The Left, Doublethink, and Individual Thought

“That’s an interesting point.  Come on, let’s get into character.” – Pulp Fiction

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Such stunning bravery and individualism!

Not quite a year ago a meme broke out into the wild – the Non-Player-Character (NPC) meme.  The meme originated with video games.  In video games that follow a storyline, there are various characters that exist only to move the story forward.  While you can play a video game character that’s a 4’2” Asian female bodybuilder with tattoos and bright red hair, you can’t play as an NPC.

NPCs can create unplanned humor because they are programmed and react in only very predictable ways.  Slug one, and they don’t care.  Meet up with the same NPC for the tenth time?  It’s like you never met before.  They have no original ideas.  They exist only to fulfill their programmed destiny.

The connection made, probably at 4Chan back in September of last year is that an NPC is really a great analogy for a Leftist that has given up completely on the idea of independent, individual thought.  The contradictions that are contained within liberalism abound, but even more striking is the degree of programming present.  An example:

Stephen Colbert is a late night talk show host who is famous for hating President Trump.  In the show after former FBI® Director James Comey was fired, Colbert mentioned Comey was fired.  The crowd was used to Comey being a villain.  Why was Comey a villain?  On the eve of the election of 2016, Comey announced a new investigation of the “newly-found e-mails” off of convicted creep Anthony Weiner that cost Hillary the election.

The crowd cheered because Comey got fired.  Until Colbert reprogrammed them that, instead of being a bad guy, Comey was now a good guy.  See for yourself:

Today, obviously, Comey is a hero of the Left.  I would imagine that, if you asked a Leftist, you’d find that Comey was always a hero and they didn’t recall at all that they ever thought he was an evil Trump supporter.  It’s like a quote from Orwell’s 1984:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.  “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future:  who controls the present controls the past.”  And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.  Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.  It was quite simple.  All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.  “Reality control” they called it:  in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

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And the worst thing is when the update is downloading that the NPCs can’t do anything else until they reboot.

When you view it from outside, it’s easily seen.  But from the inside, it’s not.  The basic contradictions are astonishing in their scope and presentation of Doublethink:

  • Pregnant men. Perfectly normal.
  • Islamic feminism. No philosophical inconsistencies here!
  • Roe versus Wade is written in stone, but the Constitution is a “living, changeable” document.
  • Transitioning a nine-year-old to a new sex is normal and healthy. Has been going on for thousands of years.
  • Speech you don’t agree with is violence. I’m triggered!
  • Violence you agree with is free speech. Punch a fascist!

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No, surely it’s not that.

I could go on in naming examples, and likely so could you.  Are there contradictory views on the Right?  Certainly, but they’re mostly not at core of the philosophy on the Right as they are the very core of the philosophy of the Left.  And, unlike the Left, the Right typically doesn’t end it all in a Purity Spiral (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be).

I’ll even admit that one time, I was an NPC on the Right.  There was a point (long ago, college time) when a Democratic congresscritter proposed a national tax cut.  President George H.W. Bush opposed it.  So I opposed it.

Huh?

I had always been for tax cuts as a general rule.  I stopped and thought . . . Why would I support not cutting taxes that the Democrats want to cut?  Just because they’re Democrats?

I decided that the Democrat congresscritter was right.  Cut the taxes.  Obviously, that solved all the problems that our nation has.  Oops.

The cure for being an NPC is thought.  Since that time, I regularly examine what I think – this blog is a part of that process.  I also examine why I think it.  If the reason that I believe something is because other people believe it, is that a good reason?

No, it’s not really a good reason.  Unless you’re a Leftist.

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I think the reason Leftists are more susceptible to the Doublethink that drives them into the NPC cult is that they’re more r-selected – they come from an environment that values conformity and group inclusion.  I write about r-selection versus K-selection here (r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)).  r-selected animals, like rabbits, move in groups.  They’re prey animals, and know that the only safety that they have is in numbers.  Doing something that’s different than the herd singles you out.  It gets you killed.  Rightists are K-selected – they’re predators.  Individual behavior is not only tolerated, it’s the only way to get your genes propagated.

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Okay this wasn’t an original, but was too good to pass up.  I think it came from 4chan.

This explains several things about the Left.  They reacted so quickly to the NPC meme that they had NPC-themed Twitter® accounts banned within a month of the meme making widespread appearance.  How do you know something bothers someone?  When it creates such a strong reaction.

Are all Leftists NPCs?  Nope.  I know a few I can discuss politics with and we can still be friends.  They admit when I have a point.  I admit when they have a point – a few very popular posts have had their genesis with conversations I was having with Left-leaning friends.  But discussing politics with the typical NPC should be avoided.  There is nothing more personal to them than the ideas that they have that don’t impact them at all.  Really.  Why would a fifty-year-old cat lady be more passionate about illegal aliens than anything else in her life?

By definition, a religion punishes heresy and blasphemy above all else.  To call NPCs cult members might sound strong, but the reality is that they probably are.  Notice the reaction when a newly-revealed religious revelation presents itself:  “DACA”, “living wage”, “Maxine Waters is not the reincarnation of James Brown’s hair”, “religion of peace”, “bake my cake”, or “white privilege” begins.

