Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
For four thousand years, China looked inward. Only conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchu, the 20th Century was a succession of weak leaders until the communist takeover at the hands of Mao Zedong. Mao seemed content to play with the Chinese people and the Chinese economy like a Doberman’s chew toy until his death in the 1970’s.
AOC will never be a doctor – she’s committing political Mao-practice.
Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked around at the huge Doberman spit-covered collectivist mess left by communism, and decided that something had to change. After visiting the United States, he decided that China needed way to get convenient chocolate milkshakes like that one Jimmy Carter got him at McDonalds®, and began reforming the economy based around market lines. You know, capitalism.
Capitalism worked amazingly well at saving a communist economy. Shocker!
The collective ingenuity of over a billion Chinese coupled with capitalist incentives and totalitarian controls has led to growth. The economy of China in 2019 is 91 times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng’s reforms began. Some before and after pictures become relevant at this point:
Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.
What China has effectively done is make its citizens nearly 100 times richer since Star Wars® first came out. Perhaps more impressive is the amount of expertise that has been imported to China. By making first cheap junk in the 1980’s to radar detectors in the 1990’s to iPods® in the early 00’s to iPhones™ today, China has imported not only the technical know-how of cutting edge technology is design, it understands better than any other country in the world on how to build most things.
See, I told you I wasn’t exaggerating much. Two day shipping really changed their lives.
In this way, China has traded lots of cell phones for zillions of dollars that we just printed up out of thin air, sure, but it’s also trained itself on how to be an industrial superpower.
Industrial. But what about military?
No. China has seen our military and has no ambition that it can in the near future compete with American military power. Unlike the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Congress, China has no desire to fight World War II again. While the United States has fought in numerous conflicts in the last fifty years, China has fought in exactly one, an incursion into Vietnam back before Reagan was president. The Chinese make the Italians look like Patton with Pizza.
So, rumor is that they also have a tricycle attack brigade, but they were at nap time.
If I were Chinese President Xi Jinping, I would have no illusions about my military. Even if it fielded better tanks and planes than the United States, it still would come up short because outside of games of Call of Duty®, the Chinese military has no experience.
Instead: “China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare. These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare…” (United States Army Special Operations Command, 2014)
In particular, China has focused on trade. In the last five years, China has started an international cooperation scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has led to (so far) agreements with over 68 countries. The stated objective of BRI is that it is meant to produce closer ties and stronger trading arrangements between China and the rest of the world.
See, need some place to keep my stuff – Mom’s basement is full.
BRI consists of at least a trillion dollars of planned Chinese spending, and by spending, I mean loans. China will loan countries money to develop infrastructure – pipelines, roads, harbors, PEZ® mines, railroads, industrial parks, electric power grids, and airports to better move people and goods throughout the world. Certainly China won’t take advantage of the loan conditions if a country has trouble repaying it?
Actually, so far not really. In only one case has China seized assets, and the rest of them it has either renegotiated debt payments or forgiven them entirely.
So what is China doing?
It came to me one night while I was thinking about the blog and just drifting off to sleep. Thinking about this like a banker looking to gain leverage wasn’t the right framework. China isn’t building this trading network to compete with the United States. China is building this framework for life without the United States. BRI replaces our markets, and replaces what we’re shipping to them. But there’s more.
When you look at what China has, it is people, industrial capacity, and ingenuity. China needs raw materials. It’s short on food. It needs oil. By making inroads into Africa, China has started new mines, run by Chinese administrators and Chinese miners. China has built, using Chinese laborers and Chinese steel, new railroads in Kenya.
Perhaps it’s just the economy of the United States that China expects will be gone?
Beyond that, closer economic ties with a country that could dominate your economy certainly isn’t dangerous, is it? They’d never use their influence to change your laws, or influence your movies, right?
Set from the 2010 remake of Red Dawn before China demanded they not be the villain. Hmmm.
Belt and Road graphic (pre-meme) By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561
The idea is that there is some balance where government can feed people just enough so that they can make guns for beautiful Marxist bikini soldiers to take over the world with love and kindness and AK-47s. In this fable, once the world chooses peace (that means Marxism), guns will no longer be produced and the glorious workers will now luxuriate in a worker’s paradise.
