Communism – Page 35 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Bridge on the River Kwai Moment

“We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that will put them to shame. We’ll show them what the British soldier is capable of doing.” – The Bridge on the River Kwai

Air combat in the Pacific as taught by public schools in 2019.

The Mrs. and I were discussing politics, and she tossed out an interesting question:

The Mrs.: “Is the Left going to have a Bridge on the River Kwai moment?”

I thought that was a great question, but it requires some backstory.

It was a condition of my proposal to The Miss that if she wanted to become The Mrs., that she’d have to watch several movies that dripped with toxic masculinity and testosterone. Patton, Zulu, The Man Who Would Be King, and any movie involving Clint Eastwood were required watching (among others).

The Mrs. said she’d seen most of the Eastwood movies already. The Mrs. hadn’t seen Hang ‘em High, so we watched that in the hotel on our honeymoon. Most of it. Okay, parts of it.

Okay, I promise these will make sense in a few paragraphs.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was included in that list of “must watch” movies. I decided to re-watch it last week after I started to write this post. I wrangled Pugsley into watching it with me. Pugsley’s a teen now, and the movie is a pretty powerful one that he’d never seen. As the movie opened to the scene of dense jungle, Pugsley asked, “What’s this (movie) about?”

John Wilder: “Well, it’s about a World War II prisoner of war camp . . .”

Pugsley: “No, you mean Vietnam.” He gestured at the jungle. Vietnam occurred 50 years ago. World War II was 75 years ago. To a teen? It’s all ancient history. Heck, Star Wars™ debuted 32 years after World War II ended. It’s now been 42 years since Star Wars© came out. Star Wars® is closer in time to World War II than we are to the opening night of Star Wars™. Feeling old?

John Wilder: “You do realize that we fought in the Pacific as well as in Europe in World War II?”

Pugsley: “Oh.” He looked doubtful, like he thought my mind was slipping, but let it pass.

To a teen in 2019, WWII is as far in the past as a world without flight was when I was a teen. Growing up I knew all about the kill ratio of the Phantom F-4 vs. the MiG in Vietnam, but next to nothing about World War I aviation other than Germans pilots apparently ate a lot of pizza:

Notice that he’s smoking. I’m sure that’s what killed him – I’ve been told those cigarettes are dangerous!

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 movie about Vietnam World War II. In it, a group of mainly British prisoners of war are in a camp in the Burmese jungle. As in real life, these soldiers were being forced by the Japanese to build a railroad so that the Japanese could have better logistics resupplying their troops in Burma.

The movie focuses around a particular bridge that needs to be completed in order to finish the railroad on time. Never since the pyramids were built has civil engineering been so exciting and sexy: piling depths, soil bearing capacity, number of cubic yards of dirt moved, surveying . . . riveting! Okay, no rivets since they were making the bridge out of wood.

In the opening scene a British colonel marches in to camp with his officers and soldiers, after being ordered to surrender in Singapore. The Japanese colonel and the British colonel engage in a battle of will. Since the actor playing the British colonel is the same actor that played Obi Wan Kenobi™ in Star Wars®, obviously not long into the movie the Japanese colonel’s will is crushed.

Colonel Kenobi: “These aren’t the troops you’re looking for.” Photoshop credit: The Boy.

Soon, the British colonel is directing his men to perform higher quotas of work than the Japanese had set for them. In order to show the Japanese how Englishmen act, Colonel Kenobi demands that his men not sabotage the bridge, but do proper, quality work. Not long after Colonel Kenobi arrives, an American barely escapes. The actor that played the American wasn’t in Star Wars©, so I have no idea if he could use the force.

Arriving at a rear base in India, the American is encouraged to join a commando group that will destroy the bridge over the Kwai. And, by encouraged I mean not “volunteered” but “voluntold.” My kids are voluntold about a lot of things, but I have never sent them to blow up a Japanese bridge in Burma. Maybe next summer, since they haven’t successfully completed mowing my lawn yet this summer. Baby steps.

The commandos, including the American who wasn’t in Star Wars© make it to the bridge and plant explosives. In order to add a ticking clock – they are going to blow up the bridge just as a trainload of high-ranking Japanese officials are using the train to go to the Japanese Death Star®.