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I’d call it a tie.  But unlike Maxine, James liked “Living in America.”

To be against any of these is to be filled with hate.  Being left alone is not an option.  Having no opinion is not an option.  From their perspective, the only opinion you can have is the correct opinion – their opinion.

Me, I think I’ll keep thinking for myself.  But remember, that’s dangerous.

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The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

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Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”  The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®.  I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work.  Really.  Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines.  But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done.  And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee.  Speaking of  noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you.  Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen.  Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power.  This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike.  He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

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What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you?  It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy.  It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him.  His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis.  These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

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You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers.  The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me.  I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy.  If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful.  While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of:  waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . .  GET UP.  AND.  GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated.  They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power.  Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment.  He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

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Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life:  action is vital for you to be the best you.  You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action?  Probably the number one reason is our egos.  Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy.  Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life.  That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

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I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life.  That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail.  Ego wants to, above all things, not fail.  Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve.  Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded.  The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life.  Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

  • They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
  • They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
  • No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above.  They care about you and want you to feel better.  After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up.  That’s your ego.  Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again.   And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute.  Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it.  The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

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And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself:  how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior?  How many things have you avoided because of fear?  How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you.  Start today.  And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

“We’ll soon stage an attack on technology worthy of being chronicled in an anthem by Rush!” – Futurama

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In honor of Göbekli Tepe, I decided to take a morning run, but autocorrect changed it to “morning rum,” so, change of plans, guys!

Göbekli Tepe is an archeological site that dates back almost to 10,000 B.C. (12,000 years ago in metric).  12,000 years is a long time, in fact it is older than both agriculture and cities, but younger than my mother-in-law.  But the other thing that it’s not older than . . . is beer.  At Göbekli Tepe they found brewing vessels.  And these weren’t small vessels, they were huge vats up to 160 liters in size, complete with chemical residue from brewing beer.  If they can find chemical evidence of beer 12,000 years later, there’s no wonder mom could smell it even after I’d chewed a pack of minty gum.

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This is how I like to imagine they figured out that beer was brewed at Göbekli Tepe.

Beer is older than farms.  Beer is older than agriculture.  The logical question is this:  did people start cities and agriculture . . . just so they had beer on a regular basis?  Is the reason that we have cities right now . . . the liquor store?

It looks like that’s the case.  Nomadic man might not have had Netflix® or Ruffles©, but those weren’t necessary.  Most studies show that when man was nomadic, the rates of leisure were higher than they are today.  The things they did for food (hunting, fishing, and gathering) are enough fun that we do those as hobbies today.  But what was missing?

Beer.  Without a steady stream of beer there wasn’t any way they could say, “Hold my beer and watch this.”  Why is this important?  It’s important because everyone knows that no really good story starts with the words, “So, I was having a salad . . .”

The technology of beer brewing changed mankind.  And I’ll assure you, living in the very first cities that we know of would be nothing like living in a city today – no Uber.  These first cities were founded around 7,500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and had really cool names like Eridu, Uruk, and Ur that remind me of Swedish death metal band names.

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I think that someone triggered him by giving him a hug.

But the first residents of Ur weren’t like you or I.  Exactly how they were different is probably difficult to even guess, but we’ve had nearly 500 generations between them and today’s humans.  And that’s changed us significantly – back in the timeframe that Ur was being formed, most men didn’t reproduce, but most women did.  When civilization was getting started around 6,000 B.C., only one guy in 17 reproduced.  Yes.  The average baby-daddy in Uruk in 6,000 B.C. was impregnating 17 females.  So, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp, all because people made cities to get beer.

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What is not shown very well is that the woman’s side scale was nearly three times the scale on the men’s side.  This is graphical evidence that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp.  Oops.  Mine, too.  Grandma, how could you?

In the United States today, about 3/4 of men father children while 85% of women reproduce.  This is significantly better than the average I’ve seen that shows throughout history 80% of women had children while only 40% of men fathered children.  Technology, in this case agriculture and beer, has changed humanity.  Beer goggles appear to work both ways in the modern United States.

Regardless, change from nomadic human to agricultural/urban human has taken us thousands of years to adapt to, and, honestly, I’m still not sold on the cities.  But I’ll keep the beer, thank you.

Other changes that were made possible by the move from nomadic human to urban human include the first:

  • Requirement for Money,
  • Economic Viability of Slavery,
  • Permanent Government,
  • Debt,
  • Taxes, and
  • Bar Tabs.

We don’t remember the things that were problems before agriculture, probably because we were having such a good time not living in cities that we didn’t bother to develop a written language to gripe about our problems.  What’s to gripe about?  I have to go hunting again?  I don’t have a job because there aren’t any jobs so I get to go fishing?  Bummer.

Over time, in the thousands of years since the development of agriculture, coping mechanisms evolved that created stability in the “new” urban-agricultural society.  Pretty significant adaptations included:

  • Organized Religion,
  • Creation of Classes,
  • Division of Labor,
  • Eating Tide© Pods, and
  • Laws.