These are the deep thoughts of a dimwitted socialist like Kamala Harris, or of an overly caring 11 year-old who is earnestly trying to solve the world’s problems. But I repeat myself.
Don’t be mean to Kamala. She already enough difficulty explaining to her husband why she’s in the top results for “slept her way to the top” on a Google® image search (this is true).
Just because Marxists were wrong about economics doesn’t mean that economies that there aren’t economic choices to make. There are. The biggest actual economic choice to make is whether to spend the output of that economy on building additional productive capacity or on Free Stuff.
Building additional production is investment in the economy. Sure, Leftists like to use “investment” as just another word for Free Stuff, but investment, by definition, produces a return. In the case of investment in an economy, after the investment is done the economy produces more than it did before. Instead of dividing a finite economic pie between guns or butter, the genius of investment is that it creates a bigger pie for everyone. By definition, that’s a win, because it also means more guns for everyone!
There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to lie. If she’s holding an AK, it’s time to lie.
This was self-evident in Western Civilization during the Cold War. We picked the strategy that we invest in our economies so that they became larger, and we’d defeat Communism by out producing them. In order to do that, we increased freedom of the free market so that instead of handfuls of production bureaucrats and commissars guessing what should be produced, millions of free people experimenting in an open economy would make that choice. The winners were selected by the market, and even when things like the Hula-Hoop® or Justin Bieber became wildly popular, industrial capacity was increased all across Western Civilization (and Japan, which had largely adopted all of the winning parts of Western Civilization).
We allowed this to guide our military spending, too. Multiple companies competed to produce new jet fighters that were more capable, missiles that were more accurate. The technical prowess of the military came not from a top-down dictate, but from the companies competing to produce better defense products. Sure, some of them were horrible, but most of our equipment and doctrine was better than the Soviet stuff. How much better? Ask Saddam Hussein.
As the focus of our economy was growth, the economy grew. How big did it grow? It grew to the point where Reagan could consciously bankrupt the entire guns and butter Soviet economy through pretending that the Star Wars™ missile defense was going to make intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete. The economy of Western Civilization was such a potent weapon because it harnessed the ingenuity of everyone through capitalist incentives and rewards. The system of capitalism was so obviously successful that China®, Inc. decided to copy it for their economy and get rid of the silly Maoist collectivism. Keep in mind, capitalism does not mean freedom.
If Venezuela had a dollar for every time giving out Free Stuff worked, they’d have zero dollars. Oh, that’s exactly what Venezuela has. Never mind.
What Free Stuff do the Leftists want to toss out?
“Free” Healthcare – for everyone. Including illegal aliens. You might think that they don’t give it away now – they do. A pregnant illegal alien show ups to have a baby? You get to pay for that right now. I guess the good news is you don’t have to change it’s diaper.
“Free” Daycare – for everyone. Why? Because who could be better at raising your children than the state. They do such a good job at the DMV.
“Free” College – for everyone. That kid that sat behind you with his finger up his nose, who talked about how he wanted to ride a tyrannosaurus on Mars? When he was a senior in high school? Yeah, he gets free college, too. Although riding a tyrannosaurus on Mars does sound cool.
“Free” Income – for everyone. Why not give everyone $1000 a month for free. It won’t distort the economy at all.
“Free” Reparations – not for everyone. People who were never slaves would get paid by people who never had slaves, for the sin of slavery. Makes about as much sense as the rest of this list.
“Free” Housing – just not in the gated communities where Congressmen live.
Oh, and don’t forget regulations, since regulations is another way to give Free Stuff. They take freedom from the economy and create winners and losers. The Green New Deal is an example of this – the idea of the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment – it’s all about creating a socialist economy. In the words of AOC’s advisor: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Regulations are used to change the economy.
Take a look at all of the innovation spawned by Communism!
The same thing happened in Venezuela. PDVSA was a very profitable oil company before Hugo Chavez gutted it to provide Free Stuff to the Venezuelan people. Now? PDVSA is deeply in debt and incapable of producing as much oil as it did in 1998, despite having 77.5 billion barrels of reserves.
Yeah. Free Stuff can make a country bankrupt.
The nice thing about this concept is that it also applies to individuals. Every day each of us has a choice: do we work to make ourselves better, or do we goof off? The choice is an important one.