See, I told you they would make sense.

As the train is approaching, Colonel Kenobi sees the electrical cord hooked up to the bridge – the other part is hooked to a Looney Tunes®-style detonator that is out of sight. Oops. Colonel Kenobi and the Japanese colonel go to investigate. When the colonels get close to the detonator, a young commando kills the Japanese colonel. Colonel Kenobi then yells for help. To the Japanese troops.

***SPOILER ALERT ON A 62 YEAR OLD MOVIE***

After the young commando is killed by the Japanese, who have much better aim than Stormtroopers™, the American, who is across the river, attempts to swim and detonate the explosives. The American is shot, but as the American is dying, Colonel Kenobi recognizes him as the escaped prisoner from earlier in the movie. Colonel Kenobi is jolted back, and looks at the bodies of the two officers that are on the same side as he is that died because of his actions . . . his actions to save “his” bridge.

Oops.

In a moment of clarity, he says the four most important words of the movie: “What have I done?”

This is the payoff for the whole movie. And it’s worth it – the only thing missing is a coyote chasing a road runner with a detonator that old . . .

That is The Bridge on the River Kwai moment, when the Colonel realized that, stuck in following procedure, in sticking to rules, and in demonstrating what a proper man he was, he got people on his own side killed. Plus, he built a really great bridge for the Japanese. Colonel Kenobi had been in service to his enemy.

Thankfully, as he was dying, he fell on the detonator, blowing up the bridge right on time.

It’s a shame that they changed this line, since it would have been a great reminder to people vacationing to remember to take their swimsuits. Such an emotional impact and such practical advice!

Victor Davis Hanson (always a good read) describes the end result of politics in California, once the most prosperous state in any union (LINK):

What caused this lunacy?

A polarity of importing massive poverty from south of the border while pandering to those who control unprecedented wealth in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the tourism industry, and the marquee universities. Massive green regulations and boutique zoning, soaring taxes, increasing crime, identity politics and tribalism, and radical one-party progressive government were force multipliers. It is common to blame California Republicans for their own demise. They have much to account for, but in some sense, the state simply deported conservative voters and imported their left-wing replacements

Where California goes, America generally follows.

When presidential candidates on the Left:

actively support giving healthcare to those in the country illegally,
make it impossible to secure the border,
make it impossible to quickly and safely deport those who are here illegally, and
support requiring American citizens to pay for all of this,

I wonder if they will ever have their Bridge on the River Kwai moment.

This particular kamikaze plane flew six missions.

When those “Conservatives” support:

unlimited globalism to export American technology and know-how,
importation of cheap labor versus using American labor via H-1B visas,
following every rule of etiquette set by the Left (that the Left doesn’t follow), and
rolling back each of our freedoms, but just a little slower than the left wants to.

I wonder if they will ever have their Bridge on the River Kwai moment. Did John McCain, on his deathbed, think, “What have I done?” I don’t think so.

How much of the foundation of this country has to crumble before Left and “Conservatives” realize what they’ve done to undermine the United States, which may be the last, best hope of Western Civilization? Do they care, or will they sell the country for two or six more years in power?

Never mind all that, an Eastwood movie is on. Haven’t seen Hang ‘em High or The Unforgiven in a while.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About 401k’s.

“When I turned 14, I took fiduciary responsibility for my mother’s 401K. We discussed it over Italian food. I had my first espresso, it kept me up all night. I fell asleep at dawn for five minutes and had a stress dream about the house burning down. Pretty good birthday.” – American Dad

The ear bud is playing a tape that says – in/out, in/out, so she doesn’t forget to breathe.

I was driving with The Boy back to Stately Wilder Manor on the way back from a fast food restaurant where he had consumed 3,000 calories out of his 10,000 daily calorie requirement. That’s one thing I miss – I was the same when I was his age, but now if I look sideways at a bag of Ruffles® the button on my jeans has a high chance of becoming a weapon outlawed in California due to velocity alone. Soon enough there’ll be a waiting period for Chips Ahoy™.

Out of nowhere, The Boy asked, “Why on Earth would anyone have a 401K?”