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Shhh.  Don’t warn the kids.  Let evolution run its course. 

These adaptations allowed post-agricultural civilization to become stable, or at least stable enough so that empires could form.  But as people changed their environment, their environment changed them.  It takes seven generations (at minimum) to create a new dog breed.

How long until a new type of human is bred by the new conditions in the city?  If I were to guess, given that humans are much more complicated that it would take 20 or more generations.  Rather than going off to hunt they’d have to do the same job, day after day, for years at a time.  Rather than start a fight with a machete because they were mad about friends who put mayonnaise and strawberry jelly in their hard hat, they’d laugh.  That alone probably took about five hundred years.

Some people didn’t make the transition.  The result, if you’re a guy?  You don’t breed.

Monogamy became more firmly embedded in society only in the West, and was primarily spread by Western society, being a recent (within the last 200 years) in most places that aren’t Western.  This had an amazingly stabilizing effect on society as a whole – fathers have more of a stake in the future of society.  Sure, kings and powerful guys had mistresses, but for the most part more men (on a percentage basis) got to have children than ever in history.

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DEFCON 1:  This would be The Mrs.’ reaction to me having a mistress.

Thousands of years of evolution of both society and of the humans that make up society led us to a fairly stable way of doing things.  Monogamy, sex roles, class, and hierarchy allowed life to proceed smoothly, and wealth to be created in society.  I’m not saying that it was better than hunting and fishing all day, but there was certainly more beer.  And after electricity, cold beer.  The 1950’s was probably the height (in the United States) of this society in many respects.

  • Women didn’t work as much – they didn’t have to.
  • Divorce rates were low – mom and dad stayed together.
  • Illegal drug use was low – yes, people drank. That was the point of society, right?
  • Church attendance was high.
  • Biggest problem of 1950’s schools? Gum chewing.

The last sixty years, however, has led to the greatest amount of technological and social change in any sixty years in the history of humanity.  What changes?

  • Birth Control – The Pill was introduced in 1960 – graph below. You’d have thought this would have led to lower births out of wedlock, but, not really.  I don’t really understand this, since very few babies are married when born, outside of Pakistan.

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I was born out of wedlock.  Not married at all.  Oh, and neither was my mom.  Sometimes the trend is your friend.

  • Significant Immigration from Non-Western Cultures – massive influxes of people in societies happens in history, but every time that it happens, it later gets called “an invasion.”

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I’m still looking for examples of successful multi-cultural civilizations.  I even went onto a communist website to search for them.  Still came up empty, though I do realize now that real communism has not been tried yet.  Whew!  I was worried that the unending stream of failures meant that it would fail here, too.

  • Massive Welfare – In 1965 President Johnson proclaimed the Great Society – we’d make everyone rich. Despite hundreds of billions in welfare spending, the only thing the Great Society created was roughly the same amount of poor people, but poor people who now depend on the government.  Might be correlated with illegitimate births?

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Thankfully, we’ve seen no more need of welfare after spending this much and poverty and people protesting for more money has disappeared.  Yay!  I love winning!

  • Fragmentation of Communication – in 1983, the highest-rated television program in history (non-sports) in the United States happened. It will never happen again.  Television has fragmented into hundreds of channels, plus dozens of online services, giving millions of options.  But the common culture from communication is gone.
  • Decline in Religion – Religious observance has dropped in America, despite religious belief being vitally important during Colonial times, when it is estimated that up to 80% of colonists were regular church goers, compared with 37% today. You may not be a religious, but it’s yet another commonality that we’ve lost.
  • The Internet – prior to the Internet, most person to person communication was local. Now?  Left-handed dentists with impaired vision can form their own FaceBorg® group.  The Internet brings us together.  The Internet also allows us to fragment.

The Internet might be the most significant technological change of recent memory.  There was a time when we actually argued about facts rather than hitting Google® to solve an argument.  Now?  Nope.  But the Internet isn’t a tool for unity, it’s a tool for fragmentation.

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Start with Futurama™, end with The Simpsons©.  Is there anything beer can’t do?

We’ve been living with technological change for thousands of years and trying to cope with it since we started the first cities.  Who knows where this will all end up?  And to think, it all started with some guy founding the first city 10,000 years ago saying, “Hold my beer, watch this . . . .”

Wedlock, Divorce Graphs, H/T Secular Patriarchy (LINK).

Göbekli Tepe picture via Teomancimit [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

This post was spawned by some comments with James over at Bison Prepper (LINK), but no bison were harmed during the production of this post.

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

  1. Gasoline is priced in goats.
  2. Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
  3. You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
  4. Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
  5. $100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
  6. Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
  7. George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
  8. The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
  9. Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
  10. You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

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

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

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

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

Then he got up to the counter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some other odd things I discovered about Cognitive Dissonance:

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

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

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

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

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

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The answer is no, not funny at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

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

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

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

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

Obviously, the systems kept working.

