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake. She stopped. She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny. This is gross. There is lint in this marshmallow. And bits of string. And, is that a BB? This won’t do, this won’t do at all.” Drat. I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught. I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record. Ruined! And all at the age of five. Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all. Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.” She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born. Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success. And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime. I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool. And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first. They then followed these kids for 40 years. Yes. 40 years. Here’s a (LINK). Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened. Enough vodka works, too. Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear: they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it. Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me. Yes. In kindergarten. That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes. We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties. Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill. The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

Ahhh, Darwinian fables. They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future. If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences. I want the marshmallow now, dangit! The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow. There might not even be a second marshmallow. Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life. I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance. On my life. I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance. Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

It’s a project car, honey. The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD. You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death. Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself. In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all. Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular. I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet. I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.” If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today. But life is a balance. If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke. Those are two extremes. Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts. You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily. Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box. Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y. And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow. But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it? Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow. Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****. But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®. The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that. It looks cool.” To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow. I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows. Otherwise Harvard© will.

I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature. If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me? I don’t like marshmallows all that much. Except on ‘smores®. And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

*The Matrix. Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger. If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me. Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. Really? Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope. You can figure this one out.

Be Prep-ared

“Be prepared, son. That’s my motto. Be prepared.” – The Last Boy Scout

The most prepared person is my friend, Justin Case.

When I was a kid, camping meant backpacking. I had the good fortune to live in the mountains, where it my daily view waiting for the school bus was what people took vacation from work to see. Heck, it was valuable enough to them that they would buy an SUV to haul a miniature home to come and experience for five days. But to me, that wasn’t camping, that was daily life. It’s amazing how we can become bored by splendor when surrounded by it daily.

Backpacking was camping. When you camp as a backpacker, everything that goes up the hill goes on your back. You are the SUV, which may explain why Pop Wilder put a bumper sticker on my butt.

Okay that wasn’t it, but if it were 2019 the sticker would say, “Hey, vegans, you can thank me for killing that cow that was eating all of your food.”

When you backpack for more than a day or so, you really learn what’s essential. The Boy and then later Pugsley joined the ranks of a familiar organization in hopes of becoming . . . “A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts®” so that they can avenge me after the communists put me in the drive in movie camp. I just know that there won’t be Raisinettes©, because communists hate Raisinettes™.

When The Boy first joined Cub Scouts® (the younger version where parents have to camp with the kids), my brain still equated camping with backpacking. The tent I bought for camping with him? A good four-man backpacker. If you know anything about tents, you know that a four man tent is not big enough for four normal-sized humans. In fact, it was just big enough for me and The Boy and our gear, and it was one you had to get on your knees to crawl inside. To sleep on? Self-inflating sleeping pads.

Honestly, I’ve never camped with anyone that I wanted to kill more. When I was sharing the tent with him, every time I’d start to drift off to sleep, The Boy would shake me back awake. Every time. Why? Because, allegedly, I would snore.

If you have never spent two nights camping with someone who intentionally wakes you up just as you’re getting ready to go into deep sleep, you may not understand that’s the sort of thing that makes you think . . . “You know, The Mrs. could produce a decent copy of The Boy that looks a lot like this one.”

I shouldn’t make too much fun of Charlie Sheen – I hear he’s got a new show set for later this year – Two and a Half Personalities.

Everything I brought camping for that first Scout© trip including the tent and cooking gear fit into one decent-sized backpack. Surely everyone else had the same idea about camping, right? No. When I got there I saw that spacious, palatial multi-room tents with cots, tables, and even sinks was the norm. On one camping trip, the leader even brought a gasoline-powered electric generator for powering his tent. I’m pretty sure at least one family brought a television, but since I was sleep-deprived, my memory might be suspect.

It was at that point I realized that outside of where I grew up, camping meant “living in a fabric palace with every possible amenity known to man.”

Yikes. Eventually I gave up and bought my own fabric palace for camping with the The Boy and Pugsley when they were Cub Scouts©, though I stopped before we bought a generator and sink. But when The Boy moved over to the actual Boy Scouts®? Things changed.

The idea of camping there was that the boys (not the adults) were responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, equipment, and logistics. They planned the meals, they selected the cooks, they divided the work, and nobody considered a fabric palace with a generator – it was not quite the austerity of backpacking, but it was close. One especially nice rule was “no phones” for the kids. As I was an adult leader in this elite paramilitary organization, I got to go camping quite a lot – sometimes over 30 days a year.

My first trip, packing took an hour. My most recent trip, packing took about five minutes – I’ve discovered that if I forgot it? I can live 48 hours without it.

I experimented with gear – what gear made sense, what gear should be thrown out. Thirty days of camping gives a lot of testing time, and do it over the course of several years? Soon enough you’ve put nearly 150 days into the field for gear testing. I learned what was useful, and what was useless. Probably the best lesson was about things that were sometimes useful.

What was always useful? The list is in (more or less) order from “never give up” to “might give up based on the trip.”

Clothing – Fully half the days of the year near Modern Mayberry, if you chose to go camping and it wasn’t raining, you’d need no more than your camping clothes to sleep. Might it be a chilly night on some nights? But you’d be okay. We often forget that the first line of defense against everything from sunburn to bugs to cold weather that we have is our clothing. Clothing also keep us from getting arrested, or at least that’s what my probation officer keeps saying.
Shoes – Foot protection is important – no protection on the feet, you won’t be moving around. Sure, people in the distant past . . . yada yada. It takes years to build up the appropriate calluses on your feet to walk around. Having good shoes is just a trip to buy them.
Tent – I know one leader that made due with a tarp. I know one that only used hammocks. I liked actual tents – it keeps the bugs out. I eventually caved, and in car camping I use a tent that I can stand up in. I know the others could work for me, but that’s what I chose because I’m old. It was also good down to -15°F (-456°C).
Knife – I always carry one. Can cut a rope, I can cut dinner, but I just can’t cut the mustard.
Matches – In the winter, staying warm is a must, and fire can cook food.
Sleeping Bag – I take a sleeping bag, even in summer – worst case, you can sweat all over it.
Cot – I experimented with sleeping foam, and inflatable sleeping pads, but a cot is about the best. Sleeping pads are a pretty close second.
Coffee Cup – Yes, for coffee. But also for soup. Or stew.
Bowl – I started out using a fancy mess kit. I know one person who used a Frisbee®, but I just settled on an unbreakable ceramic bowl.
Cookware – The bowl could double, if it was metal. I’m all for having both a bowl and a cooking pot.
Spoon – Spoons are like bowls on the end of sticks. Amazing that people would invent a smaller bowl to empty a larger one.
Book – I always took one, I always read one. Nice during down time.
Toilet Paper – Better than using poison ivy leaves.
Folding Chair – Sure, silly, but it was always used. You can only stand so long. A stump works, certainly, and when I backpack we’d pull up a log. But chairs are nice.
Light for Inside the Tent – Mainly useful for reading the book.