I’m used to random questions by The Boy at any point in any conversation. In the middle of discussing the economics of a thorium-based fusion reactor, he’ll pipe up and ask, “Do you think fish ever get tired of eating seafood? Oh, and what if we fed tuna mayonnaise, would that skip a step?” Bonus points if you can identify the two movies those questions came from without using the Internet. As The Boy is getting ready to go off to college, I suppose it makes sense.

First you get the khakis, then you get the job, then you get the girl, then the mortgage, then the divorce because your wife doesn’t agree that PCs are better than Apple© products and then you retire bitter and alone. So you might need a 401k.

See, The Boy gets the “thinking too far ahead” thing from me.

Admit it – this wasn’t just me.

I realized that it would be a fair topic for a Wednesday post, and probably a moderately fun one, too. If you have a 401k, or are retired, I know that you’re thinking, “Why would I want to read about a 401k, anyway?” Because it will be funny. I promise – I’m a trained Professional Humorist and Certified Duck Yodeler. You’re professional when people pay you to stop doing something, right?

401k’s aren’t taught in school, probably because no one would be listening, which still doesn’t explain why they have Band. The advantage of being 16 is that you are immortal, and your entire lifetime is spread out before you. A 401k? Might as well spend time teaching about the best types of denture adhesive or why candy bars don’t cost a dime anymore.

But you’re not 16 anymore, at least not according to your FBI profile, so I can keep discussing 401ks without your mind wandering. At least too much.

There are basically three types of retirement plans:

Have Very Wealthy Parents
Be a Part of a Defined Benefit Plan
Contribute to a Defined Contribution Plan

I prefer the first option, as should you. Sadly, my parents were only of the “comfortably well off” sort rather than “mind numbingly” wealthy. They selfishly managed to spend all of their money on themselves doing things that they liked. All they left me with was years of love, encouragement, good advice, help with a college education, wonderful memories, and times just tough enough to build the character I needed. They were awful.

Okay if your parents were losers like mine, you have to pay attention to the other options:

A Defined Benefit plan is something that, if you’re working in the United States, you’re already in. Social Security is such a plan. You contribute 7.5% of your income, which is matched with another 7.5% by your employer. Then, Congress spends it on worthless programs meant only to enrich the people that vote for them and on bacon-wrapped shrimp. Because who doesn’t like bacon-wrapped shrimp?

Thankfully, eventually if you live to age 107, you’ll receive enough money back from Social Security to subsist entirely on a diet of dog food and sawdust you gather from nearby construction sites. And the dry dog food, not the wet – what do you think we are, the Bill Gates’ family?

Other examples of Defined Benefit plans are pensions and stealing office supplies from your employer. I would discuss pensions, but unless you work for the government, pensions are as relevant as discussing attacks by a roving band of tyrannosaurus rex – it’s not going to happen in your lifetime. If you work for the government, pensions are a never ending fountain of chocolate-covered strawberries that I also get to pay for.

The reason pensions became as rare as decent Stephen King novels after he quit cocaine and were phased out by most businesses is that the 401k, a Defined Contribution plan, appeared in the 1980’s. With a 401k, a business can safely contribute just once to the employee, and then forget about them forever, making them even more disposable. Eventually they’ll figure out how to make employees “single use” like a Keurig® coffee brewer but they’ll have to worry about the hole they’ll need to pop into your head – oh, wait, that’s Facebook®. The biggest advantage for a business is if the employee decides to invest all of their 401k money in pantyhose and elephant rides it doesn’t matter to the business. Once they match your contribution, they’re done.

But having a 401k is a choice, and I have one. Why?

First and foremost, my employer matches my contributions. I contribute 6% of my pay, and my employer contributes 3% on top of my current salary. In my case, it’s like a 3% pay raise. And these are pre-tax dollars. Every dollar I put in my 401k lowers the amount of taxes that I have to pay right now, plus I get a free 50% of what I save invested. I like that.

Okay, mine are paid off. I paid them off in 2013 – I paid payments ahead, but I kept a balance until December 2012 was over, just in case the Mayans were right. That’s one way to stick it to the man.

When I invest in the various funds that my employer has to offer, then the amounts in my account grow tax free until I begin to pull money out. At that point, I then have to pay taxes on the money I take out of the account for The Mrs. so she can selfishly spend it on insulin.