I assumed the position of the First Bank of Dadâ„¢, and rummaged through my wallet for cash. Looking, I had a ludicrous number of single dollar bills – $16 in ones. “Okay, guys, hope you don’t mind ones. Here is $15 in ones, and a $10 and a $5. That should keep you in raw fish and botulism.â€
Pugsley laughed, “It’s like Dad went to a strip club and got too many ones from the ATM!â€
The Boy stopped and immediately defended my honor, “What are you talking about?  Dad would never, ever . . . go to an ATM.â€
That’s a direct quote. Thanks, pal.
I think if I were going to be a stripper, I think I would use the name Brax Thünderhyde, and dress as a construction worker. Probably a building inspector – they’re sexy, right? I hear chicks did clipboards.
This really happened, nearly word for word. The Mrs. immediately started laughing, as did I. I hadn’t been to an ATM since college, when I determined that an ATM was just a hole in your bank account that your money leaked out of. When I was about 20, I found out through bitter experience that either I didn’t have enough money, discipline, or intelligence to have an ATM card, so I cut it up. My life has been far better since then. So, yes, The Boy was right, I’ve been to a strip club more recently than I’ve been to an ATM.
The ATM card was my first exposure to the concept that banks were certainly not on my side – I wasn’t their friend, I was simply a way for them to get fees. ATM cards were a way to charge me to get my own money – I’d pay a $1 fee for $100 in cash. That’s an immediate 1% for the privilege of using my own money, on those rare occasions that I had $100. In the far more realistic case that I was pulling out $20, it was the same fee for $20, so that’s a 5% fee. The good thing is that I could also check my balance at the ATM.
I was in college and could do calculus, but I certainly wasn’t smart enough to do basic subtraction. Take $21 out of your account too many times? End up with negative numbers in your bank account. That led to the really fun set of fees – charges for having less than zero money. Like the lottery, bank fees are a tax on bad math and poor impulse control.
After I had to pay overdraft fees the second time, I cut up the ATM card. If it was Friday and I needed cash for the weekend? I’d go down to the bank and cash a check. That was it. You can’t use an ATM machine if you don’t have a card. This had two good effects – I had to plan how much I was going to spend on Coors Light® for the weekend, but, once I ran out of money, I had to stop spending. No choice, no poor willpower. I had to stop.  And if I had to check my balance without an ATM? I could have a friend shove me really hard.
But dumping the ATM card was a good one.
I haven’t had an ATM card (or even a debit card) since then, and don’t think I’ve paid a fee to a bank for anything other than mortgage interest in almost two decades. I learned a big lesson from using an ATM: to the bank, I was the commodity. I was nothing more than ATM transaction fees and overdraft fees. My bad math paid their salaries.
That realization made me look around and observe how other companies viewed me. I realized that entire businesses have been built around using consumers as commodities. In the 1990’s Sears® attempted to get every financial dollar conceivable out of a consumer short of turning them upside down and shaking them to see if any singles were left over from the strip club would fall out. How did Sears do this?
You could buy your clothing, hardware, crib, bed, refrigerator and lawnmower at Sears®.
When (in the late 1990’s) I realized that Sears® at one point or another owned all of those companies, it became clear to me that Sears® was attempting to get a piece of every dollar that I could spend that wasn’t given to directly to a mortgage lender. They then sold off these businesses, and have been very successful since then:
I kid. Sears® remains every bit as relevant today as fax machines and slide projectors.
It was around the same time that I first heard the word “monetize.† Taken literally, it means, “make into money,†and an example is what the Clintons did with the presidency and Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend did with Jeff.
Capitalism works best when people look for ways to create better service for you so that you will give them your money. This is the power of capitalism – people competing to make you happy. This provides a springboard for innovation. It provides a reason for people you’ve never met to cooperate with you to allow both of you to meet your goals.
And I hear that their diet plan works great, too!
A rule of economics is that the more indirectly you do something, the easier it is. If you had a rock to break, you could hit it with another rock until it broke. It’s the simplest way, but it’s also the hardest. You could get a steel hammer to break the rock, but now you need find iron ore and make the steel and form it into a hammer. Much more efficient, but much more indirect. Heck, you could create an entire chemical laboratory and make explosives, and taking your hammer and a steel chisel and put a hole in the rock, and then blow it up. That’s the easiest, but it is the most indirect method yet.