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Not my original.  And I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

Civil War I was:

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

Civil War II is different because:

  • Certainly we are not the same people today compared to when we generally unified ethnically. Civil War II will likely be fought on the basis of conflicting culture, identity and ideology.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought by armies, mostly, with identified geographical centers.

Civil War II is different because:

  • At the early stages, at least, Civil War II won’t be fought by armies, and there won’t be defined geographical concentrations. Armies are better at killing people and breaking stuff, but irregulars are way better at atrocity.  Expect the initial stages of hot war to be filled with some pretty rough stuff.

Civil War I was:

  • Characterized by a general adherence to the rules of war, though there were some war crimes on either side.

Civil War II is different because:

  • There has been a tendency of civil wars in this century to have increasing levels of atrocity during the war. This will continue.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought with the intent of reunification (by the North), and separation (by the South). The basic desire of the North was to reunify the country, admittedly under more comprehensive Federal control.  Reconstruction sucked, but the goal was a single country.  That’s why all the Confederate statues were tolerated, and even encouraged.

Civil War II is different because:

  • I expect whoever wins to pursue a policy of revenge at the end, especially if it’s the Communists. This is founded based on every single communist revolution ever.  The end of Civil War I occurred in a growing young country with the opportunity to move West.  Now?  Whoever wins will cleanse whatever areas they take.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought by organized, elected governments.

Civil War II is different because:

  • I’m thinking that one side might be a Caesar-type leading a partial military coalition versus Leftist irregulars, but I might be wrong on this one.

I decided to see what other studies had been done about more recent civil wars, and found that James Fearon and David Laitin (from Stanford) did a study in 2003 on civil wars during the 20th Century (LINK).  Here’s what they found:

  • Civil Wars had a median duration of six years
  • Sub-Saharan Africa: 34 wars
  • Asia: 33 wars
  • North Africa and the Middle East: 17 wars
  • Latin America: 15 wars
  • Eastern Europe/Former Soviet Union: 13 wars
  • The West: 2 wars

Why do civil wars develop?  It’s my bet that political scientists are like economists – six political scientists will generate 15 incorrect theories over coffee each morning, although I, for one, have no idea why we would think we would have a more stable country if we import people who keep having civil wars all of the time.  Fearon and Laitin came up with three different types of civil wars:

  • Ethnic: “You other people suck.”
  • Nationalist: “We want our own country, because you other people suck.”
  • Insurgent: “We want to be the boss, because you suck.”

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Okay, I don’t know who the originator was of this meme, but it still cracks me up.

Civil wars were non-existent in ethnically homogeneous and rich countries during the time period of Fearon and Laitin’s study.  As the United States was essentially ethnically homogeneous and rich during Civil War I, you can see that, just like the Revolution, something unique was going on here.  We decided to fight over principles.

Fearon and Laitin had several graphs that pointed out that increased wealth makes up for a portion of ethnic diversity – wealthier, non-homogeneous societies were less likely to go to war than poorer non-homogeneous ones.  Oddly, the very poorest ($48 to $800 a year) societies were less likely to go to war than societies that made just a little more money.  I guess just living was tough enough and going to war against other people who also had nothing was pointless.

One conclusion that Laitin and Fearon found was that civil war onset was no less frequent in a democracy.  Discrimination is not linked to civil war.  Income inequality is not linked to civil war.  Grievances aren’t the cause of civil war – they’re caused by civil wars.  What are risk the factors?

  • New nations. I guess they haven’t developed the “don’t kill the president” tradition yet.
  • People can hide in mountains.  I guess.
  • Higher (absolute) population numbers. I told you big cities were bad.
  • Oil exporting.
  • High proportion of young males.
  • Exporting commodities – risk seemed to peak at about 30% of GDP coming from commodity export.

memewar.jpg

Okay, not directly on point, but my primary export is memes.

So where does the United States stand as a country today?  I guess I’d throw out the thought that the first prerequisite for Civil War II is economic stress.  Why?  Average Joe won’t pick up an AR to go kill people in the next county if Joe has beer in the cooler and another episode of Naked and Afraid® next week.  If Joe has a job and a wife and a mortgage, well, there just won’t be action.  I meant war, silly.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Our risk now is relatively low based on economics.

The United States is developing a higher absolute population.  That puts us at risk.

With immigration, the United States is forming a higher proportion of young males.  That puts us at risk.

State weakness is generally correlated with civil wars.  I’m torn on this one.  On one hand, we have the largest number of laws ever, along with a very large enforcement mechanism.  On the other?  Laws, both state and Federal are increasingly just ignored.  Victor Davis Hanson describes this paradox in California (LINK).

Nearby civil wars are associated with having a civil war.  Latin America is a civil war factory . . . so we’re at risk.

From the above five predictors of civil war, we have four of them.  Obviously this doesn’t tell the whole story.  The United States has a peaceful history, and, unlike a less established nation, the general populace is going to assume that today was good, so tomorrow will be pretty good, too.  And, generally that’s a good way to predict the future:  tomorrow will look like today.  Building the conditions for civil wars generally take years and what was abnormal becomes normal and tolerated as time goes by.