But there are downsides or risks to having a 401k as well.

There are a limited number of plans. What if I really want to invest in dirigible manufacturers instead of Apple®? I’m sure dirigibles are coming back this year – rumor has it they’re going up.
A 401k is another way for Wall Street to monetize your life, which will probably be the focus of next Wednesday’s post. And we know Wall Street has your best interests at heart, right?
What will future tax rates be? When I begin to take money I believe that I won’t be paying as high a tax rate as today. But I could be wrong. I’ve just been itching to pay for health care for illegal aliens, so, there’s no telling.
A 401k is easy for government to confiscate: it would take exactly one law and some politicians have even discussed the idea. Why should those that save their money be entitled to any of it? Selfish, like my parents.
What will the market performance be? For my lifetime, the market has gone up and down, like Oprah©’s weight. But it’s mainly stayed up. Also like Oprah®’s weight. Or dirigibles, which are kind of Oprah™ shaped.
What will inflation be? Will we become Zimbabwe with a nuclear arsenal and a better navy?
Perhaps one of the scariest comments I’ve seen with respect from this came from Arthur Sido (LINK) (I’m paraphrasing): “Your money will become worthless while benefits to those on welfare will increase.” Well, I guess that’s one good way to achieve the goals of communism!

I love it when Communists prove that it works this time.

But when I look at all of the risks above, I realize that I’m exposed to them already unless I completely invest in the three precious metals – gold, silver, and lead.

My 401k doesn’t seem to accept .223 or 7.62 as a valid investment.

One other advantage of the 401k is that it adds a significant amount of financial stability. Most 401k plans allow you to borrow against them. Financial advisors don’t like this, because they’d much rather you pay interest to a bank with headquarters in New York rather than yourself. Also, sometimes you can’t add more money to a 401k after you’ve borrowed money against it.

A loan against my 401k has been useful to me on one particular occasion. After my first wife She Who Will Not Be Named moved out she handed me a grocery sack filled with bills. She then handed me a checkbook. “I have no idea how much money is in the account.” And then she walked out.

My loan from my 401k paid for the late payments. Barely. That experience allowed me to be able to answer this important question:

Why are divorces expensive? They’re worth it.

I shouldn’t complain, my divorce was better than most. I just wish she hadn’t gotten my hair in the settlement.

The downside of a 401k loan is that you have to pay it back immediately if you leave that job. If not? The money becomes taxable that year – plus a 10% penalty tax is added on.

Now The Boy wonders if he can feed the 10% penalty to fish. Go figure.

I am not a financial advisor. I am a silly blogger that writes on the Internet. If you use my advice, you certainly get what’s coming to you, which may include being impacted by an asteroid, eaten by a sasquatch, or financial ruin. So there.

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links

â€œHave you any idea how successfulÂ censorshipÂ is on TV? Don’t know the answer? Hmm. Successful, isn’t it?â€ â€“ Max Headroom

11:45pm â€“ fifteen minutes to midnight.Â Yes, itâ€™s subjective, and itâ€™s based on the countdown, published last month (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming).Â Weâ€™re still at CivCon 6 – People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.Â Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.

In this issue:Â Front Matter â€“ Censorship Updateâ€“ John Markâ€™s Video and Criticism â€“ Updated Civil War II Index â€“ Who Benefits? â€“ Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the second issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.Â These posts will be a bit different than the other posts here at Wilder Wealthy and Wise â€“ they will consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II.Â My intent is to update these on the first Monday of every month.

John Wilkes Paintbooth (Idea via user Miles Long at The Burning Platform)

There has been a pretty significant interest in Civil War II â€“ it has generated more emails to me than any other topic Iâ€™ve written about, with a great number of links to relevant information that youâ€™ll see below.Â Itâ€™s also resulted in about a dozen book suggestions, and Iâ€™ve bought or downloaded every one of your suggestions.Â I havenâ€™t had time to read even 10% of the books yet, but I can tell the suggestions are rock solid.Â Thank you.Â Please feel free to contribute more suggestions of links or books either in the comments below or directly to me at movingnorth@gmail.com â€“ I wonâ€™t use your name (from e-mails) unless explicitly given permission, and I wonâ€™t directly quote your email unless explicitly given permission, but I may quote my answers in a way that doesnâ€™t violate your privacy.