This was nearly as useless as that glass hammer that I got from E-Bay®, or that wooden frying pan that I got from Amazon©.

What was sometimes useful? The order is less useful here, since depending upon weather or other conditions, some of these would really be essential.

First Aid Kit – I still always carry one, though mine is a bit more tricked out than an over the counter version – I’ve added Super Glue®, butterfly bandages, a foam splint, and blood clotting agent. It’s hard to be John Wilder: Civil War Surgeon® without a bag tools. Did I mention I have a knife?
Bug Spray – Depending on the time of the year, this is really nice to have. I tried not showering as an alternative, but that only works as a people repellent.
Rope – Paracord is about right – you could always use more if you were hauling something heavy, but we never ran into any situation where paracord wouldn’t work.
Rain Poncho – Useful when it was raining, in theory. In practice, when it’s raining and 80°F out, it’s not required unless you happen to be made out of sugar. When it’s raining and 40°F out? It’s a necessity.
Water Bottle – Why isn’t this useful for every trip? Well, most places we went had water. If they didn’t? We brought it. If unlimited fresh water wasn’t the case, I’d revert to my backpacking days where a water bottle and a water filter were near the top of the list.
Saw/Axe/Hatchet – Most fires that we made were out of small wood that we could easily break by hand. We used saws/axes/hatchets more for making things. In deep winter camping, we’d probably want better firewood, so a saw becomes more useful.
Map – This is listed in “sometimes useful” but only when we taught map reading. We never went any place so far off the beaten path where a map was required. If you didn’t have a cell phone? This might be useful once again.
Frisbee/Football – Good times. And football doesn’t mean soccer ball.
Flashlight – When I started camping, I thought this was essential. Between firelight, moonlight, and starlight, rarely did I use a flashlight after the first thirty days.
Cell Phone – Okay, I’ll admit I surfed Drudge® while I was camping. And it’s great to have as an emergency backup, if there’s signal.

I always carry a knife when I have a flashlight – you won’t see me taking a stab in the dark.

What was rarely (if ever) useful?

Compass – Modern GPS technology and cell phones have made this of similar usefulness as a buggy whip. I have several.
Bear Spray – Not very good for spicing up my chili when camping. When hiking, scouts make enough noise that bears are afraid. And my (alleged) snoring would keep any bear away at night.
Wallet – Nothing useful there for camping, unless they need to identify the body.
Keys – Useful before and after camping. Not so much during.

A camping trip isn’t the end of the world, so there are things that we plan to take with us that we consumed during the trip:

Water – Needed. Unless you’re a kangaroo rat. Clean water is of great importance, but maybe we take it for granted – and remember, it’s no substitute for beer.
Food – Unless you have a medical condition, over the course of any short duration, food is not a necessity, it’s a comfort item. We were comfortable campers.
Paper Towels – 99% of cleanup is done with paper towels. Not a necessity. But nice.
Soap – To wash dishes. Or yourself.
Trash Bags – In a pinch, you could use them for rainwater collection, as a poncho, or weave it into a plastic rope to let yourself out of a psychiatric prison again. We just put trash into ours.

“Here’s a lesson to test your mind’s mettle: take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages. So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won’t grow tired.”

– Seneca the Dead Roman Dude

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

– Also Seneca the Still Dead Roman Dude

Roman algebra was boring. X was always equal to 10.

One of the best parts about camping is that it allows you to walk away from 2019. It allows you to leave behind the past and live with virtually no technology younger than 70 years old. Camping pulls you away from most of the meaningless parts of our world, and it’s interesting to see people cope with moving from an environment that manages to provide amusement on demand to one where high-tech includes propane stoves and fire.

One particular campout brings this one to mind – an adult was continually whining about the weather. Sure, it was November, and there was a constant rain. Thankfully, we had an adult whining about the weather every chance he got. Since the boys were off doing their own thing, they weren’t exposed to the negativity – the boys loved it, cooking oatmeal in the rain for Sunday breakfast. Several thought the campout was one of the best they’d been on.

The lesson? You don’t need most of the things you think you need, not even good weather.

Things that you need that you don’t think you need:

Practice – spending that amount of time away from a house taught me a lot about what I need, and what I don’t.
Mental Toughness – The life we have on a daily basis isn’t really normal, especially when compared to the lives people have lived throughout history. We live in luxury, with a great freedom from want, and ample food for everyone: whether it gets distributed is another matter. Living without these luxuries for a week and learning you can be happy with less is a great way to prepare for emergencies.
Amusements – Simple things like a deck of cards can help with the withdrawals from 2019. The next step is meaningfully connecting with people. Crazy idea, that one.
Purpose – Understand why you’re doing all of this. Having a purpose that’s beyond Facebook® is priceless.

Here are some lessons I picked up from Hurricane Ike:

90%+ of people don’t prepare at all until the last minute.
Unless you’ve practiced, you’ve forgotten something. I forgot propane for the gas grill, my neighbor had some. He forgot gas for his car. I had some. Even trade.
Unless your family has practiced, they’ll be mentally weak. Even just a few days without power had people missing it, and in the aftermath of the hurricane, it got hot. With no air conditioning, Houston was just plain horrible. None of us were used to that. Another week of no power and I’d have shipped off the rest of the family to a hotel.

The basics of survival are simple: Air for breathing. A place to get out of the cold. Water. Eventually, food. Survival is hard to practice for – taking a few days off and camping is easy. Taking a month off is harder, and taking a year off is nearly impossible for anyone who has bills to pay. But if you’re ready for a disaster that lasts a month? You’ve already gone to the head of the class. And if you’ve learned to not murder your child because he wakes you up every time you start to snore so that sleep is impossible?

