Category: Complacency

Penultimate Day: The View From 2021

“Well, I simply observed, sir, that I’m felicitous since during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

I invented a time machine so I can view the Resurrection on TV – it’s amazing resolution: ADHD.

Penultimate Day.

This is the only unique Wilder Holiday that I know of. New Year’s Eve? That’s for tourists. It happens every year. It’s the last day of the year. But what about the next-to-last day of the year?

That’s Penultimate Day.

Penultimate Day started as a lark, maybe a decade ago.

The Mrs. decided that she didn’t like her Blackberry™ phone, and wanted to shop for a new phone. We did. The deals were all bad, so we didn’t buy a new phone. What then? We’d driven nearly 100 miles (the closest place to Modern Mayberry that sold phones then) and decided to . . . eat Italian food.

Driving 100 miles home, we made jokes about it, and Christened the day, Penultimate Day. The three tenets:

  1. Shop for a new cell phone (at Best Buy® is best),
  2. Don’t buy a new cell phone (you can decide to not purchase a cell phone nearly anywhere),
  3. Eat Italian food, namely at Olive Garden® (it’s close to Best Buy™). Since, when “You’re Here, You’re Family™” is their motto, I still wonder why they look weird at me when I take off my shoes and put on pajamas to eat with my shirt off.

Where did I go after eating all of those breadsticks? The hospitialiano.

Ta-da! You can celebrate, too! Well, at least you can celebrate next year, since my math shows that December 30, 2021, has (thankfully) perished from the annals of history.

Last year was lame. We were in the midst of (yet another) ‘Rona lockdown – 40 weeks to stop the spread, or something, so we stayed home. This year, though, it was time for a full and hearty observance of Penultimate Day. I arrived from home, ready to not purchase a cell phone.

Sadly, only Pugsley was ready to go. The Mrs. and The Boy claimed that they were deep in the clutches of some evil virus. Since Pugsley was patient zero, and I was in the midst of recovery, well, we let the weak decide the day. Here’s our scorecard:

  1. We didn’t shop for a new cell phone.
  2. We didn’t buy a new cell phone. Win!
  3. We ate Italian food. Win!

We ate Italian food because I made (with assistance) chicken Alfredo for dinner. Since everyone else old enough to drink was sick, it was up to me to drink the wine. I threw myself on that grenade for the family.

I had a real problem when I used a collie for gathering my sheep. I had 48, but he always brought back 50. He was bad about rounding up.

I’m a giver that way.

But what happened this year?

  1. Everybody was sick. Last year? Everywhere was closed. As simple as our task was, we failed it twice in a row.
  2. When we sent Pugsley to buy food for dinner, he reported that one supermarket was entirely out of pasta. Pasta is, well, one of the easiest things to make and distribute. Why is a national grocery store chain out of pasta?
  3. They had chicken. I cooked that, and The Mrs. pronounced it “dry.” She wasn’t being mean – she was being honest. Dry chicken isn’t due to a lack of moisture – dry chicken is due to a lack of fat. My bad. More butter next time. I thought that putting a stick under each of my armpits was enough. I’ll add more in 2022, though I’m unsure of which crevices to put it in.
  4. Pugsley said they were out of Alfredo sauce. Since that’s easier to make than adding water to ice, I gave him the ingredients to make it from scratch. Oops! They had Alfredo sauce. Just the wrong aisle.

The most disturbing thing Pugsley said was this: “It’s weird. It was like there was nothing in the store. Most of the shelves were bare.” Since The Mrs. had just complained, “Why do you tell them to buy more things, our pantry is so full we can hardly buy anything at all,” I smiled. When she said, “And you’ve infected them. When I ask them to buy one, of anything, they buy three.”

I smiled so hard my face ached.

Being a skeleton is nice – nothing gets under his skin.

I will probably go to the store in the next few days. That will be the first time in months. Not because of the ‘Rona, mind you, but because I really hate going to the store because there are people there. I’ll give a look to see what is missing, or what has gone up in price.

But it’s been two years since we’ve properly celebrated Penultimate Day. Before The Boy graduates from college, we have only one more. I’m not thinking that he’ll often decide to come home so we can travel and not purchase cell phones and then eat Italian food. So, we have just one more year where it’s the four of us.

The only hobbit I met was a jerk, a real douchebaggins.

This is the last post I’ll make this year, and even in the 10 years that we’ve been celebrating Penultimate Day I’ve seen very big differences to our lives – Penultimate Day used to be a lark, but now it’s a time to look back. In the failure of this Penultimate Day, I’m wondering – what does it mean? How have we as a nation changed in the last decade? Do we even still like Italian food?

  • Our nation has split apart farther than I ever thought it could go. There is rarely anything either side can agree on, except that they find the other side awful poopy heads.
  • The economy is even more poised for collapse. As it is, I think we’re riding a razor’s edge, where on either side is a collapse in prosperity that will last generations.
  • Alec Baldwin has finally made good on his promise to kill again.
  • The punchline to a joke since at least 1988 (really, look it up) inhabits the Oval Office despite a (legitimate) doubt that he was elected legally. The Left responds as they always do – by doubling down and declaring him the “most” legitimate President in our history.
  • We went from energy dependent to energy independent to energy dependent (and in crisis) in four years.
  • As far as I can tell, yes, everyone still likes Italian food.

We face a very unique crisis – one of cohesion, one of leadership, one of economic collapse. All at the same time. What will happen?

When I was a little kid, my dad made pasta when I was scared – to show me there was nothing to be Alfredo.

Who can know. All I know is that the Alfredo was pretty good tonight. And each day that my family spends together is special, and I cherish each one of those days. I have right now, so I will enjoy it.

As Marcus Aurelius said: “The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

Today I’ll focus and value those things I can control. And when I look at that? Penultimate Day 2021 wasn’t so bad after all. Happy New Year to all.

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

“There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Think you’ve had a great morning?  Every day Joe wakes up and someone gets to explain to him that he’s the president.