Censorship Update

Why is censorship an issue in Civil War II?Â Censorship is a measure of how those in power (either political or economic) fear an idea and how polarized they have become.Â Most censorship in the past had been based on the sexual content of the book or movie.Â Now itâ€™s based on ideas that are dangerous.Â Which ideas?Â Depends on the day.

I know it says â€œUpdateâ€ but this is really the first version, so technically the first â€œupdateâ€ will be next month.Â There has been more censorship in the United States in the past year than at any point in my adult life.Â This level of censorship is more frightening than anything Iâ€™ve ever seen, except for the latest Democratic presidential debates.

YouTubeÂ© is the real star of censorship in June.Â Comedian/journalist Steven Crowder has been a long-time YouTubeÂ® broadcaster who is generally on the mainstream â€œRightâ€ side of the political world.Â He likes guns.Â Doesnâ€™t like abortion.Â He is not extreme in any real sense of the word.Â But as a comedian, one of the things he does regularly is mock people.Â Which people?Â Everyone.Â I wonâ€™t go into the details (you can look it up) but a group of Leftists decided Crowder should be banned from YouTubeâ„¢ since he made a lispy-Leftist journalist who is an ethnic and sexual minority feel bad.

YouTubeÂ© responded to this contrived moral outrage by making it so Crowder couldnâ€™t get money from YouTubeÂ® ads â€“ oddly this increased Crowderâ€™s income as thousands of people bought merchandise directly from Crowderâ€™s company.

End of story?Â No.

Soon enough, YouTubeâ„¢ will consist of nothing more than makeup videos, BuzzfeedÂ®, and whatever else the New York TimesÂ© says is okay.

Forty other channels were either banned, demonetized, or had videos deleted.Â I wonâ€™t go so far as to say that these channels are all mainstream like Steven Crowder, they arenâ€™t.Â But I am not aware of any content that called for violence or did anything more than spread â€œdangerous ideas.â€Â In a crowning bit of irony, YouTubeÂ® censored a video where a Googleâ„¢ (owner of YouTubeâ„¢) executive talked about how GoogleÂ© wouldnâ€™t allow another â€œTrump situation.â€Â This was presumably via using their ability to manipulate what search results people see when they use Googleâ„¢.

TwitterÂ® had also purged significant figures on the Right, most prominent among them James Woods, who has since given up on the platform after multiple bans despite having over 2,000,000 followers.

Letâ€™s take Amazon, who in 2010 said that â€œAmazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.â€Â This was a fairly absolute position, especially since Amazon was defending selling a pro-pedophilia book.

Not so much now.Â Amazon has now banned dozens of books, and created entire categories of products that cannot be sold.Â Â You canâ€™t get a Confederate flag t-shirt from Amazon, but you can certainly get a Stalin shirt.Â This is despite the fact that Stalin killed (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) more people in one year â€“ 3.9 million â€“ than the total number of slaves in the United States in 1850 â€“ 3 million.Â Sure, it sucked to be a slave.Â But it was certainly worse to be a slave to communism that was starved to death.

With apologies to Arthur (LINK), whose tagline I mangled for this one.

I tried to come up with a list of censored things, but even the censored things seem to be mainly censored.Â Orwell would be proud.

John Markâ€™s Civil War 2 Video and Criticism

This video was suggested by several of you, including Shinmen Takezo who suggests you listen to all of John Markâ€™s videos.Â Iâ€™ve seen this one, and plan to watch the others when I have a spare minute.

I think Mr. Mark is spot on with commentary that Trump is the last Republican president that will be elected.Â I wrote about this back in November of 2018(Trump: The Last President?).Â It has a click-bait-y title, which might explain why it went viral and got over 120,000 pageviews on Zero HedgeÂ©.

John Mark reviews an article purportedly written by a â€œRed Teamâ€ (bad guy) member of a war game where the Right revolts against the government and the Left.Â My response is in italics, or braille if you donâ€™t clean your screen very often.