Well, that’s a positive, too.

Remember: just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t. And when you’re prepared for a range of outcomes, both physically and mentally, you’re ahead not of 90% of the population, but 99%. What will the future bring us? That’s a big question, but if you prepare, remember that practice is a part of the preparation.

As Concerned American always notes over at Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), “This material will be on the final exam.”

The Impending End of The Age of Oil. But Not This Week.

“You have raw emotion deep under your surface. Frack it!” – The Simpsons

From the movie Sad Max®: Beyond Soy Latte™.

Energy rules our world. Advanced civilization depends entirely on the availability of inexpensive energy, and wars have been fought for energy, and lost because of the lack of energy. Every task you or I do during a day is made easier by the availability of that energy. Every task. Even something as simple as a hike in the woods is made easier due the hiking shoes I wear that incorporate polymers and plastics and artificial fabrics made possible through cheap energy and more specifically: cheap fossil fuels. Cheap energy gives us fresh strawberries in winter, and baby oil for sunbathers in summer.

Even though the oil changes are more fun, I imagine the upkeep is more expensive than a Buick®.

I’d even make the case that when energy is cheap, freedom flourishes. Why have a slave? It’s much cheaper to have a gas powered weed trimmer. Slavery is immoral, but cheap energy removes that pesky incentive. Why have serfs? You have to feed them, which is a big drawback. If the Russian Emperor had used tractors instead, he might have lived long enough to be on Dancing with the Czars®.

Cheap energy is freedom.

One of the biggest recurring questions that has popped up (again and again) during my lifetime has been the impending end of the Age of Oil. If you say “impending end of the Age of Oil” in a really deep, booming baritone like Brian Blessed it sounds even cooler. The first time the impending end of the Age of Oil reached mass public consciousness was in the 1970’s, and for good reason. Texas had passed its peak in oil production in 1973, it was thought that every year after would see the production decline.

True Life Snippet From Stately Wilder Manor: Whenever I agree with The Mrs. by saying, “Indeed” she says, “Now say it like Brian Blessed.” And she’s serious. She won’t let me say the word “Indeed” without impersonating Brian Blessed.

How crazy were we for oil in the 1970s? When oil was found in Alaska on the North Slope, several major oil companies put together a four-foot wide (16 meters) pipeline that brought oil 800 miles (6 kilometers) from the Arctic sea down to the Gulf of Alaska. At the time, the project was one of the most ambitious construction projects in United States history, and cost the equivalent of $34 billion 2019 dollars, or about what Elon Musk spends on weed and hair implants in a year. It was expensive, and even in the 1970’s the lawyers and environmental groups had their knives out. In 1970, they were all NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard. In 2020? They’ve gone BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Nothing as grand or great as the Alaska Pipeline will ever be built again in the United States.

After the Alaska Pipeline oil started flowing and the United States sweet-talked the Saudis into making oil cheaper than a date with Miley Cyrus, oil concerns continued – with oil companies looking for oil in ever more remote locations, including the a mile under the sea, couch cushions, and the faces of teenage boys. Billions were invested in both conventional oil (think about a Texas oil derrick) or unconventional (think about the oil platform used by a James Bond villain as a secret hideout). Exxon© even spent millions trying to learn how to mine shale, crush it, and cook it so that it could be turned into Happy Motoring™ gasoline, but gave up.

These concerns disappeared in 1999 when it became obvious that if you wanted a barrel of oil, in the future all you would have to do is order one on the Internet via Hotmail® after you looked it up on AltaVista™. At that point The Economist© had a woefully stupid cover proclaiming that oil would be cheap from here on out since it was trading as low as $15 a barrel at that point, even though oil doubled in cost over the year. In 2008, crude oil would hit its (so far) all-time high in 2019 dollars of $173.

On a positive note, with her skin Meg Ryan could now do commercials for Jack Links® beef jerky.

The thought in 2008 was that we were certain to have hit impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!). How certain? George W. Bush, an oilman president from Texas, was in favor of creating incentives to add ethanol to gasoline, despite the anguished cries of people who would rather have consumed the alcohol directly. Ethanol plants appeared throughout the corn belt of the United States, turning seed, sunlight, fertilizer, and diesel fuel into food. Which was turned into fuel. Farmers loved this.

This led to yet more investment in energy alternatives – schemes to turn natural gas into ammonia for fuel, yet deeper wells into the ocean, fracking, turning coal into liquid fuels, turning “switch grass” into fuel, and any other silly idea that would could come up. People even touted the coming “hydrogen economy” because they forgot that hydrogen had to be made using some other form of energy. The world was needing an energy savior.

Or, could he be the foretold Anti-Cat?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Apocalypse

Of course in 2008, the trend was clear: impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!) was upon us. But one of the unlikely saviors had turned out to be real.

In 2012 if you would have asked me, I would have told you that fracking was just a great way to turn money into wasted fuel – it took almost as much fuel to make fracked oil as you got out of it – not a good investment. In 2015, I would have told you the same thing – the fracking companies were losing money like there was no tomorrow – if you had to invest more energy (think Btu or kilowatts) into getting oil out of the ground than it was worth in energy terms, you were just sinking yourself faster by using that kind of energy – it’s like burning your blankets to keep your bedroom warm in winter.

I was putting together my notes for a Big Energy Post in October of 2018, and had even written the first few paragraphs (okay, 500 words or so) when my research was showing something different. I skipped the Big Energy Post and moved on to another topic, since it was clear to me that my preconceived notion that fracking was a waste of energy might be wrong. My research was showing something other than fracking was a waste of energy. It was showing that fracked oil might actually be . . . worth it?

It turns out that when anyone first starts doing anything, they suck at it. And unless it’s me practicing singing, I have learned that if I practice, I’ll get better. There’s even a curve that describes this – it’s called an “S-Curve” or logistics curve or learning curve. When you first start walking, you suck. When you first start driving, you suck. When you first start, well, anything you’re awful at it. Over time you get better, and the more you practice, the more competition there is? The better you get.

If you have hundreds of people practicing something with billions of dollars on the line? They get better. Quickly.