Just like my bank tried to do when they created the ATM, the coming trend is to monetize cash. It’s harder to remember to go to the bank on Friday to get cash than to get cash, anywhere, at any time. From the standpoint of Wall Street, cash sucks. If I want to go buy a six pack of crotch weasels and I use cash, the only people getting a cut are the crotch weasel store and the government – crotch weasel sales are taxable in Midwestia. Governments have this monetization thing down.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of products I’d miss, if they disappeared tomorrow, but monetization is also control.
Appetite: grow your own versus a buying food at a supermarket
Money: cash versus a credit card. Every credit card requires fees.
Emotion: Twitter® versus not being irritated at everyone.
Attention: Netflixâ„¢ versus a book or this fine blog.
Lust: Ruffles®. You know you want some.
Okay, that might be an extreme solution.
Don’t think monetization is control? What about EBT cards? Legislators have even figured out how to give banks a share by monetizing poverty. What happens if the EBT cards shut down? Yup. Monetization is control. Ben Hunt has a good post (LINK) on how Facebook® is attempting to monetize money yet again to destroy cash (and Bitcoin) and give governments complete surveillance of every financial transaction – and Hunt thinks that it just might work. (H/T Remus, at the Woodpile Report (LINK) – if you’re not reading the Woodpile Report – you’re missing out.)
If monetization is control, that means that if it can be monetized, it can be weaponized.
Stop the food – without a farm, you’re hungry.
Deny you credit, cancel your card – you’re not able to rent a hotel room.
“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 . . .”
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
“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:
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.
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.
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?
“Have you any idea how successful censorship is on TV? Don’t know the answer? Hmm. Successful, isn’t it?†– Max Headroom
11:45pm – fifteen minutes to midnight. Yes, it’s subjective, and it’s based on the countdown, published last month (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming). We’re still at CivCon 6 – People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
In this issue: Front Matter – Censorship Update– John Mark’s Video and Criticism – Updated Civil War II Index – Who Benefits? – Links
Front Matter
Welcome to the second issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts will be a bit different than the other posts here at Wilder Wealthy and Wise – they will consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II. 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 – it has generated more emails to me than any other topic I’ve written about, with a great number of links to relevant information that you’ll see below. It’s also resulted in about a dozen book suggestions, and I’ve bought or downloaded every one of your suggestions. I haven’t had time to read even 10% of the books yet, but I can tell the suggestions are rock solid. Thank you. Please feel free to contribute more suggestions of links or books either in the comments below or directly to me at movingnorth@gmail.com – I won’t use your name (from e-mails) unless explicitly given permission, and I won’t directly quote your email unless explicitly given permission, but I may quote my answers in a way that doesn’t violate your privacy.
Censorship Update
Why is censorship an issue in Civil War II? Censorship is a measure of how those in power (either political or economic) fear an idea and how polarized they have become. Most censorship in the past had been based on the sexual content of the book or movie. Now it’s based on ideas that are dangerous. Which ideas? Depends on the day.
I know it says “Update†but this is really the first version, so technically the first “update†will be next month. There has been more censorship in the United States in the past year than at any point in my adult life. This level of censorship is more frightening than anything I’ve ever seen, except for the latest Democratic presidential debates.
Twitter® 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.
Let’s take Amazon, who in 2010 said that “Amazon 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. Amazon has now banned dozens of books, and created entire categories of products that cannot be sold.  You can’t get a Confederate flag t-shirt from Amazon, but you can certainly get a Stalin shirt. This is despite the fact that Stalin killed (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) more people in one year – 3.9 million – than the total number of slaves in the United States in 1850 – 3 million. Sure, it sucked to be a slave. 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. Orwell would be proud.
John Mark’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 Mark’s videos. I’ve seen this one, and plan to watch the others when I have a spare minute.
John Mark reviews an article purportedly written by a “Red Team†(bad guy) member of a war game where the Right revolts against the government and the Left. My response is in italics, or braille if you don’t clean your screen very often.
First Vulnerability: The electrical grid is dispersed and easy to take down into most cities because it is impossible to guard. The front won’t be against just the Right, it will also be against their own (Leftist) cities.
I agree. The United States is built as a free society, and so is all of our infrastructure. It is devastatingly vulnerable. In one of the links below, you’ll see how a $0.02 match took down a $20,000,000 bridge. And that was on accident.