First Vulnerability:Â The electrical grid is dispersed and easy to take down into most cities because it is impossible to guard.Â The front wonâ€™t be against just the Right, it will also be against their own (Leftist) cities.

I agree.Â The United States is built as a free society, and so is all of our infrastructure.Â It is devastatingly vulnerable.Â In one of the links below, youâ€™ll see how a $0.02 match took down a $20,000,000 bridge.Â And that was on accident.

Second Vulnerability:Â 30% will revolt.Â Most on the Right have guns.Â There are 400 million guns, 8 trillion bullets in the United States â€“ most in the hand of the Right.Â Ten million strongly on the Right.Â Tanks and airplanes donâ€™t matter as much as the Left thinks. Â Â There might be 2 million in the United States military, and over 60% voted for the Right.Â There are 20 million former military.

Total would be about 2 million available forces for revolutionary suppression (including civilian police), if the active military did not revolt.

I agree.Â The people, especially former military, on the Right can do whatever they want.Â Tanks and airplanes didnâ€™t win World War II on the Eastern Front â€“ the winning weapon was the mortar and the rifle â€“ anti-personnel weapons.Â The Soviets also accomplished it only by throwing millions of bodies into combat.Â Bodies that will be tough for the Left to get outside of conscription.

I think thereâ€™s an Uber joke in here somewhere.

Third Vulnerability:Â The Left lives in consuming cities, the Right lives in the land that produces food and stuff.Â The concentrated cities of the Left produce a lot of porn and girls with daddy-issues, but not much food.

I agree.Â They are vulnerable, though the porn and Facebookâ„¢ drought might be tough on some.

Where do I disagree?Â

The Ultra-Violent and Nukes.

Sure, we know the StarbucksÂ® Socialists and Latte Lenins wonâ€™t fight.Â Why wouldnâ€™t the government take MS-13 and arm them and turn them loose to â€œmake examplesâ€ of small downs, one after another?Â If they were losing, they would certainly do that.Â And they could scrape together a pilot and a nuke or two to take down a rebel capital city.Â If they were losing, they would.Â Â Â Â

The Right could make a reasonable partisan force, especially when you look that probably 50% to 75% of the military would defect and train people on the Right, bringing along a nice batch of weapons (think grenades, C4, etcetera) to the farm to teach the rest of the football team.Â I donâ€™t think Jed would need to teach the boys to shoot, and I think theyâ€™d learn to use that mortar and grenade launcher that he â€œliberatedâ€ from the Marines very quickly. Â

Logistics and Geography

The Left can be resupplied via air and ship.Â â€œEmergencyâ€ supplies would head into coastal cities and sustain them forever, though Denver would fall soon enough.Â Would Russia supply the heartland while the Chinese supplied the West Coast?Â I have no idea â€“ I think theyâ€™d do what.Â Regardless, France would soon surrender.

Also, I think there would be a nearly immediate media clamp down.Â Â The media supports the Left, no matter what.Â They would parrot the Leftist line until the studios were taken from them by force.

I think that this is far too optimistic, but I also think the odds are lower the more time passes.

Civil War Index:

Hereâ€™s the state for this month.

Economic:Â +10.42.Â Unemployment is the same â€“ interest rates took a huge drop, and the Dow was (slightly) up.Â Increasing economic is good.

Political Instability:Â -46%.Â I think that the start of the debates and the poor poll numbers of â€œany democratic candidateâ€ against Trump has calmed the Left politically by a lot.Â Lower instability is good.

Censorship:Â Originally this was going to be a candidate index.Â Sadly, thereâ€™s no data.Â How scary is it that you canâ€™t find good data on censorship?

Interest in Violence:Â Up 7% this month.Â Not horrible, but not good.

Illegal Aliens:Â Up 24% last month to 144,000.Â 144,000 is more than have been deported since Trump got into office.Â This shows increasing instability south of the border, or lower fear of deportation.Â Both are bad.

Eventually these will be graphs, but a graph with one point is . . . boring.Â Maybe in August.