And that’s the story of fracking oil in the United States. Water usage in fracking is down. Chemical usage in fracking is down. Drilling costs, energy expended, and labor per barrel are down. After practicing thousands of times on thousands of wells, companies have figured out how to frack a well to maximize crude oil production and minimize cost (and energy) put into it. One metric I saw showed that fracked oil was now competitive (with a profit) compared with the cheapest oil on the planet – oil from Saudi Arabia. Companies have gotten so good at fracking that natural gas in the United States is essentially free.

I guess I’m not a fan.

Fracked oil is on a trajectory to be competitive with the lowest cost oil produced conventionally any place in the world. And fracked oil has some other advantages – it’s “lighter” than conventional crude – that means it contains more gasoline and diesel, and less of the “heavier” stuff that is harder to turn into gasoline and diesel – think asphalt.

The United States is the largest crude oil producer in the world. I never thought I’d type that sentence and it represent a real fact, but in 2019, it does. The United States is, as promised by every president starting with Nixon, actually, really and for trues, energy independent.

[Edit – Chart added after Lathechuck’s comment]

Was it alternative energy, like windmills? No. Was it the communist fever dreams of The Teen Girl Congress Squad®? No.

Is it “sustainable”? Kinda. It is for a while. There are an estimated (as of 2019) 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the world, 293,000,000,000 of them are in the United States. At 20,000,000 barrels a day in just the United States, using just United States resources, that’s forty years that we have from 2020 – until 2060 – to find an alternative, like, oh, nuclear. And don’t believe me – here’s an actual clean energy evangelist who finally did that math and discovered . . . windmills are worse than natural gas as far as carbon emissions.

We still face headwinds – economic, exponential growth, two billion people that would love to hop the border to the United States, and communists that want to tear the place down. But oil? Oil isn’t the place to look for an apocalypse, at least this week.

And, trust me, if I hear a whiff that any of the above is wrong, I’ll pop it right back up on this blog as soon as I can confirm.

So, at least for today, Happy Motoring©. We have maybe forty years to fix this, so let’s not waste it. This has obvious foreign policy implications we’ll discuss in future posts. Upside? Why do we care about the Middle East anymore?

American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny

“Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!” – Animal House

On this blog recently someone commented, “When I was a kid, people used to say that ‘It’s a free country,’ but they don’t say that anymore.” I tried it out the other day. The response? “It hasn’t been a free country in a while.” I turned him into the FBI for that kind of hate think.

I was driving in the middle of Midwestia in the middle of a quest that you’ll probably hear about on Wednesday. One of the videos that was in my suggested list was about “America’s Cold Civil War.” This isn’t a review of the video, but it brought up some interesting points. The one I want to make clear to every single person that loves freedom in the United States is: if you’ve ever seen a movie about that rag-tag elements of a group fighting a foe that has nearly utterly defeated them, it’s us. We are the Wolverines.

I get to be Charlie Sheen, mainly because he’s still alive. I think.

I don’t mean to say that to create a feeling of defeat – far from it. But the first step in dealing with a situation is understanding reality. And reality is very simple today. At a minimum, the Left has coopted the following elements of culture in the United States – they have been, over time, “converged” into Leftism:

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.

This isn’t an accident, it’s entirely by plan. And not only by plan, it’s by a plan that was entirely shared. From Verified Communist Traitor® Herbert Marcuse, in his book Counterrevolution and Revolt (bold added):

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.

I could prove all of the above Institutions have been converged through the Long March Through the Institutions and will probably discuss a few of these in the future, because I could do a post on each one. Heck, maybe it would be a great book, but only if I could figure out how to pair hot chicks and communist propaganda.

East German girl swimmers bench pressing 300 pounds in 1976 is completely normal.

But if you doubt me, you have Google® (itself converged) and you can easily verify list above even through the Leftist-bias that’s now on that search engine. I’ll leave you with one more question: why else would Fortune© 500® corporations sign a manifesto saying profits were less important than social goals if Leftists weren’t in control? Because there were extra doughnuts in the breakroom and they were feeling generous?

In almost any context, these organizations reflect the values of the Left, not of the Right. I specifically don’t use the label conservative here – the conservative movement has utterly failed in the United States (to quote absolutely everyone) to conserve anything. We live a country where adults telling four year old boys that being a girl is okie-dokie (and vice-versa) aren’t thrown directly in prison for a decade or more (after a trial, of course) for child abuse. The goals of the above organizations would be cause for mass revolt if they had been publicized in 1990, but now, despite no vote, no public acceptance, each point of the Left has been accepted as the new normal.

And telling a boy that he’s a girl? Oh, wait, that’s brave. Sorry.

Despite all of that, this is not a post about giving up. Screw that. Each day makes me more independent, not less, more wanting to tell the truth.

And if you’re reading this, no one is done here. Freedom is always the underdog. I really wish we’d just stop waiting until 2:00 in the fourth quarter to start playing.

I remember seeing a film in Social Studies in High School about the Korean War. In the black and white film, almost all of Korea had been lost. The film ended right at what is known as the Pusan Perimeter, right where the North Korean Army was about to kick freedom off of the Korean peninsula, forever. It was tough watching that film.

But then we learned what happened next: MacArthur led the naval invasion of Inchon and turned the tide of battle, leading a combined United Nations® force that cut off the North Koreans. This turned the course of the war, and in the process helped to create the free country of South Korea that is a world leader in technology, bad music videos, and wealth creation today.

Spoiler alert: we tied.

Our Pusan Perimeter is now. I had a great boss once upon a time, he would continually remind me, “John, start with the end in mind,” which is #2 of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As I look at the state of the Right back in 2016, we were at the Pusan Perimeter. As we as a nation blindly stumble toward Civil War II, I can’t predict the outcome, but I can see the full range of outcomes.

We’ll go from best case to worst case for people who love freedom. Although there are variations, I think I’ve captured all of the big picture end games below.

I named operation Aesop after the Raconteur Report’s Aesop. You can read him here (LINK).

Operation Aesop: Total victory.

What it is: The Right wins. Traditional society is restored. Mothers and fathers in committed relationships are again honored. A Constitutional republic of limited government replaces the democracy of unlimited power. The United States is unified. Think of it as a return to the 1950’s, but with color TV and microwaves.

What it takes: Oh, not much more than the bloodiest war in the history of the country. The only way this results in victory is as Von Clausewitz wrote about in On War: [Accomplishing . . . ] “three broad objectives, which between them cover everything: destroying the enemy’s armed forces; occupying his country; and breaking his will to continue the struggle.”