Peter Grant over at Bayou Renaissance Man (LINK – if you’re not going there regularly, you’re missing out!) mentioned a quote from Monday’s post (The Winds Of War?):

The idea is simple – warfare encompasses absolutely every facet of the life of the enemy.  Destabilize the government.  Force their economy into chaos.  Starve them.  Own their communications systems.  In other words, it’s just like a Biden presidency.

When I write these posts, there are generally multiple edits.  First, I do a draft.  Then I go through and edit that.  Then I go through and use hammer, tongs, spackle and a welder to fill the post with jokes.  The last bit I do is to go to work in the meme forge and sweat and pound and make (mostly) new and original memes.

If your only tool is a meme, every problem looks like a grumpy cat.

In this case, I wrote the Biden line in the first edit.  I was trying to be a bit cheeky, but it just fit so well.  When Mr. Grant noticed that line . . . I thought about it even more.

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

  • destabilize our currency (not money, currency) through massively printing it,
  • produce and disseminate propaganda to further polarize the citizens,
  • import millions of people with no ties to the country and no understanding of its governmental systems,
  • work through an admitted conspiracy encompassing virtually all media(traditional and social as well as search engines), corporations, state and to make sure the vote produced the “correct” winner,
  • make yet more Marvel movies,
  • effectively purge from the military all senior officers who don’t follow the correct ideology, and
  • create a culture of dependency on government programs,

we would say that was an act of war, or a copy of the secret Disney® business plan.

Sure, Donald Duck can walk around Disneyland© without pants and he’s beloved.  I do it, and I’m “banned for life.”

From an economic standpoint, one goal appears to be:  destroy the middle class and destroy small independent business owners.

Why?

Large businesses can be easily converged into following the Narrative with little actual damage in most cases.  Need examples?

  • Gillette® attacks traditional masculinity. It’s still in business.  It doesn’t want my business, and doesn’t care.  It’s doing fine financially.
  • Coke™ reportedly provided access to training that told employees to “be less white” and its stock is up about 20% since that came out, despite my personal boycott.

That’s two.  There are countless others.  If you look at the major companies that financially support the radical Marxist organization Black Lives Matter©, they are overflowing with cash.  They are free to take whatever political positions they want, as long as those positions are Leftist.  Just ask Ben & Jerry’s®, which is a Leftist political organization masquerading as an ice cream company.  I guess communists have finally fed someone.

I met a French guy – what a coward.  He kept asking for “mercy” . . .

Big Businesses love Big Government.  They love the huge shield that regulations bring – the more regulations, the fewer competitors they face.  And, if you’re lucky like me, OSHA names a new safety regulation after you.

Big Businesses also don’t care what consumers think, because most consumers are mad for a week or a month and then forget.  Me?  I haven’t bought Levi® jeans since 2002 or so when they went full anti-Second Amendment.  I guess I’m stubborn.  Must be in my jeans.

Big Business also doesn’t really care about inflation.  So what if a dollar is worth less?  Their job isn’t to sit on piles of cash, their job is to create cash flowing through the business, while keeping some of the cash for themselves.  Because the cash is flowing through, it doesn’t matter much if that cash is becoming less valuable every day, they’ll just make more cash and use it immediately to buy more raw materials.

Hunter wanted to be the Secretary of Energy until he found out it wasn’t pipes and lines.

Destabilization of the economy through inflation, though, is good if you want to create more government power.  Another way to create more power is to make sure people are polarized.  That means that they can’t come together to demand freedom.

Increasing poverty is a good one, too.  Having people become poor makes them slaves to the government, and afraid to speak up at injustice.  Microsoft® may choose to support Black Lives Matter™, but individuals can be fired for criticizing it on their own time even when not connecting that criticism to their employer.

Is it government suppression of speech?  No, why would they bother when private businesses will do it for them.  The effect, though, is the same.

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

Is it too far to call it warfare against the Right?  It’s more than that – it’s a war against every aspect of American culture and the basis of what made that great – Western Civilization.  The statues are coming down not because the Left hates slavery or “colonialism”, the statues are coming down because they want to erase the history of America so that they can rewrite it to fit.

Looking into what that means to wealth for individuals, let’s extrapolate what we know:

The United States government for over 100 years had gold and silver as money for a very special reason – gold and silver meant stability for the money of a country.  You either have gold or you don’t.  You can’t print more.  Could you manipulate it?  Sure, but it was certainly harder than running a printing press.

When FDR (press S to spit) took from American citizens the right to own gold, he was effectively robbing them.  He bought gold from them at $20.67.  A year later, he revalued the dollar to $35 dollars to the ounce of gold.  It now took $1.69 to buy what a dollar did before Roosevelt’s heist.

“For example, the free circulation of gold coins is unnecessary, leads to hoarding, and tends to a possible weakening of national financial structures in times of emergency,” was what that philandering monster said to excuse the theft.  Me?  After I read that, I was glad he was in a wheelchair.

Fun fact:  he never ran for office.

But the pattern is there:  if the Left wants something you have, they will take it.  Will they confiscate gold in the future?  I don’t know.  I tend to think not, unless it’s just for spite.  In this case, they’ll inflate the currency, and lend freely to Big Businesses and Big Banks so that they can acquire houses and land and every asset with cheap, borrowed dollars.  Why steal the gold when they can make people so impoverished that they sell it?

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

Inflate again if they missed something.  Will they lose control and end up in hyperinflation?

Probably not, unless they want to.  But realize that almost every person reading this doesn’t have a seat at the table, and the game is certainly rigged.  We knew that.

But what happens when a government declares economic war against its own people?

The Winds Of War?

“I admire your ethics. But right now, a little violence might help.” – Star Trek:  Enterprise

Is an inconsistency in a Cheech and Chong movie a pothole?

War in 2021 has much the same objective as war throughout human history – make the enemy do something that they otherwise wouldn’t do.  It’s never been pretty.  In the end, though, the old adage that violence doesn’t solve anything is wrong – ultimately violence solves quite a few things, as Heinlein notes in Starship Troopers:

“. . . I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow.  Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that `violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it.  The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon.  Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.  Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms. . . .”