Second Vulnerability: 30% will revolt. Most on the Right have guns. There are 400 million guns, 8 trillion bullets in the United States – most in the hand of the Right. Ten million strongly on the Right. Tanks and airplanes don’t matter as much as the Left thinks.   There might be 2 million in the United States military, and over 60% voted for the Right. 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. The people, especially former military, on the Right can do whatever they want. Tanks and airplanes didn’t win World War II on the Eastern Front – the winning weapon was the mortar and the rifle – anti-personnel weapons. The Soviets also accomplished it only by throwing millions of bodies into combat. Bodies that will be tough for the Left to get outside of conscription.
I think there’s an Uber joke in here somewhere.
Third Vulnerability: The Left lives in consuming cities, the Right lives in the land that produces food and stuff. The concentrated cities of the Left produce a lot of porn and girls with daddy-issues, but not much food.
I agree. They are vulnerable, though the porn and Facebook™ drought might be tough on some.
Where do I disagree?Â
The Ultra-Violent and Nukes.
Sure, we know the Starbucks® Socialists and Latte Lenins won’t fight. Why wouldn’t the government take MS-13 and arm them and turn them loose to “make examples†of small downs, one after another? If they were losing, they would certainly do that. And they could scrape together a pilot and a nuke or two to take down a rebel capital city. If they were losing, they would.   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. I don’t think Jed would need to teach the boys to shoot, and I think they’d learn to use that mortar and grenade launcher that he “liberated†from the Marines very quickly. Â
Logistics and Geography
The Left can be resupplied via air and ship. “Emergency†supplies would head into coastal cities and sustain them forever, though Denver would fall soon enough. Would Russia supply the heartland while the Chinese supplied the West Coast? I have no idea – I think they’d do what. Regardless, France would soon surrender.
Also, I think there would be a nearly immediate media clamp down.  The media supports the Left, no matter what. 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:
Here’s the state for this month.
Economic: +10.42. Unemployment is the same – interest rates took a huge drop, and the Dow was (slightly) up. Increasing economic is good.
Political Instability: -46%. I think that the start of the debates and the poor poll numbers of “any democratic candidate†against Trump has calmed the Left politically by a lot. Lower instability is good.
Censorship: Originally this was going to be a candidate index. Sadly, there’s no data. How scary is it that you can’t find good data on censorship?
Interest in Violence: Up 7% this month. Not horrible, but not good.
Illegal Aliens: Up 24% last month to 144,000. 144,000 is more than have been deported since Trump got into office. This shows increasing instability south of the border, or lower fear of deportation. Both are bad.
Eventually these will be graphs, but a graph with one point is . . . boring. Maybe in August.
Quote From a Failed Candidate to be The One: “Is the Red Pill gluten free? Also, is it vegan?â€
One measure I thought was pretty good was from Anonymousse over at The Burning Platform: “One good metric may be the spread between political poll projections and reality/results. I’m thinking that gauges just how “free†people feel about saying versus what they do. Something I’ve noticed widening over the years.â€
I’d like to do this one, but the data points are just too far apart. This would be useful information over the course of a decade, but won’t be much use monthly. I think Anonymousse is right – people don’t feel good about sharing if they’re going to vote for an “unpopular†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. We got out. The plates on our car are from a very red state – my county went 85% for Trump. As we got out of the car to stretch our legs and see the monument, we spied a guy birdwatching. He put his binoculars on our car. 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: “You heard me, A****le.” It rhymes with tadpole.
I was stunned, I mean, I don’t deny being a tadpole, but I didn’t think you could see it from 150 feet away. The Mrs. was in the 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 she’d like to hear Birdwatch Bill’s yelp as she gave him a nuclear wedgie.
Who Benefits?
Whenever I see something that doesn’t make sense, I try to understand what could possibly be causing it. 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? 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? Probably more on this in a future post.
Links From Readers:
Obviously I only stand by 100% of my own writing. Here is some interesting stuff sent in by readers. Feel free to take some of the burden off of Ricky, and send me more. And if you send it in an email, please let me know if I may credit you.
See, a chain link photo in the “Links†page. I’m witty that way.
“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.
“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.
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.
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.
“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?
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:
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.
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 . . . .”