Quote From a Failed Candidate to be The One:Â â€œIs the Red Pill gluten free?Â Also, is it vegan?â€

One measure I thought was pretty good was from Anonymousse over at The Burning Platform:Â â€œOne good metric may be the spread between political poll projections and reality/results. Iâ€™m thinking that gauges just how â€œfreeâ€ people feel about saying versus what they do. Something Iâ€™ve noticed widening over the years.â€

Iâ€™d like to do this one, but the data points are just too far apart.Â This would be useful information over the course of a decade, but wonâ€™t be much use monthly.Â I think Anonymousse is right â€“ people donâ€™t feel good about sharing if theyâ€™re going to vote for an â€œunpopularâ€ candidate on the Right, severely skewing the polls.

What do I mean by unpopular?

We were on vacation two years ago, and decided to stop at a national monument.Â We got out.Â The plates on our car are from a very red state – my county went 85% for Trump.Â As we got out of the car to stretch our legs and see the monument, we spied a guy birdwatching.Â He put his binoculars on our car.Â He was about 150 feet away.

Birdwatch Bill, yelling:Â “Who’d you vote for?”

John Wilder, being sassy, yelling back:Â “Starts with a T!”

Birdwatch Bill, muffled:Â “Ashshof.”

John Wilder:Â “What?”

Birdwatch Bill, with anger, yelling:Â “You heard me, A****le.”Â It rhymes with tadpole.

I was stunned, I mean, I donâ€™t deny being a tadpole, but I didnâ€™t think you could see it from 150 feet away.Â The Mrs. was in theÂ bathroom, and I’m thankful that she didn’t hear him, since she would have broken him like a twig – she handles my light work.

After saying that, Birdwatch Bill scurried and jumped in his car, and sped off.

After hearing that story, The Mrs. was adamant that we not move to that state, even when I had a job offer there, even though I think sheâ€™d like to hear Birdwatch Billâ€™s yelp as she gave him a nuclear wedgie.

Who Benefits?

Whenever I see something that doesnâ€™t make sense, I try to understand what could possibly be causing it.Â When conditions are better for minority racial and ethnic groups than ever in the history of the country, and the agitation increases, I have to ask, who benefits?Â When the push for segregation comes from, not the Right but the Left, I ask, who benefits?

When I see us moving on a seemingly certain path towards war, I have to ask, who benefits?Â Probably more on this in a future post.

Links From Readers:

Obviously I only stand by 100% of my own writing.Â Here is some interesting stuff sent in by readers.Â Feel free to take some of the burden off of Ricky, and send me more.Â And if you send it in an email, please let me know if I may credit you.

See, a chain link photo in the â€œLinksâ€ page.Â Iâ€™m witty that way.

Thomas Chittumâ€™s Civil War TwoÂ – Iâ€™m not finished with this one yet, but very interesting.Â A 178 page .pdf file â€“ this was listed by “Mark” at The Burning Platform.

Photos of Bosnia during and after their civil war from â€œMygirlâ€¦maybeâ€ over at The Burning Platform.

Update on the State of Jefferson vs. New California from user â€œMartelâ€™s Hammerâ€ at The Burning Platform.

Who is behind Antifa?, via AC at The Burning Platform.

From Ricky:

Pentagon prepping for civil unrest?

Review of the risk of civil unrest (presentation).

Peter Turchin predicts violence in 2020.

France and Social Unrest â€“ Tied to Loss of Family and Religion

Perhaps my favorite link from Ricky â€“ the Partisan Conflict Index â€“ worth watching.Â

Brazos reminds us that there is precedence for using the troops against American civilians.Â

User â€œMN Steelâ€ reminds us that the damage a single match can do.

From my E-mail:

First is a blog I often read, Metallicman on what liberals have in store for conservatives.Â Not pretty.Â

And more from Ricky!

This one from an Australian perspective.

NY Magazine â€“ wondering if it isnâ€™t time to split up.Â My add (from HBOÂ®) was for the series Divorce.Â Hmmm.

From the Federalist, again about â€œdivorceâ€ of the United States.

From other emails . . .

A great article from Mary Christine over at The Burning Platform, looking at Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War and how partisans will form â€“ will Civil War Two look more like the personal fights along the Kansas and Missouri borders?

The Left, Doublethink, and Individual Thought

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

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.”

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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

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.

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!

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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.
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?
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.
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.
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.

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

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.

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.

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.