Our current military is ready to fight a war.  It’s just that the war in question is World War II.  Our armed forces absorbed the lessons of the Wehrmacht and now could totally defeat the Germans and the Japanese much more quickly than the first time.  Even I got caught into that mindset when I displayed dismay that the bomber fleet of the United States was down to just over 100 bombers.

Okay, not that kind of bomber . . .

My mind was locked into old paradigms:  1,000 bomber raids.  Those days are gone.  There is no real reason to send slow, crewed planes on missions where a much faster missile can do the job.  Big bomber raids are a thing that you only do against people who can’t shoot the bombers down which every significant near-peer enemy of the United States can.

And if you want to destroy a city?  You use a nuke – if I had a nuke, I’d call it Dr. W.  You know, W, M.D.?

Likewise, our aircraft carrier fleet is great when used against an enemy that can’t really fight back.  Use them against Iraq?  Sure.  Use aircraft carriers against China?

Ummm, that’s probably silly, since if a carrier is within fighter range of China, it’s probably in Chinese missile range, too.  American aircraft carriers are just targets preloaded with casualties.

Why am I writing about this today?

There are rumblings of war.  Putin looking to take over part of Ukraine?  China looking to take over Taiwan?  An American senator talking about a first strike against Russia?

I know when I yawned in physics class it set off a chain reaction.

To the extent the United States isn’t involved in either of these conflicts, things probably remain nice and boring.  If Putin wants the Donbas, I’m not sure that I care.  I have no idea why he might want it, but it seems like a lot of Russians live there.  I can certainly understand why he wants to keep the Crimean Peninsula, since that’s where he keeps his ships.

Again, I’m not sure that I care.  At all.

Taiwan is a different situation.  Its shore is as close as 81 miles to the Chinese mainland.  For the people in Taiwan, this is unfortunate.  From the standpoint of the United States – what, exactly would we do to help Taiwan if the Chinese invaded?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure that the United States could do anything.  In report after report, the United States loses, and loses quickly when China attempts to take Taiwan every time we wargame the situation.  Taiwan is 81 miles from China.  Taiwan is 5,000 miles from Hawaii.  To the extent that Taiwan isn’t prepared to defend itself, I’m pretty sure the United States has limited options in responding quickly.

I heard the Dalai Lama has a gambling problem.  He loves Tibet.

Which brings us to the face of war in 2021.  The Chinese have been thinking for a very long time about war with the United States.  To be sure, I’m willing to bet some very, very smart people in the United States have been thinking about just the same thing, when they weren’t distracted by Afghanistan or Iraq.

This following is from the 1999 treatise “Unrestricted Warfare” by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. (LINK):

. . . if the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets, then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in 146 advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into social panic, street riots, and a political crisis. There is finally the forceful bearing down by the army, and military means are utilized in gradual stages until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty. This admittedly does not attain to the domain spoken of by Sun Zi, wherein “the other army is subdued without fighting.”

The idea is simple – warfare encompasses absolutely every facet of the life of the enemy.  Destabilize the government.  Force their economy into chaos.  Starve them.  Own their communications systems.  In other words, it’s just like a Biden presidency.

The hippies tried to get to Afghanistan – they heard that smoking weed there got you stoned to death.

None of this is really new – destruction of civilian cohesion is a tactic that’s been used again and again.  At the end of World War I, the Allies kept a food blockade on Germany from 1914 until months after the November 1918 Armistice – the blockade lasted until July of 1919 to force Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles.  Over 100,000 German civilians died during the famine after the Armistice was signed.

The war envisioned by the Chinese (if it happens) won’t be the antiseptic thing that most civilians in the United States have dealt with since 9/11/2001.  It will involve the systems around us failing.  Imagine the utter loss of every modern convenience, including food being available and plentiful.  Then imagine there is no information on when (or even if) the help is coming.  Alone.  No food.  No power.  In the dark.

That’s what unrestricted warfare looks like.

After going through Hurricane Ike (a small one, by destructiveness standards) it was enlightening to watch the systems go down.  After four days, Home Despot® opened up, and was selling limited amounts.  How limited?  As I recall only 8 customers were allowed in the store at a time.  Purchases were done, as I recall, with cash only.  I went by to purchase a battery-operated fan, and was actually in and out fairly quickly – the Hurricane might have been a small one, virtually all services stopped.

Recovery was fairly quick because the damage was regional.  All of the surrounding areas pitched in and within a week, most power was back on in the city.  We had radio, so we were listening to the city come back to life in real-time.

I think when the astronauts saw this storm they said, “Houston, you have a problem.”

The interconnected, wired, and powered world has created an unparalleled ability to create wealth, to create comfort, and create convenience.  But it has added a great degree of fragility.  In 1919, if you had taken out the electricity to the United States, the result would have been inconvenient, but not fatal.  Some water systems might have failed, and people would have had to switch back to candles.  Abandoning the top floors of buildings that were inconvenient to reach except via elevator would be bad, but there would be no fundamental reason we couldn’t fix the systems:  this failure would hurt, but not paralyze us.

Today, it creates a system where unrestricted warfare could result in a conflict that would be over in minutes, and end with a country so devastated that it might never be rebuilt.

So, have a happy Monday!

This post was inspired in part by email with a reader – I’ll let them bring it up if they so choose.

You’re Not Alone

Got home late, and feeling a bit under the weather.  Got 90% through a new post, but then the tired hit.  The good news?  I’m way ahead on next Friday’s post!

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

GOOGLE

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

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

That post will have to wait until next Wednesday.

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

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

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

SERBIA

But his wife wanted to go anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have no idea.

SECOND

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

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

And that just might be the point.

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

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

Then there’s Laura Towler.

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

laura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUICE

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t stop there.

CENSOR

Russians call their website censoring the Inter-nyet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If those things are important to you?

You’re not alone.

DRIVER

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

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

You’re not alone.

Bikini Economics And The Red Queen

“You heard Marcellus threw Tony Rocky Horror out a four story window for giving me a foot massage? And you believe that?” – Pulp Fiction

Ahh, Chuck Norris, with his hair feathered like the wings of a majestic eagle . . .