I’m going to attempt to try to make a metric showing the rise in various societal factors that I think might lead to civil war.  Some of the obvious are:

  • Economic metrics – economic growth, unemployment, average wealth.
  • Organized violence metrics – news of riots, other organized violence and protests.
  • Political instability metrics – use of the term “impeach”, “civil war”, “electoral college.”
  • Sites banned – numbers of political speakers silenced.
  • Number of illegal immigrants per month. This shows greater economic stress or greater problems at their actual home.

index.jpg

Yeah, you just can’t add the North and the South together and end up with a Civil War.  Unless you do it in binary, then you could have a Bipolar War?

I’ll then combine them into an index.  If you have other items that you think can be tracked and should be tracked, let me know, and I may incorporate them, especially if they’re easy find and to incorporate, because I’m lazy.

Finally, Civil War won’t show up all at once, it may take years to get people to the idea that war is better than dealing with your weird neighbor by going into your house and watching a marathon of YouTube® videos where people turn $40 of propane and a bunch of aluminum cans into $10 worth of aluminum ingots.  It’s easier than fighting, right?

Following is my take on the steps that will lead to actual civil war.  I humbly call it the Wilder Countdown to Civil War II™.

  1. Things are going well.
  2. People begin to create groups.
  3. People begin to look for preferential treatment.
  4. Opposing ideology to the prevailing civic ideology is introduced and spread.
  5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  10. Open War.

I bolded number six.  That’s where I think we are right now.  Violence is occurring, but it’s not monthly, so I don’t think we’re at step seven.  Yet.  And I think we can live at step nine for a long time as long as we don’t have the bottom drop out of the economy.  Might there be some trigger that takes us to nine in a hurry?  Sure.  But I’m willing to bet that we see it take a few years, rather than a few months.  My bet is no sooner than 2024, but I’ve been wrong before, way back in 1989.

This is a project where I’m not only very open to contributions of information (even anonymous contributions) I’m actively soliciting them.  Let me know if you’ve got commentary, criticism, news stories, or suggestions to make issue two (probably in early July) better, either down below or at my email, movingnorth@gmail.com

While we can’t predict catastrophic storms with 100% accuracy, it’s probably about time that someone started looking at the horizon to see what they could see.  Because I see what might be a storm coming.

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

Whoonfirst

The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

  • “Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
  • “Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
  • They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want.  But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

WHOHQ

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof!  Ha, to die for!  That’s a health joke.  (Photo by:  Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs.  Burnout is defined as:

  • Energy depletion or exhaustion,
  • A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
  • Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on.  I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

mammothreview

Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man.  But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks.  For reals?  If this was the last moment of my life?  I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon.  I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog.  And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation.  Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

vicburn

Also 1872:  “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out.  Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

  • Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
  • Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game?  I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time.  I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with.  There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting.  But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also:  Why a year?  Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.”  Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)?  I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®.  But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left.  The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO.  It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important.  WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration.  And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

  • HIV/AIDS,
  • Malaria,
  • Tuberculosis,
  • And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK).  If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing.  Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter.  But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very.  Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland.  Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning.  I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay.  Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual.  If you’re a jerk?  You’ll be kicked out of the pool.  And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag?  The Muslims were told to pound sand.  Oops?  Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination?  I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss.  But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden.  If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property.  I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad.  I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout?  Video games?  These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

  • A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
  • A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you.  Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists.  I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit.  Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency.  Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).  Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week.  He’s right.  (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way?  Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer.  I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve.  Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

WHO LEADER

Real aside:  when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom.  I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

ike

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

  • Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
  • Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
  • Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
  • When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
  • If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism.  But why would you strip out the cynicism?  That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial.  “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past.  Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so.  The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen.  I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index.  “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index.  So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.”  I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now.  Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

  • The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
  • Donald Trump would be president,
  • China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
  • The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
  • People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
  • Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
  • People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
  • Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
  • You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
  • People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

Richards.jpg

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head.  The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic.  The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible.  We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA).  From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

rocky.jpg

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig.  I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting.  It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now.  In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated.  After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming.  “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018.  This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq.  Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either.  My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future.  Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself.  Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others.  One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.  One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection.  In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone.  Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today.  And, again, this is the span of only thirty years.  We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

boo.jpg

Duh.  Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen.  Huge things.  And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade.  The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I?  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said:  “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™.  I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade.  I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome.  But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong.  Hint:  They will be.

yogi.jpg

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered.  A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial.  Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well.  The future is unknown.  The future will surprise you.  If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt.  Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.  I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this:  It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done.  The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from.  Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail.  However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.”  A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.”  I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that.  But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

The One Where I Talk About WWII Tanks, Red Dawn, Wealth Management and Steve Martin

“Well I’m gonna go then.  And I don’t need any of this.  I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need you. I don’t need anything except this.  And that’s it and that’s the only thing I need, is this.  I don’t need this or this.  Just this ashtray.  And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need.  And this remote control.  The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need.  And these matches.  The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball.  And this lamp.  The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need.  And that’s all I need too.  I don’t need one other thing, not one – I need this.  The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure.  And this.  And that’s all I need.  The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.” – The Jerk

thejerk2

On film, first movie.  No pants.  Which explains the blackmail letters I keep seeing.   