That’s what happened in the first Civil War. That’s what happened to the Germans and Japanese in World War II. The concept of continuing was even more horrific than the concept of trying to continue to fight. It’s total capitulation. This is actual war until the enemy is not capable of continuing. Not talking heads on a television show. Not voting. Not discussion. Not a “mission accomplished” after five weeks moving across Iraq where the “will to continue the struggle” is still clearly intact.

Outcomes: Some freedoms we see now would be curtailed. Political discourse would be constrained. But teenagers would be pretty polite, again. And you wouldn’t really have to worry about the border.

I’m related to Patrick Henry, or so my aunt told me. I like to imagine Patrick getting a bit tipsy and writing mean letters to Madison about how short Madison was and how Dolly might want to give up on the chew.

Operation Founding Fathers: 50 Independent States.

What it is: A return to base principles. Originally, the United States was conceived as just that, independent free States. The majority of decisions to be made were to be made at the state, and not the Federal level. Each state was to be free to make decisions. Texas could be Texas. California could be Venezuela. Vermont could be stoned. The free decisions of free States was allowed. The free movement of free peoples was likewise allowed. This is returning to that state.

What it takes: Leftist thought is built around the universal adoption of their principles. Individuals in society cannot be left to make decisions, so this is a hateful outcome to the Left. I recall discussing politics with a Leftist when I was younger. The Leftist thought I was on the Right. That, at least they could deal with. When I identified as a Libertarian®? The look of disgust was clear – the Left hated Libertarians™ more than they hated the Right. The Right was merely amused and not threatened by Libertarians©. Maybe it was the Star Wars® shirts and poorly trimmed beards?

That taught me one thing: the thing the Left hates the most is . . . freedom. Liberty. In many ways the Left would rather lose a shooting war and be subjugated to the views of the Right than to be allowed to turn Seattle into the Siberia of the PacNorthwest.

The only way this can take place outside of warfare is a Second Constitutional Convention. I think that alone would lead to a shooting war from the Left and a complete revolt from all of the Leftist institutions shown above. But we can dream that the Second Constitutional Convention would turn out well. If we did it, oh, in the next year. The clock is ticking on this being a viable outcome. It’s probably time to do it now. As in, well, now. Conservatives (not the Right) seem to feel that everything is going to come out fine, so until the wolf is at the door, I don’t think they’ll move an inch.

The problem is that Conservatives (again, not the Right) seem to think that the Left likes the Constitution. Since the Left gained the institutions I’ve listed above, the Left doesn’t care about the Constitution – the Left cares about power. Pure, unadulterated, 18 year old with a 12 pack of Coors Light™ behind the wheel of a 1969 Camero® power.

Outcomes: In many ways this is the best outcome, but in my opinion the most unlikely. This is the only outcome where we can still have the full freedom of political discourse and the full Bill of Rights. I’d love to turn over freedom to choose to a California that can choke itself to death on Leftist feelgoodism while a Rightist Arizona can deny admission to every illegal and return them via a trebuchet if they want to.

I was expecting more girls in bikinis from Bruckheimer, but this is a good start.

Operation Fort Sumter: Going our separate ways.

What it is: Secession. Splitting up. It’s not you, it’s me Oregon. The problem is that unlike in 1860, the dividing lines aren’t so clear. Then there was a line which, if everyone agreed, would have been fine for a split. The North could be the North, the South could be the South. Oops. Now it would be a county by county fight.

What it takes: Just like a psycho ex-girlfriend, if the Right tried to succeed in Texas, the Left wouldn’t accept it, and would demand tanks on the banks Red River by morning, which would be hilarious because tanks don’t float. Unless the secession were overwhelming in number of states, numbers of the armed forces, and nearly immediate, I see only a small path to a peaceful secession. For secession to stick, the Left and Right would have to feel that conquering the other side was more costly than trying to forge a peace.

Outcomes: If secession happened and was maintained, the United States would be irrevocably broken, unless it was re-stitched by a Caesar sequentially conquering the Balkanized United States. Maybe Caesar Pugsley Wilder the First?

Think they need a reason to send you to the Gulag? Sure they do! It’s Monday – that’s good enough.

Operation Gulag in The Dakotas:

What it is: This is the darkest timeline not only for our nation but for our world. And, amazingly, the only timeline (outside of a Second Constitutional Convention) that we can vote ourselves into. It is the Leftist takeover of everything. Although it is sold as a Denmark, in reality Denmark is capitalist with stronger social institutions because Denmark is, well, Danish and I think they put mayo on their fries. In the United States it will look much more like the U.S.S.R. – but not the basketcase 1988 U.S.S.R., but more like the 1932 “starve to death millions of citizens that Stalin doesn’t like” (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) U.S.S.R.

What it takes: Nothing. We keep going as it is. In less than 20 years, we will be in complete tyranny. The erosion of rights we have seen won’t continue in a linear fashion. It will accelerate.

Outcomes: 1984.

Now we know the stakes.

Big Brother is our friend! And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Book Review: Civil War Two, Part II

“Without law, Commander, there is no civilization.” – Bridge on the River Kwai

You’d be surprised at the number of Civil War battles that were fought on National Parks.

We’re at part II of the review of Thomas W. Chittum’s book, Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America. You can find part I here (Book Review: Civil War Two, Part I).

I’m happy to report that I was wrong – you can buy Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America on Amazon© on their Kindle® store. Doing a normal search will take you only to the used hard copies, and those hard copies are still only available from resellers.

I encourage you to buy a copy of the Kindle® edition if you’ve downloaded the book on .pdf. I bought one – because it puts money in the author’s pocket. I’ve left a link below, and, as usual, I don’t make a dime if you buy anything linked here. I’ve been thinking about it, but not right now. Anyway, buy it. As of this writing it’s only three bucks. It’s a bargain at that price, so, pony up.

How did I find out that Mr. Chittum’s book was still available on Amazon? Mr. Chittum emailed me and told me so. I’m glad, and I’ve already revised my previous post, as well.

Last week we left off at the end of Phase I, the Foundational phase. This week, we start off at Phase II – The Terrorist Phase. Chittum felt that this phase would last between five and twenty years. It’s been over twenty since it was written. What did Chittum predict?

And we can prevent Civil War II if we just hold hands, because then no one will have hands to hold guns.