We have a built-in bias that there is a way that the world should be, rather than spending effort on understanding how the world it, and adjusting accordingly.

When something “big” happens, the default human condition is to assume that things will eventually go back to the way that they were before the event.  This is normal.  I recall reading in Taleb’s The Black Swan about how his relatives in Beirut kept expecting Lebanon to go back to the way it was before war broke out in the 1970s.  It hasn’t.

And it won’t.  And Lebanese police have it the worst:  they have to investigate restaurants if they hear of a bad hummus side.

Our economy is that way.  It is built, in large part, on inertia.  In January 2020, a broad definition of money (the Federal Reserve® calls it M2) was $15.5 trillion dollars.  Today, it stands at $22 trillion dollars.  Keep in mind that this includes money just sitting in accounts, gathering dust.

The money supply has increased by at least 43%.  How?

This graph is somewhat misleading – it doesn’t explain that savings accounts were added in the adjustment to make that big vertical line.  The totals I have in the text above are the latest I could find at the Fed®.  All I can suggest is that you find someone as interested in you as the Wilder Spokesmodel® is interested in economics.

The government printed it and then spent it.  The banks lent it, since there is essentially a zero reserve requirement now.  Regardless, what it means is that dollars are being printed at an ever-increasing pace.  The latest spending bills just add trillions to the mix.

Through all of this, economists are pretending that 20% inflation is growth.  As prices go up, the Gross Domestic Product goes up. But inflation is increasing faster.  We’re in recession, but that recession is hidden by inflation.  Our economy is shrinking even as printed money makes it seem larger.

Oddly, there are plenty of jobs at lower wages that are going unfilled.  Why?  Because with current stimulus spending and government benefits, in some cases it doesn’t make sense for people to go back to work.  Work for $15 an hour, or play vidya and eat Twinkies® for $12?

Not a hard choice for many.

Did you hear about the Amish topless bar?  Not a bonnet in sight.

What about people who want to work but don’t want to take the “jab”?  Those wages are going up phenomenally as companies work to compete for a shrunken pool of labor.  Think EMTs.  Firefighters.

It is a weird recession – prices go up, wages are going up (but not as much as prices), labor is scarce, but the GDP is down in constant dollar terms.

Looking around the corner, this simply cannot last.  I’ve written about the Red Queen before.  The Red Queen said to Alice in Alice in Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass as Alice asks the Red Queen why they’re running and not getting anywhere:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Well, it’s almost a bikini picture.

Printing dollars like we are is just keeping the economy (sort of) in the same place.  It’s the monetary equivalent of using increasing amounts of crack to cure a junkie, or using electrical shocks and massive amounts of medication to keep a doddering 79-year-old Alzheimer’s patient mobile enough to give a rambling speech off of a teleprompter when wheeled out in front of a crowd.  But in either case, a Biden and pudding are involved.  So there’s that.

I’ve begun to wonder if Hunter might not be the best of the two for the Oval Office, at least he has goals.  Prostitutes and crack cocaine are goals and there’s a chance he might not show up for work at all in a four-year span.  He’s good at taking jobs and getting paid for nothing.

But this ignores a basic principle of fact.  When I print a dollar, I have created nothing.  To explain this, I’ll go back to the writings of dead French guy Frédéric Bastiat.  Bastiat asked a simple question:  what happens if someone breaks a shopkeeper’s window?

Well, he must go buy another window.  If that costs 6 francs (7 and 3/16 liters) then the glassmaker has an economic gain, which he could invest in increasing the size of his glass manufacturing, or, more likely (since he is French) use it to buy cartoonishly long wands of bread, cheap cigarettes, and berets.

So everyone wins, right?  The shopkeeper gets a new window, and the glassmaker gets a profit.

Well, if that were correct, then all we would have to do is enjoy the George Floyd Economic Plan®:  burn down cities and everyone gets rich when we rebuild them.

Obviously, that’s nonsense, primarily because the economy is (at best) the same as it was before.  At worst?  Every dime spent to replace broken glass is a dime that wasn’t spent making the economy wealthier:  many profits are spent to increase capacity or efficiency.  Increased capacity increases the wealth that the factory can produce.  Increased efficiency lowers their cost.  Both of these things are (generally) good.

Breaking windows, like printing dollars, is just theft.  Whereas the shopkeeper has his window destroyed, the people can have all that they worked for and saved destroyed.

My friend patented a cold air balloon, but it never took off.

Printing cash is theft, but theft from those that have been productive to those that either leech off of the system or those that are insiders.  But I repeat myself.  In the bailouts following the Great Recession in 2009, billions of dollars were offloaded to Wall Street insiders for taking no-risk positions in mortgage-backed securities.  If the insiders won, they won and kept the money.  If the insiders lost, the U.S. Treasury (that is, us) lost.

The games have gone on too long – the economy is a lie, and politicians of both flavors are happily breaking windows to keep it going just a few more years until they get theirs.

I’ll point out that I’ve correctly predicted five of the last three recessions, so I do tend to be a bit on the pessimistic side.  Regardless, I’ll maintain that all of the elements exist right now for significant and lasting decline.  All of the “emergency” spending bills, the “Build Back Better” bill – all of those have one purpose – to feed the Red Queen so we can go faster and faster.

To stay in the same place.

Why do I never eat before a marathon?  I fast.

As much as we might like to go back to a simpler time – a rewind to the 1990s, perhaps, we cannot.  Resets don’t really exist – the only actual outcome is to create a new (or the same) set of winners.  We are on the verge of a strange and dangerous new future.

It starts the moment printing ceases to have any effect.  That’s just around the corner.

Time to stock up.  I think there might be a lot more broken windows by the time we’re done.

What Is Truth?

“She’s always hungry. She always needs to feed. She must eat. All she gets is nasty Orcses.” – LOTR, Return of the King

I saw a wanted poster for Schrodinger’s cat.  It said, “Wanted Dead And Alive.”