There’s a common scene in movies where the hero, a has-been, out of shape bum in need of a shave and smelling like convenience-store cheese, cheap booze and a Kardashian who hasn’t showered in weeks wakes up.  The surroundings are a mess.  Generally, the place is a fleabag motel – one that doesn’t cater to respectable people, like those fancy folks that use actual hamburger in their Hamburger Helper©.

Our hero is always a guy, never a gal.

Generally, what happened to our hero to have dropped to such a low point is that he lost something, generally a woman, though sometimes a child, but always of great meaning.  It’s generally his fault.  And with the loss of that loved one, he lost the reason to care.  Everything is going wrong with his life.  To quote one of the best movies since Rome fell to the robot legions of Abraham Lincoln in 1932, Baseketball:

Coop

We should make the Losers wear Loser t-shirts after the Super Bowl®.  Why?  Branding.

Our hero, Joe Cooper, being interviewed after losing the national championship in his sport (due to his error) and when he goofed up trying to save the life of his friend:

“Today I lost the game and a dear friend and . . . I’m feeling pretty vulnerable right now.  I don’t think I should be by myself.  I need someone to talk to . . . .”

The announcer turns away from Joe and faces the camera:

“It certainly looks like it’s raining s**t on Joe Cooper.  Back to you.”

It’s at this low point that something happens to remind the hero of who he was, and what he stood for.  The hero then looks himself in the mirror and decides that from today onward, life is going to change and he’ll start using that topical cream, every day, just like the label says.

One montage later?  Instead of drinking a six-pack, the hero now has six-pack abs, gleaming teeth, and a mane of hair that would make a sorority swoon.  Assuming women still swoon in the current year, or that sororities are comprised of women.  Or that women are anything more than a social construct.

trans2

I’ll attend my mandatory sensitivity training next week, but even in 2019, BOYS CANNOT GET PREGGERS.  Anything pregnant with that must facial hair must be a Kardashian.  I promise – no more Kardashian jokes this month.

The big difference is that there is something that makes an emotional impact on the hero, which brings him back from his fallen state.  This something changes him, gives him a reason to live, makes him care.  It also connects that hero to the audience, allowing the audience to share in the struggle and, through that sharing, care about the hero and vicariously share his inevitable come-from-behind victory.

Who could have seen that coming?

It’s the theme of most of my favorite movies.  Unfortunately, it’s also the theme of our recent history in the United States, but we’ve yet to see the redemption part.

There was a time when the Right cared about the debt and actually talked, unironically, about balanced budgets.  I recall the constant drumbeat during my youth that “government can’t spend too much” because we would default, interest rates would skyrocket, and the Evil Wizard Jimmy Carter would keep cutting our money in half through his magic +2 Inflation Spell.  At some point, probably before I was born, I think Democrats and Republicans both agreed on that we couldn’t spend money like Joe Biden in a hair-plug factory.

Later, probably in a Nixon-related rant, the post-war truce between Right and Left split.  Democrats decided they couldn’t spend enough on social programs, and Republicans decided they couldn’t spend enough on military stuff.

red dawn

Yes, I’m going to Leftist Hell.  Aisle seat, please.

I’ll argue that we got a better deal with the military stuff, which resulted in Russia replacing the U.S.S.R.  Russia on it’s surliest (feeling bloated and all) day isn’t ready to unleash nuclear Armageddon on Earth because Karl Marx convinced a bunch of barely literate people in the midst of a vodka-binge that killing the Czar was a cool idea.  Sure, Russia is a state that barely visits this fine blog.  And some of the freedoms might be lacking, like freedom of speech.  But Russia has nothing fundamental against our way of life – they’d love to emulate it, but with 100% fewer hipsters.  In my opinion, very penny spent on the military from 1948 to 1992 was worth it.  I don’t miss the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

Sadly, all we got from the Leftist social programs that were set up to eliminate poverty was more poverty.  It would have been cheaper to just give everyone in poverty a million dollars back in 1965 when Johnson declared the War on Poverty©.  At least then we’d be done with feeling guilty about it.  “You’re poor?  Sorry.  Paid that bill.  Shoo.”  The best way (really) to eliminate poverty is to increase consequences and allow lower taxation on rewards.  Make it so Playbox® and X-Station© don’t replace working for food.

Eliminating unlimited pools of foreign labor couldn’t hurt, either.  But that’s another post.

socialism

Not my original, but it illustrates the point well.

Not to say that military spending hasn’t been silly from time to time.  I’m absolutely certain that we have the finest equipment ready to turn back the Wehrmacht if Hitler’s ghost ever assumes control and decides he wants to invade San Diego.  I guess I’m saying that our military, from a strategic standpoint, might be ready for those new bands, the Beatles© and Elvis™.

Why did we spend so much on the military?  The norm throughout history in every nation in every war was to provide soldiers with the absolute minimum that they needed to get the job done.  Kipling wrote about this a century ago in the poem Tommy, which has nothing at all to do with pinball:

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all . . .