More of Phase I.
More riots, driven by ethnic conflict, some of multiple day duration, involving barricades and heavy weapons. This is spot on from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, with the exception of heavy weapons, which to my knowledge have not been employed.
Ethnic militias, cults, gangs. I’ve certainly seen the gangs, but if “militias” and cults have been increasing, I’ve missed them.
Increasing talk of secession and civil war. I read once that couples that use the word “divorce” are more likely to have one, so I’ve forbidden the use inside the house. People talk about what they want, and these terms on the tips of tongues from Ticonderoga to Tallahassee to Tacoma to Toluca Lake. Oh, yeah.
Increasing bombing and sabotage against the government. This is another item that seems to be missing – people are mad at each other, not at the government.
Increasing small group attacks.
Small scale ethnic cleansing. I’ve read multiple articles about displacement of one ethnic group by another. The one that comes immediately to mind are blacks being driven out of traditionally black areas in Los Angeles by Hispanics.
Demographic and political Reconquista of the Southwest. In progress, as I keep hearing that schools find the American flag . . . racist?
Food riots as government attempts to shut of welfare. Welfare is in full swing.
Racial factions and politicizing of the military. I have no idea if the military is racially fragmenting. I’m willing to bet this will light up the comment section. But the officer corps seems to be broadly moving left, based on the rumors I’ve heard about elimination of upper ranks due to political reasons. West Point appears to be corrupted to the point a communist graduated. Although they kicked him out, it would appear that Congress has a place waiting for him.
Splitting American institutions based on ethnic or political lines. In progress. When a the FBI® has groups attempting to overthrow the government, and the Boy Scouts™ are admitting girls, the institutions of the country are splitting apart. A little.
Abandonment of certain city areas by the police.
Gangs will have political goals and militarize. Outside of the cartels, if this is happening, it’s not happening publically.
White people begin to wonder if the establishment is working for them. The white vote appears to be polarizing, although I personally doubt we’ll ever see the 90/10 split seen in many minority voting blocs.
An armored car will be destroyed. A child is shown in the media foraging for food in a dump. Neither of these have come true, to my knowledge, but photos of the homeless camps in California are common.

Phase II is where we are now – but it keeps getting worse, seemingly on a monthly basis.

The next phase Chittum outlines is Phase III: Guerrilla Warfare. By inspection, we’re not there. The skirmishes that Antifa© provokes aren’t it – imagine if Antifa™ has weapons and secures an area, killing people in the process – that’s the level of violence expected. This is actual warfare, but limited in time and location. Areas will be lost to the guerrillas. Chittum expects this to be shorter than the current phase, and this lower-scale warfare will last ten to twenty years.

The final phase is Phase IV: All-Out, Continuous Warfare. It’s just as on the label – actual armies moving in the field. This is civil war – and the outcome cannot be predicted, especially if it takes place ten or twenty years from today. Massive forces will be unleased, like never before in the country, and (this is me, not Chittum) we won’t have the structure that provided cohesion after the first Civil War.

Chittum spends some time analyzing the United States and safer places to be, but this is tied back to 1997 demographics and I don’t live in the places he talks about, so, those are interesting primarily due to his analytical methods and I’d suggest you give that a read to see how your mileage may vary. I’d suggest spending time doing your own research on what you feel is a “safe” location. Although finding a safe location might be hard, it’s probably easy to find places that won’t be safe, so you could probably start just by avoiding places that you know will turn into a post-apocalyptic hell-hole in five minutes if the microwave at the 7-11® breaks.

It’s easy to predict places where you’re not safe – you know, the places with bars over the windows and the local priest carries an AR. Think those neighborhoods will be better after the world caves in? Well, I’m pretty sure real estate prices will be down, but that’s primarily due to the wailing coming from the direct pit to hell that will open up after things get bad.

Birthday at Casa Wilder is always exciting!

But how do they go from normal to “pit to hell”, anyway? One particular line from Chittum in a later chapter breaking down stability by using Europe as a model had this sentence in it: “With each and every passing day, more and more Americans of all ethnic groups are perceiving their tribal affiliation as more self-definitive and more important that their common American nationality.”

This is the key to the unravelling we’re seeing in the country right now. The United States transformed from a nation that had little diversity (in 1960, the country was 85% non-Hispanic white) to today, where the country is 60% non-Hispanic white. In 1960, by and large the identity of all the citizens in the country was: American. Americans were of all ethnicities. Were there groups that were excluded? Certainly – Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement gained popularity by pointing out unfairness in treatment of blacks in America. And America responded – we wanted to believe that being an American could transcend racial differences that seem to rip apart countries across the world. We did our best.

Problem fixed, right?

No. Not as long as each ethnic group defines itself through identity.

Also, the Egyptians should have seen that pyramid scheme from the start.

Chittum hints at the possibility that complete Imperial Conversion might be one way to avoid Civil War, and lists several requirements to complete the transformation of the United States from it’s former form to an Empire. In the end, Chittum feels that Civil War at least provides hope, whereas Empire doesn’t. Chittum even provides (23 years ago) a direct time and place where the Civil War will start – 5/5/2020, in a city park in Los Angeles. For reasons that I’ll get into below, I think this is a little soon.

Chittum’s advice on preparation is pretty common in the prepper world, at least in 2019. Locations near borders along ethnic faultlines are out. Locations that have logistical dependencies (think water) on other locations . . . out. Military bases? Out. Large cities? Out. Near the border of the “new nations”? Out.

Also, have some food and don’t tell other people that you have food. At least enough for your family for a year. Also, a gun and at least 5,000 rounds of ammo. Chittum speaks about gun caliber in general, but I’ve seen the fights that gun caliber selection sets off in the comments section, so I’ll leave that for later when I want to make sure you’re reading. He suggests caching your food and ammo and gun away from the house, and, although I understand his reasons, it’s not something I do, at least currently. As I get older, it’s even less likely. If I make it to a retirement home, I’ll probably hide bullets in my walker.