I have a general routine that I start before I write.  I interact with my family because they seem to want me to do so.  I then retire to the Wilder Tub of Genius where I smoke a cigar the size of a crutch that Tom Cruise might use.  It’s not a huge cigar, since Tom isn’t that tall.  But it is a mighty cigar nonetheless.

Then I generally enjoy life.  Unfortunately, sometimes the muse hits me while I’m happily hanging out in the hot tub, and it pulls me away from the three pages (yes, it was that many) of notes I had prepared for you.  Whenever that happens, I always, and I repeat always, go for the muse.

The idea of a muse is simple:  it is creation.  It’s an untamed force that hits you and takes over.  It’s not exactly like The Mrs. hitting me in the face with a raw chicken covered in Ranch® dressing, but it’s close.

That’s tonight.  Fridays are often that night where I go where the muse hits me

What hit me tonight?

Tonight it was this simple idea:  controlling what goes into your mind is the key.

https://youtu.be/VYEU-12U32A

Except the dormouse. I hate that guy.

I start every post with a quote.  There’s a reason why I do this – it sets the mind of the reader into a familiar idea.  If the reader (you) doesn’t recognize the quote, it’s okay.  The quote isn’t necessary for the magic that follows, but if you know the quote, you are nearly instantly transported into the ideas that will follow.

It’s like a subtle form of hypnosis, but one in which I don’t require you to pretend you’re a duck who has just created an egg out of chocolate and plutonium.  Well, not more than once.  As far as you know.

I use that because I want to create a mental space where the ideas that follow will sit well.  If you’re already on familiar ground, the ideas will flow more smoothly.  It’s a stupid idea, but it’s grounded in reality.  Besides, I like movie quotes.

The reason I chose movie quotes is because they are the most shared of our experiences.  Millions have seen, say, Ghostbusters®, while only hundreds of thousands have read Dostoevsky.  Heck, I told my buddy who was an Orthodox priest that I was reading Dostoevsky and he shook his head and said, “John, that’s a little heavy, don’t you think?”

There was a really bad joke about ghosts.  It still haunts me.

When a guy in a Russian cassock tells you that Dostoevsky is a bit heavy, well, it’s probably not the best way to reach people.  By the way, spoiler alert:  It’s Russian literature, so everyone dies.  And then it gets worse.  It’s almost as bad as reading a German instruction manual for a chainsaw – I tried reading one once all it gave me was a longing to invade Poland.

Or a British cookbook.  Good heavens.  The British have ruined pudding for me forever.  Well, maybe Cosby beat them to that, but, still.

So, here I am, admitting that I want to manipulate the emotions of my readers so that they are more receptive of the ideas of crazy people like Plato or Seneca or Aristotle or Twain (Shania, not Mark) and the message that follows will sound crazy.

Be careful of what goes inside your head.

You don’t think that color scheme was an accident, do you?

I’ve tried again and again to show this very simple point:  in 1900, the only regular contact any American would have had with the Federal government was the postman bringing letters.  Now?  When I get up in the morning I have nearly a dozen interactions with the Federal government before I leave my front door.  The alarm goes off, and

  • The lights (subject to Federal emissions standards at the power plant) come one and
  • I go to the shower (subject to both EPA water standards and EPA waste disposal requirements) and
  • Brush my teeth with toothpaste (subject to FDA requirements) and
  • Put on my clothes (subject to The Mrs. wanting me to not look too cool in public) and
  • Go into the Wilder Morning Den and drink a cup of (USDA approved) coffee and
  • Have some (USDA approved) bacon and
  • Pick up my (Federal Highway Administration Approved) keys and
  • Check my (FCC approved) cellphone for messages and
  • Walk upon my (Building Code Approved) floor and
  • Open my door (which is made of lead and plutonium) and
  • Start my (Insert a zillion Federal regulations here) car and drive to work.

Oddly, this little demonstration undersells the impact of government in my life.  There are dozens of regulations that I skipped because, well, I’ve been drinking.  Blame Jim Beam®.

This is just the setup, however.

What goes in your head?

I’ve told you how I try to make a post better by increasing your receptiveness to it.  My motives are simple – I am not trying to sell you anything except ideas.  And those Ideas are (mostly) the ideas of the most brilliant people who have ever lived on Earth.  I try to sneak a few of mine in, because, hey, my beard is awesome, so I might have built up some wisdom.

But who is trying to manipulate the ideas that go inside your head?

The Mrs. had a complement the other day.  She couldn’t listen to mainstream media coverage on a certain topic because Truth that I shared with her had infiltrated her brain.  Every Single Time the media tried to lie to her, she reacted in revulsion because . . . the Truth had set her free.

What goes in your head?

What do you feel that is real?  Why is that you feel that thing?

Those are very, very difficult questions, and are not for the weak of heart – what if you understood that most things you felt were truth were instead, lies?

This is a devastating lens.  What lies do you believe in because they are pretty little lies?  The more you examine them, the more they fall apart.

Communism sounds good on paper.  Unless you’re reading a history book.

I promise you that I have done my best to make every word as Truthful as I can make it.  But I ask of you this, can you understand the immense amount of propaganda you have been fed nearly every day of your life?

Step back.

What, really, is the Truth?

There is an entire industry made of tens of thousands who want to feed your head.  They want to bring their ideas into yours.  There is an amazing amount of money being spent to try to influence you.

What, then will you choose?

The pretty little lies, or the Truth that you know exists underneath?

The Five Laws Of Human Stupidity

“Don’t call me stupid.”  – A Fish Called Wanda

I hear of you hold a pistol like that, you can hear the Rittenhouse.  Alternatively, this might be an Alec Baldwin gun safety video. 

Carlo M. Cipolla is a dead Italian economic historian.  So, not a dead economist, because we know that a dead economist was at least right one time.  I don’t know much about him, outside of:

He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker.  He’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, he rests in peace.  If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.  His metabolic processes are now history.  He’s off the twig.  He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  This is an ex-economic historian!

Sorry, I went full Monty Python on you.  Never go full Python, unless of course, you’re pining for the fjords.

But, Dr. Cipolla is dead, as I think I have abundantly established.