It’s nearly certain the same from the time the Roman legions marched on Carthage (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) to the today, every soldier has been given only was absolutely necessary, and that was mostly grudgingly provided.  “Really, armor on your vehicles?  What, do you think we’re made of money?  Rub some dirt on it, you big babies.”

So where does all the military money go?  Well, there was once a joke that the armed forces had developed an absolutely invincible weapon system:  it had parts manufactured in every single congressional district.  That’s where the money goes.  Into the pockets of likely voters.

People used to argue about government spending and how we could reduce it.  In public!  Now it’s different.  No one cares about spending or debt at all.  Social spending?  Why not have Medicare™ for all?  Pay for everyone’s student loans.  While we do that, let’s also build huge floating targets aircraft carriers, the likes that the Japanese Soviets ISIS our future foes will fear.  But, please, let’s not talk about Chinese missiles taking one to the bottom of the sea.  Why, do you know where the components of an aircraft carrier are made?  Why, everywhere from the Redwood Forests, to the New York Islands!  This carrier was built for you and me.

Social programs are a vote-harvesting program.  And so is the manufacture of aircraft carriers.  But, again, should World War II break out again, we are so totally ready to win it.  We’ve even modeled our procurement strategy after the Germans (remember, they lost) – small numbers of really technically advanced components.  6,000 Panthers (German) will beat 49,000 Sherman (American) and 64,000 T-34 (Russian) tanks any time, right?

Oops.

Guess not.

(Translation for the tank impaired:  Germany produced, without question, the highest quality of tanks during World War II.  But they didn’t have many of them.  When the United States and the Soviets started making tanks, they massively outnumbered the technically superior German tanks.  It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.  They might be small, but they will get you.  I half imagine the Air Force© would like to produce just one perfect fighter plane.  Just one at the cost of a trillion dollars.  But it would be so perfect, and never mind that the enemy produced 150,000 fighters at two million dollars each.)

The point, however, isn’t about tank production strategy, even though you can buy a working – with functional gun! – T-34 for about $80,000.  No, the point is about the indisputable fact that no one in Washington cares even a little bit about how much money we spend every year, or if the troops live or die, or if anyone ever stops being poor.  And why should they?  It appears that right now we can spend as much as we want, consequence free.  That’s bound to continue forever? And how would I explain to The Mrs. that she needs to brush up on her college Russian for the manuals for the T-34 I just bought?

Do you think The Mrs. might buy the argument that I bought a Russian tank because of my principles?  Do you think James at the Bison Prepper (LINK) might think I was frugal because, really, what could be more prepper than a tank?  And, for the record, it’s not a new tank.  Totally used.  No FLIR or anything.

t-34 meme

I suppose I could use it for hunting?

I’m not sure what broke us as a nation, what make us that slovenly, unkempt guy with a three-day growth of beard smelling of cheap gin, Johnny Depp, and just as sticky as a movie theater floor.  But just like Steven Segal’s® belly, we as a nation seem to have lost our discipline.  Honestly, I’m tempted to buy that T-34 just so I can imitate our government and waste the money, though, honestly, nobody’s making T-34’s anymore.  I’d really love to buy a Panther, but there are only 29 (as far as the Internet knows) of them still in existence.

Hmm.

There is a bright side to this:  the Federal Reserve© has discovered it can print money forever, and can guarantee that you will receive your promised Social Security benefits.  The Federal Reserve™ won’t, however, guarantee that you’ll be able to buy a single piece of PEZ™ with your monthly check let alone a Panther or a T-34.

The future will bring bailouts.  Why?  Spending.  Duh.

The funny thing is that this will really be a stable system.  Until it’s not.

Will that be the moment that makes the hero recognize who he is, and what he’s given up?  And, most importantly, will he have a tank?

T-34 pic from:  Antonov14 [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

I see dead people. – The Sixth Sense

deadpeople

It really will be different this time, right?

The biggest famine in human history was caused by communism, based on a bad idea and a stubborn decision to hold with ideology over reality.  It was known as, ironically, The Great Leap Forward.  Mao decided in 1957 that within 15 years, China could surpass the United Kingdom (The Guys Who Supply Evil Accents to Movies) in economic production.  Mao was egged on to make this pronouncement based on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 pronouncement that in fifteen years that the U.S.S.R. would surpass the United States in economic production.

Spoiler alert – none of these things happened, and Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time.

deathrate.jpg

That’s the entire world death rate.  Who says communism isn’t powerful!

The Great Leap Forward killed about 45 million people in China.  Mao decided that he wanted to collectivize farming to consolidate power (more on this later).  In addition to this, Mao also decided that to increase economic output, he’d have the peasants make steel.  In their backyards.  This worked about as well with an I.Q. above room temperature could have predicted, especially once the farmers started melting down the tools they farmed with to meet production targets, thus decreasing food amounts even more than replacing experienced farmers with office workers did.

Oops.

greatleap.jpg

Another victory for environmentalism under communism!