Finally, Mr. Chittum has a checklist (in no particular order) of things that will be there before Civil War II hits. I’ve put the ones I think have already occurred in bold:

Always remember item 6 – “Wear Pants”

Ethnic classifications become more prominent.
Illegal aliens allowed to vote, even locally.
Attack on the Second Amendment.
Juries that split on racial lines – shows that justice isn’t justice anymore.
Military taking police duties.
Internal (for use in the United States) elite military force.
Mobs in Washington D.C.
Blacks demanding facilities without whites (dorms, etc.).
Replacement of individual rights with group rights – health care, for instance.
Non-governmental organizations acquiring military power.
Real political power shifting to the courts.
Political power shifting to international bodies.
Leftists and minority control spreads of basic institutions.
Secessionist movements and groups seeking autonomy.
Race-based political parties.
No-go areas left to gangs.
Reparations.
Court voting manipulation (against gerrymandering).
Unrest in other multiethnic empires in the world at the time.
“Gated” communities for the wealthy.
Increased media hoaxes.
Increased minorities in the military.
Out of court settlements in cases of racial discrimination (method to transfer money to radical groups).
More restrictions on freedom of speech, including getting speakers fired or SWATed.
Police abandon traditional uniforms for military-style uniforms.
Groups of cops that form to oppose unconstitutional actions. Chittum thought they would be clandestine and ethnic, but the Oath Keepers are neither.
An affirmative action agency (EEOC for instance) to have armed agents.
Dollar collapse.
Geographic segregation and mention of it in the press.
Signs American military dominance challenged in a serious way.
Breakup of Canada.
More Americans moving to Canada than vice versa.
Parallel ethnic political and legal organizations have more power than base organizations.
More help wanted ads requiring bilingual applicants.
Greater role for UN in the world.
Photo of burned out American tank on US soil.

So, of this list, by my count about 18 (your mileage may vary) of Chittum’s 36 item checklist have happened. Some of the above are more important than others.

As noted, I recommend the book. It’s good, and not everything is covered in the 4,000-odd words that are in this review. It’s also a pretty quick read with decent flow.

How has the prediction held out? Certainly, better than any prediction that I did in 1997. I think the biggest missing piece is Leftist ideology. The Leftists have done a really good job of keeping together a rickety coalition of communists, Islamists, racial agitators, and ideologists without ideas. This has led to increased stability that would have been hard for Mr. Chittum to foresee from 1997.

Additionally, the work on prepping has moved on in twenty years. The basics remain the same, but the general philosophy has had 20 years of thought, refinement, and improvement. But we haven’t had 20 years of thought on what will cause a civil war and how likely that is.

But, oddly, the Leftist coalition is keeping the country from splitting into dozens of pieces – right now it’s just two pieces. I think this increased stability has extended the time until Civil War II breaks out. What brings stability down? Economic hardship. The 2020 election.

And there is a price to be paid. Can the Left control the forces of discontent and hate that it has unleased? Can the Right control the forces that are a reaction to the demographic change in society?

Tough questions. (Shakes Magic 8 Ball®)

MAGIC 8 BALL

Black Swans, Cute Girls from Poland, and Sexy Bill Gates

“All I want is peace – a little piece of Poland, a little piece of France . . .” – To Be or Not To Be

These are Polish sports fans. They were photographed at . . . oh, I’ve lost you already.

I went to seventh grade in a very small school district, I think there were, perhaps, 40 or 50 kids in my grade. We were fairly remote, and the area wasn’t particularly well off economically so looking back, this was the end of the road for the teachers that weren’t locals. When I was in seventh grade, I saw that my science teacher was reading a book. Since I had ample time to read on the bus going to school every day, (Pa Wilder picked me up after football practice) and I was a pretty voracious reader. I was always looking for a good book after I’d rolled through the science fiction section in the school library.

Young John Wilder: “What’s that book?”

Teacher: “Oh, this? It’s called The Shining. It’s pretty good. Want to borrow it after I’m done?”

I’m sure he’d get fired today for allowing a seventh grader to borrow a book that only included cis-gendered characters in a heteronormative patriarchal un-handicapable-positive environment. But it did start me reading Stephen King, and I read everything he wrote until he stopped snorting whiskey and drinking cocaine. After that? King’s nosebleeds decreased, as did the quality of his writing. It’s probably in bad taste to suggest we start a “Get Stephen Stoned Again” movement, but if it gets him away from Twitter® I’m all for it.

Given all that, today I was amused when I got this in a text from my friend: “The reason your writing is scarier than Stephen King is that your writing is more likely to come true.”

But reality is scary. The future is scary. And even though we can’t predict exactly what will happen, it’s fairly clear that we live in a vastly more interrelated society that exhibits technological wonders while it faces the challenges of a huge planetary population. The paradox is, although humanity is more connected than ever before in history, that connection seems to have sharpened the divisions between peoples and ideology. The dream was that communication would unite humanity. The reality is that we don’t seem to like each other all that much. Apparently the ultimate conclusion as we communicate in a superhuman fashion at the speed of light across the planet is that “those other guys are hooter-weasels.” Hooter weasel wasn’t my first choice, but turd-yak© and rump-stooge© were already copyrighted by Disney™.

But back to scary:

The other day I was working out, and listening to a YouTube® video on the Polish Resistance during World War II. Why? I like history, and in some ways you can learn a lot about today from looking at the past, it seems that just like Albanian strippers attempting to fix a copier at an all-night hardware store, we just never learn. I haven’t quite finished watching this video (since I ran out of treadmill) but will probably finish it tomorrow. But one question struck me as I was listening: what sort of change had the Polish people endured?

Warning, this video is over an hour long. I enjoy watching stuff like this on the treadmill at lunch, because it makes me think and ignore the pain weakness escaping my body and how the English have no idea how to pronounce certain words. Your mileage may vary.

The economy of Poland before invasion in 1939 was growing. Like the rest of the world, the Polish income had dropped during the depression, but by 1939 it was higher than it had been in 1929. Beyond that, between World War I and World War II Poland had greatly increased the number and quality of schools and had started flossing regularly. Poland was doing okay.

Of course, being stuck between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is a really, really bad place to be. Both countries invaded in Poland in 1939, and it was split up like a Hollywood couple’s kids, except Hitler and Stalin were mom and dad. Yeah.

Immediately, the Poles buried rifles. They didn’t plan for this, and didn’t have much time to prepare, so when they went to dig the rifles up later, they found that they had rusted and were useless. As the economy of Poland was absorbed first by the Germans and the Soviets, and then by the Germans alone, Poland’s economy was shattered. Poland’s labor was taken to make armaments, and Poland’s food was taken in large part to feed Germany and German troops. Food became scarce. What could be worse? Oh, yeah, the war passing right over your country again. When the Soviets invaded Poland the food situation eventually got better, but, let’s face it: the communists have never really figured out the whole “feeding your people” thing.