About the only other thing besides his condition of demise is that Dr. Cipolla is most known for writing a goofy little essay called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  He wrote this essay originally in 1976, which proves that he might have had time to meet Joe Biden before writing it.

What do you get when you cross an economist with the Godfather?  An offer you can’t understand.

Text in italics (and those in quotes) beyond this point are direct quotes from the former Dr. Cipolla, except the snarky things I say underneath the memes I have handcrafted in the Wilder Meme Lab.

The First Law:  Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Tongue in cheek, Cipolla notes that “any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate.”  So, it’s clear that there exists a nearly infinite and inexhaustible supply of stupidity in the Universe.  I have observed this in action:  I have been to the DMV.

The Second Law:  The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.  

Cipolla felt strongly that stupid people weren’t made stupid, they were born stupid.  And, just like the First Law would predict, they are numerous and everywhere.  They inhabit colleges (I think Harvard™ is full of them) the government, and the Pentagon.  Stupidity can also be found at McDonalds®, but that’s excusable.  If When someone is stupid at McDonalds©, an order gets screwed up and I get not a Sausage McMuffin® without the muffin, but just a warm muffin (this happened) at the price of a Sausage McMuffin©.

When someone is stupid at the Pentagon?  They get promoted after the cover-up.

It has also been my experience that if you ask the right questions and listen to the answers, it’s amazing where you will find intelligent people.  Just like there is no bound on where you will find stupid people, there is no bound on where you will find intelligent ones.

Roses are red, violets are blue; no one in Washington cares about you.

One personal example is that every time (not occasionally, but every time) I felt full of myself, soon enough an intelligent person from a place I’d least expect would correct me.  The lesson I learned?  Listen.  Ask questions.  Just as idiocy hides everywhere, gems of wisdom are often when you don’t expect.

Great stuff.  But what, exactly, is stupid?  That’s what the Third Law is for.

The Third (and Golden) Law:  A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The third law is what really caught my attention.  Here, Cipolla defines what stupid is – and this is an especially interesting definition:  a stupid person screws something up, and doesn’t get any benefit.  At all.  Here Cipolla constructs a chart to define it:

One of my girlfriends in high school was arrested for bank robbery.  She made out like a bandit.

Cipolla dices up the world into two parameters: do they help or hurt society, or do they help or hurt themselves?

Help Self, Help Society:  This is the quadrant that Cipolla reserves for the intelligent.  They end up creating a harmony where they help not only society, but end up helping themselves in the process.  Take the makers of PEZ®, for instance.  They make money by selling the sweet, sweet PEZ™, and society benefits, because, PEZ©.  In this instance it’s a win-win.  Society wins, and the makers of the product win.

These are the people that create the upward drive for society.  They make things better, and they make the people around them better, too.  This is SpaceX® Elon Musk.  He’s revolutionizing space transport and making it cheap to hit orbit ($25 a pound within 10 years???) while raking in piles of cash.

What next?  The helpless.  Helpless people, by Cipolla’s definition, are those that make bad deals.  The bad deals end up helping someone else (even society at large) but end up hurting the people making the deals.  Note:  this wouldn’t be people who help others and get joy from it – they’re getting a benefit.

The biggest group I can think of that represents the Helpless group in 2021 are Biden voters.  Man, I’m thinking they’d take that back if they could.

Joe Biden’s press staff is mainly women, I guess because he doesn’t have to pay them as much.

So, that’s two out of three.  That leaves most politicians bandits.  Bandits, according to Cipolla, come in two flavors.  The first is the net zero bandit.  A net zero bandit just takes $20 from one person and keeps it to spend on themselves.  Bernie Madoff and most conmen are net zero bandits.  They take money and then enjoy it themselves.  Society as a whole (outside of the trust and breaking the law things) isn’t hurt.

Bernie Madoff may make a lot of rich people angry, but he’s not going to create the fall of western civilization because his clients can’t afford to donate money to Harvard© so Harvard™ will let their third-rate children in.

The worst kind of bandits are the asymmetric (my term) bandits.  These bandits cause an outsized amount of trouble for a small gain for themselves.  I can’t think of any real-life examples, but what if some politicians subverted the monetary system just so they could buy votes for themselves while causing massive inflation?  Of course, something that crazy could never happen, right?

That, of course, leaves the subject of the essay:

Stupid People.

Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavors.

Stupid people, Cipolla opines, are even more dangerous than bandits, because they screw everything up.  Stupid people take wonderful ideas, destroy them, and then hurt themselves in the process.  They’re the equivalent of a six-year-old sticking a knife in a toaster and getting knocked out, and then doing it again.  Repeatedly.

Think of it as evolution in action . . .

Again, from Cipolla:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

And because there’s no rationality to the attack it’s impossible to defend.  How do you defend against a naked person covered in sex lube attacking you with a rubber chicken?  No, really, how do you do that?  I don’t ever want to be in that place again.

This takes us to . . .

The Fourth Law:  Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

This should be called the Rittenhouse Law.

Kyle was attempting to help society.  And, perhaps he did because I don’t think the world is a worse place off after he was done, but stupid people managed to ruin his night.

And, remember that stupid people vote.

Stupid that night, stupid on the stand.

The Fifth Law:  A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.  Corollary:  A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Here is where Dr. Cipolla might have lost me, but only because, perhaps, he never imagined that bandits could operate on the scale that they do in 2021.  What if you could steal from everyone at once?  Just print money, and you can.

What if you could get yourself two (or six!) more years at a job in Washington, D.C. and all you had to do was bankrupt the country?  That’s banditry that, perhaps, aspires to stupidity.  The end of the system will end up being the end of their banditry.

See?  Stupid.  So, maybe he was right after all?

Demoralization? No. Remoralization.

“Hold them back! Do not give in to fear! Stand to your posts! Fight!” – LOTR, Return of the King

Chuck Norris threw a boomerang.  It’s afraid to come back.

It’s Friday.  Thankfully.

On Monday and Wednesday, we have heavy topics.  On Friday?  It used to be health focused.  But then after a year or so I had most of my health topics (things I wanted to say) completed.  Sure, more will show up over time, but most of health is either really, really simple or so blisteringly complex that it’s not solvable.