Farmers had to melt down steel farming tools to meet Mao’s steel production targets.  Even though Mao was informed relatively early on that the policy wasn’t working, he stuck with it because he didn’t want to look weak because his wife told him he never would get that raise unless he stood up to his boss at work.  In the end?  45 million people starved to death so Mao could keep his day job.

But this was just stupid, not vengeful.  This is known in China today (as related by the Internet) as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.”  Even in death Mao cannot be challenged publically, so you can bet he finally got that raise.  The rumor is that even his ghost can kill.  But Mao’s ghost kills via bad breath, but George Washington’s ghost kills with laser eyes, so we’ve got that going for us.

stalinsad2

Stalingrad?  No, Stalinsad™.  I may have to really trademark that for a series of teddy bears I sell to leftists so they can hug them after rallies.

Although Josef Stalin only gets the Silver Medal in the “Killed My Own People” sweepstakes, it’s not due to lack of trying – he managed to kill, by many estimates, 20 million of his own people in activities completely unrelated by war.  How did we get there?

Soon after Lenin died, Stalin and the Soviet Union benefitted from a strong and robust economy.  The local farmers, called Kulaks, were producing record grain yields.  And if there’s one thing that people like, it’s grain, especially James at The Bison Prepper (LINK).

That’s a good thing, right?  The grain production gave the U.S.S.R. a source of currency, and the Kulaks imported farm machinery to increase farm production even more.  The Kulaks were the engine of the economy.  As a leader, Stalin must have loved these guys, right?

No.  Stalin hated them.  They were a threat to his power, and he didn’t like any power structure existing outside of him.  So, he went after the Kulaks.

But what was a Kulak?  Well, a Kulak was a peasant.  But this was a peasant that was slightly less poor than the other peasants.  That meant, for reals, that this peasant had a slightly nicer hovel, and had some regular gruel.  It wasn’t even as good a job as the assistant manager at McDonalds, but it was still really good in the Soviet Union where a bowl of warm mud was considered a major prize.  As such, these Kulaks were often looked up to locally because they were successful.  Their position in society was earned through merit.

But Stalin didn’t like Kulaks, and decided he was going to break them.  One of the first things he did was to create an army because Stalin had declared a Revolution© against . . . his own people.  This army was called the Twenty-Five-Thousanders.  They were steel and factory workers that were armed, given a quickie six-month training program on farming, and told to go make collective farming work.  Essentially they were dim-witted college interns with guns.

One of the interesting (to me, at least) measures of communism is how the system selects, on purpose, those of no real merit to be placed in positions of authority.  The factory worker given a gun and told to enforce Stalin’s will was being given the best job they had ever had, and power beyond anything a typical factory worker ever had.  This policy of promoting the unworthy and stupid into positions of power made the unworthy and stupid really zealous communists.  Where else could they go to get that kind of power?  They owed everything they were to the state.  Where else could a former prostitute or pimp decide on the summary execution of a former doctor or engineer?

So, faced with the army of 25,000 idiots, the Kulaks decided to do what a reasonable person does:  they decided to get together to go to Moscow to work out a solution.  Stalin was glad to meet them, and worked with them on a solution to all of their problems:  those Kulaks that weren’t summarily executed were shipped off to “leisure” camps in Siberia.  You might have heard of the camps – they called them Gulags.

gulagg

Ahh, just like Disneyland®!

But that wasn’t enough.  Stalin sent his 25,000 strong army to confiscate every bit of grain from problem areas.  Every bit.  He encouraged the poorer peasants to raid the houses of the Kulaks and take . . . everything.  Envy is powerful, and here was a license to steal.

So they stole.  But that wasn’t enough.

Stalin essentially shut the border down of the Ukraine after pulling all food out of the area.  In a stunningly familiar Communist plan, armed troops kept the people in.  Mao was an inadvertent murderer, but Stalin starved millions of people to death, on purpose.

Why?  James Mace explains:

I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such.  The calculation was very simple, very primitive:  no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.

Even today, the Western Press has a love affair with Stalin.  I won’t go into reasons why, and I’m not sure I care, but it’s obvious that the New York Times has never met a communist it didn’t love.  Walter Duranty privately noted on a telegram to London that over 10 million had died of starvation in 1934 during the Holodomor, but wrote publicly rosy pictures about the Soviet Union.  But what did Duranty say in public?

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Showing that they are perfectly unbiased, the Pulitzer™ committee has refused to rescind the Pulitzer Prize® given to Duranty for his participation in the cover up of Stalin’s mass murder of millions.  I wonder if complicity is in any dictionary they own?

At least someone got it right, but he didn’t win a Pulitzer©.

jones

Rumor is that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD.  Because truth is the biggest enemy a dictator has.

It might occur to a discerning reader that, while Democracy Dies in Darkness™, tens of millions can be killed by communism and lying about it, even when proven, gets prestigious awards!  And who says the press is biased.

But just like in the Olympics®, communists can be proud.  The got the gold and the silver!

GBD 2017 Mortality Collaborators [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] – Mortality graph.