This is a real picture of a store in Poland during the communist years. They actually told the people that they didn’t produce too much food, so that they wouldn’t be wasteful like the Westerners.

This post isn’t about Poland or Stephen King’s coke-filled sinus cavities. This post is about change. The Polish people were doing well, but then this big steam roller then proceeded to crush them, eliminate 20% of the population, and then oppress them over the next fifty years.

Did anyone in Poland predict that change? Nope.

Massive, unexpected catastrophic change regularly occurs. In society, the stock market, companies, and even personal reputations are built slowly, but lost in a flash. This phenomenon is called Seneca’s Cliff, and I wrote about it here (Seneca’s Cliff and You) a long time ago.

Are there other examples of extreme catastrophic change beyond Poland in 1939? Sure.

The Russian Revolution, which led directly to the Holodomor (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!).
The Depression and Housing Bubble were both examples of market crashes.
Myspace®. Not the company, that was bad. But my page was just awful.
I could start on reputations of people, but, really, where would I end?

Funny how times have changed.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this phenomenon in his (quite excellent) book The Black Swan. The really short version of his book is humans lived for tens of thousands of years in a linear world. You could look around, and see that the height distribution in the tribe was a bell curve. So was running speed. Yeah, everyone who runs the 100M (3.2 miles) dash at the Olympics® can run it faster than I could when I was young. But I could run a 40 yard dash in 4.9 seconds. So, let’s say I could run 100 meters in 11 or 12 seconds at my peak being while pretending to be chased by a rabid Albanian stripper. 11 or 12 seconds is probably average for a high school athlete while not being chased by an Albanian.

The world record in the 100 meter dash is 9.58 seconds.

Yeah, my best time sucks compared to the world record, but the world record isn’t that far away from what I could run. Now let’s take a look at wealth.

The average (which is pulled up by wealthy people) net worth of a family in the United States is about $700,000. But the median (half the families above, half below) is $100,000. But let’s use the higher figure for grins.

The best sprinter is about 25% faster than me. Bill Gates is 14,285,000% wealthier than the average family.

To get the same percentage in a sprint as Bill Gates has in the pocketbook would require that I finish the 100 meter sprint that the world’s fastest person finished in 9.58 seconds in . . . 15.9 days. (That’s 15.9 in metric days.) People are simply not equipped to think about life like that, although Pugsley (my youngest spawn) does move that slow when I tell him to take out the trash. Huge numbers and exponential quantities are not what we spent tens of thousands of years thinking about.

What does it take to make Bill Gates the richest man in the world? Jeff Bezos dating a floozy. Sexy Bill Gates is for James at Bison Prepper (LINK).

How did Taleb define his Black Swans?

The odds would say that they’re extremely rare. Stock markets don’t collapse all at once when investors are rational, right? Well, the odds are wrong. Nonlinearity happens. Investors panic in a herd.
Black Swans have huge consequences. The Great Depression likely led to World War II. That’s a huge consequence. These consequences are huge mainly due to overlapping failures – one part of the economy shuts down which pulls another with it. And the longer a system has been forced into “stability” and not allowed to fail? The greater the consequence. An avalanche isn’t a single snowball – it’s a massive wave of snow. It’s funny, but it used to be a joke that someone just making a big noise could cause an avalanche . . . and yet . . . at some point that individual snowflake is just enough weight to bring the whole mountain of snow down.
In hindsight, people believe it was obvious the Black Swan would happen. Why didn’t evil terrorists pilot a plane into a building sooner?

The Polish being invaded was a Black Swan. Sure, it looks obvious now, but Britain and France guaranteed that they’d go to war if Poland was invaded. Britain and France were completely unprepared for war. But in hindsight . . . oh, that was the point.

Javelin jokes? Please spear me.

We have to live in this world of Black Swans. Well, Bill Gates doesn’t, but you and I do. How do we cope?

Be awake. The world wants to lull you to sleep with Doritos® and Johnny Depp movies and food delivery boxes. Don’t fall for it. Look at the world through clear eyes. See beyond your surroundings.
Be honest. You can’t cheat an honest man. Be honest with others. Build real relationships. Be honest with yourself. If you don’t understand that 40 year old you couldn’t beat 18 year old you in a 100 meter dash, you’re not being honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. Plan accordingly.
Plan for what? Don’t know. Everything. Anything. Start small. Three days. Then Three months. Then? Three years. But start. The basics of financial survival and the basics of physical survival overlap. Plan. Think about what could happen. You won’t be right, but you’ll be ready to react when the unthinkable really does happen.
Remember, higher consequences are less likely. A fistfight is more likely than a gunfight which is more likely than global thermonuclear war. Hurricanes are more common than civilizational collapse. But the odds of civilizational collapse might be much higher than you think.
Understand that the inevitable is . . . inevitable. You’re going to die. The sun will come up tomorrow. The Cubs® will never win the World Series™. Oh, they did? 2016? I must have been sleeping.
Have a rainy day fund. The rainy day fund isn’t always in dollars, though dollars are super nice. It can be a pantry full of food you eat. It can be a massive safe filled with rare PEZ® dispensers. It can be gasoline in gas cans in your garage, propane in your propane tanks. Pop Wilder always said, “It doesn’t cost anymore to run off the top half of your gas tank.” Build slack in your life, in your time, in your supplies.

Even in the darkest days, there is hope. For Poland, it was an electrician who wanted workers to be treated well, and who also didn’t like communism. Lech Walesa founded the labor union “Solidarity” in Gdansk, on September 17, 1980. A year later over 30% of the Polish workforce belonged to Solidarity. In the end, Solidarity forced the Polish government in 1989 to allow the first free elections since the 1930’s.

Never underestimate the power of the ‘stache.

Shortly afterward and absolutely related to Walesa’s work? Another Black Swan, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about in part by Lech. A Polish electrician helped bring down a superpower. Okay, let’s be honest, a Polish electrician and $10 million in covert funding from the CIA.

Thankfully the CIA got that $10 million – the Pentagon would probably have bought, what, 16 hammers with that? The Pentagon spending wisely? Now that’s a real Black Swan.