That’s why on Friday (in most recent posts) I have had the ability to focus on:  remoralization.

Life has a known beginning.  It has a known ending.  For religious folks there is a promise of a lot more.

Demoralization is simple:  the idea is to make you feel that you’ve lost.  Put into context, demoralization is fear.  The idea is to make you afraid.  And what does fear do?  Fear sells products.  Fear sells politicians.  Fear sells.  Heck, even suicide bombers have a fear:  dying alone.

When I look at a scene like this, I expect that a coyote and a roadrunner were involved.

Fear is also the basis of almost every negative action.  The proof of this is left to the reader, as many of my textbooks in college said.  My proof is this:  whenever I’ve acted in a manner that was in some way against my values, I can look back and see those actions were based in fear.

Sure, I’d like to place myself in the category of fearless, but I’m human.  Or at least I can pass for human in dim light, according to The Mrs.  But as I looked back and realized that nearly every action I had ever taken that I regretted was due to fear, I decided to get rid of fear.  Thankfully overcoming my fear of escalators was a one-step program.

Does just deciding to not be afraid anymore work?

Well, mostly.  Fear is (amazingly) just another choice.  I discovered I don’t have to feel fear at all.  The decision was simple – I stopped focusing on outcomes.  If I worked every minute at my best, and worked according to my values, well, if it turned out wrong?  It turned out wrong.  Heck, I’m even slowly getting over my fear of speedbumps.

What do you call a chicken crossing the road with no legs?  A speedbump.

I discovered something weird.  People hate it when you’re not afraid.  People want you to focus on fear, especially bosses.  I had one conversation where my boss said, “John, do you realize that (my great, great, great grandboss) would be upset about that?”

My response was simple, “Well, I’d love to tell them my story.  Have them call me.”

His response was, “Whoa!  Why did you bring them (great, great, great grandboss) into it?”

Me:  “I didn’t.  You did.”

Strangely, that implied threat . . . disappeared.  And was never used again.

As I said, people hate that.  Especially bosses.

My boss asked me to make fewer mistakes at work.  That means I get to come in later!

Another example was when I was working at a company that was experiencing significant financial difficulty.  My boss came up to me, and said, “John, do you know what kind of difficulty this company is facing?  How can you walk around so happy all the time?”

Weirdly, I have never understood how being unhappy and worrying about impending doom has helped, well, anyone.  I explained that to my boss.  I told him I would try to appear less happy around the office.  And, while I make a lot of jokes in my posts, this isn’t one.  This really happened.

I really had a boss upset with me for having too good of an attitude.  Go figure.

Being happy is a weird superpower.

It makes people uncomfortable.  A salesman makes a joke that, “Hey, I bet you’re overworked and underpaid,” and when I respond, “No, the work is fairly interesting and I’m satisfied with my compensation,” the look I get is priceless.

I love my couch, it makes me feel regal.  I am “Sofa King” happy!

I also look at most of my choices like I look at a menu.  It’s a choice of something good or something better.  “Do I want the ribeye or do I want the . . . of course I want the ribeye.”  Seriously, if there’s steak on the menu, all of the other pages are wasted.

To be honest, this superpower wasn’t because I was born on a far-distant planet named Krypton® that orbited a red star.  Even though that’s true (I told you I was adopted but wasn’t too specific for, well, reasons) the reason I came to this Truth was the way that I think nearly everyone comes to Truth:  the long, dark night of the soul.

As I have found it, this is the Truth.  There is no aspect of character that comes without scars.  This may be personal, but in my life I recall a very simple pattern:

  • Something awful happens. It may or may not be related to my actions.  Often it is not.
  • There is a decision for me to make. It is a moral decision.
  • I think about it. Often (if time allows) I consult people I trust – people of moral character.
  • I take action.

The important bullet point is the last one.  And when I decided to do whatever was right, regardless of the consequences?

Freedom ensued.  When I stopped focusing on the outcome, and started focusing on what is good, True, and beautiful?  I stopped caring about the outcome.  When I became the embodiment of those things?

I ceased being myself.  I was working for a higher purpose.  The phrase, “let the chips fall where they may” comes to mind.   Oddly, the more I act in accordance with my principles, the better the (average) outcome is.  Not that I care.

I’m disappointed.  I went into the restaurant restroom and waited for hours.  Despite the sign, no employees came to wash my hands.

This is freedom, acting upon principles, regardless of outcome.  The secret is a simple one:  each of us is capable of doing this.  It’s a choice.

Freedom isn’t a document.  Freedom isn’t what someone gives us.  Freedom is what we take.  Freedom is a choice.  And the most good and True freedom is acting upon moral principles.

And then?  Not caring what happens.

There is a word for that.  Courage.

So, there’s a choice, and it’s a choice we face every day.  Courage or fear.

When you give in to fear, you have that stain for life.  Courage?  It outlives us all.

The better news?  We all have the seeds of courage inside of us.

The very best news?

We can all let those seeds grow.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Special Wednesday Edition: Are We There Yet, Part III

“Yes, I shall certainly choose revolutionary France for my holiday again next year.” – Blackadder the Third

There are two types of people:  those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.

Generally, I plan my posts in advance, sometimes weeks ahead of time.  I try to research the topics, and, quite often I’m surprised by the thing that I thought that were true that simply weren’t true.  Things that are “common knowledge” are often incorrect.  Who knew that telling an upset woman to “calm down” would have the opposite effect . . . every single time I’ve ever tried it?

That being said, the comments from the last Civil War 2.0 Weather Report pulled me off of my schedule.  As usual, the commenters at this site are generally at least one to two standard deviations of intelligence above the norm.  It’s a smart room, and a tough one.  When I make an error, even a grammatical error, I get called on it.  I hate to think that I make one grammatical error and then my post is urined.

Oddly, I really appreciate when people point out those errors.  Even though  I will eventually die.  My chances for a legacy on this planet are:

  • my children,
  • the things that I have done (think, work),
  • my PEZ® dispenser collection,
  • the lives that I have touched,
  • and the ideas I was able to share or spread.

Truth, with a capital T, is more important to than me “being right”.

By my reckoning, I’ve popped down in excess of 65,000 words on the conflict in American that is coming to be called Civil War 2.0 over the span of years.  I keep writing about it because it has hit a nerve:  these are some of the most viewed posts that I have written.  People are interested because, like me, they feel something big coming.

Does a nurse need to carry a red pen in case they want to draw blood?

The comments on the November edition of the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, though, are special.  There is a great division in what we even consider the ongoing conflict.  Is it even a war?  Will it ever be a war?

When I think about this I look to analogies from the past.  When Germany decided to take a fall vacation in Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on them.  And then, after Poland was gobbled up by the Germans and the Soviets in September 1939?

Nothing, or, mostly nothing.

For about eight months, the largest armies in Europe did (mostly) zilch.  Newspapers have to have something to write about, so they wrote about the war that just wasn’t happening.  This no-war version of war was called names like Sitzkreig, and the British started calling it the Bore War.  The name “Phoney War” finally stuck.

Well, at least the French won that war.

Then?  On May 10, 1940 the Germans attacked realized that the French were sitting on a lot of stuff that they wanted (mainly, France).  By the middle of June, Germans were having wine in Parisian cafés.  By the end of June, the jokes about French military, um, “prowess” started.

I bring this up because I wonder if we’re in a lull like that right now.

In an attempt to catalog the progress to a war, I tried to use existing international standards to codify the steps towards war.  On my ten-point scale, last six points were:

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  5. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  6. Open War.

Point 5. is beyond dispute.  Point 6. is ongoing, right now.  I have had dozens of people in real life and on the site talking about moving away simply because they did not want to be in Leftist-controlled state.

I’d tell more jokes about the Civil War, but I keep getting Stonewalled.

Point 7. was very common.  Violence has, to a certain extent, dropped backwards due to rioting becoming “so 2020”, although societal violence levels are still increasing.

But Aesop had this gem in his comment:

“And those 1000 casualties? In a 12-month period? That rolling criteria is rolling backwards, not forward. We’re currently back at maybe 6½, not 10.

In the way I thought about my model, these were ratchets – point 6. supported point 7., and so on.

But Aesop is right.  Violence (especially of the riot-y kind) has decreased.  At least for now.  I’ll state that point 8. has happened and can’t be undone.  The structures are far better organized on the Left – Charles Péguy said it well:  “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  But when faced with real, proximate threats the Right has shown that it can organize thousands in a week.

Point 9.?  I would say that this level of terror continues in American cities, right now.  Leftist violence (though not always pointed against the Right) continues and isn’t punished.  Leftists can commit a huge variety of crimes and be walking the streets in the new “no bond” world the next morning.

Non-violent people who walked unopposed into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 are being held in conditions that approximate a Soviet GULAG.  Don’t take my word for it, you can read a letter from an inmate here (LINK).  So, is number 9. happening?  It clearly is.

Aesop continues:

But the most obvious reason it’s not midnight, nor anywhere close, is because you’re even asking the question.

No one had to tell the ship’s band on the Titanic that the sh*tfestivus had begun. They knew the minute they sat down to play that the performance would end with their shoes getting cold and wet, before they even sat down.

I don’t think we’re taking on water, and I don’t even think we’ve even hit the iceberg yet. I do think we’re barreling towards it blind in the night, at flank speed, in a fog.

But that’s a far cry from taking on water, and doomed to sink.
Yet.

Those are good points.  It’s sort of like the definition of drowning.  If have the breath to ask, you’re not drowning.  At least I told my kids that when I taught them how to swim.  You can’t have a Civil War if nobody comes.

And yet . . . we’ve been in a cultural war since long before most people ever realized we were.  And one thing we’re good at (as humans) is normalizing life.  We get complacent, and behavior that would have led to social ostracism becomes almost acceptable in a few years.  We can get used to that level of violence, too.  If you look at the Google® trend for the term “riot” it spikes with the first Floyd riot, but goes back to the same level of interest after only a few weeks, despite riots being prevalent all summer long.

We get used to things, even bad things, very quickly.

One or two people might get this one, but they’ll really enjoy it.

Various other comments –

McChuck:  “The cultural, political, economic, legal, and demographic war has been waged against US for generations, and we are losing badly. If we don’t fight now (or very soon), we lose by default.

When only one side shows up for a war, it’s called genocide. That’s where we are now, even if it’s being done slowly.”

The Docent:  “We have a fight between factions for control of the government. So I would suggest that the issue is whether it rises to more than “civil disturbance.” This is where the minimum yearly body count of 1,000 (with at least 100 per side) comes into play. If we are only looking at the BLM/Antifa riots, we are at a civil disturbance level. If we consider COVID jabs for the kill count, we get over the 1,000 minimum, but because it is unilateral it is a genocide rather than a civil war.”

jojo:  “Yup. Wilder – throw away your charts. Look at what’s going on. It’s on already. And has been for more than a little while. Add in political prisoners locked up in D.C. for trespassing with no bail – you got a chart for that?”

It’s clear that there is some feeling that we’re not seeing any sort of war – just flat-out genocide.  And that’s the reason for the charts.  People who are invested in the system, who feel that they have something to lose are generally willing to put their heads down and keep quiet.  I will keep the graphs going.  I’m plotting something.

Well, that’s one way to properly fill out a ballot in Georgia.

So, are we there yet?  Ask some folks, it’s clearly a yes.  Ask others, it’s clearly a no.  It’s also, clearly, likely to be the biggest event that we’ll see in our lifetimes.

And in places like Modern Mayberry, I imagine that there is a good possibility that we may never see any direct violence related to this, except on YouTube® reports.

But, I can see spending time to review the markers – these are two and a half years old now.  I might even stay with them, but recalibrate them with some objective markers.  We’ll see – I’ll give it some thought.

It is clear.  We will never be able to return to the nation that was, and what we will become will be born from the next few years.

Who will we become?  We all have a stake in that.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.