Corona – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened. I’m kidding, of course. I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living. Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race. For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President. By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored. Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump. His other advantage is, well, you know. You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind. Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open: 21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day. Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward. It won’t be. Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire? A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states. A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later. But has anything about 2020 been best case? The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth. In reality, the tension has been building for four years. In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt. We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable. This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good. This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral. I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic. In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week. I ignore most of them. Today? I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate. You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses. Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability. The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral. Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it. It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California. Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%. California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants. The result? The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money? You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times. They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

The Silenced Majority: How The Left Censors The Right

“You can’t stop the signal.” – Serenity

Joe Biden wants to win, so his kids can get jobs closer to home.

Sometimes my jokes are greeted with silence. You could hear a pun drop.

Nixon famously used the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” during a speech in October of 1969. Leftists were demanding an end to the Vietnam War. There were plenty of valid reasons to end the Vietnam War, but hating America wasn’t one of them. This was a speech to the American people about just that – and Nixon knew that the people not out in the streets were with him.

But in 2020, we face a different world, but in the movie. We still have a group of silent people who aren’t on board with the Left – and I believe them to be an absolute majority, or you and I both would be in a gulag right now. But there is another group, a group that would speak, but can’t.

I call them the Silenced Majority.

I write about the first type of the Silenced Majority almost every month in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. Why? The amount and type of censorship tells you a lot about how far a country has fallen towards a Leftist totalitarianism.

Also the Left: It puts the sanitizer on its skin, or else it gets quarantine again.

The vanguard of this behavior has come from Silicon Valley. YouTube® has been the great censor, keeping dogma from Leftist organizations but banning content from only moderately Right of center sources. But there is one way that YouTube© is like the United States government – both break their own rules.

The libertarians and Right-libertarians make the point that these are “private companies” and that free speech doesn’t apply. Sure. That’s what the cashier at the Burger King drive-through keeps telling me. But it’s not just Facebook®, Twitter™, and InstaSnap©. It’s also Gofundme.

Jason Blake, the guy in Kenosha who got shot while allegedly stealing a car with kids in it from a woman he allegedly raped, has a Gofundme® of nearly $2.3 million dollars. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old whose previous brushes with the law included being in a youth crime prevention organization, was prevented from having a Gofundme® at all because self-defense is the scariest thing in the world to the Left. You don’t need Papa and Mama Government when you can protect yourself.

Hmmm.

Living with the systems of the Left is difficult. Discover® recently said it won’t process payments going to Gab®, the free-speech alternative to Twitter™.

Twitter® has banned the term “treason.” Now it’s supposed to be “undocumented foreign supporter.”

Why?

Does it matter?

The Left has co-opted the media. And it’s not just from wild-eyed people on the far-Right. On my YouTube™ feed a video showed up from a (as far as I can see) balanced, centrist journalist. Like a real journalist, who has news Emmy® awards and everything.

The video was about Antifa®. This video was so good that I subscribed to her channel, along with 67,000 other people that week. That’s rare – I think I’m subscribed two three or four total YouTube® channels. Total. It was that good. And it was fair.

She got a million hits on that video. People are fascinated about Antifa™, and they want to learn more. To have the opportunity to learn about it from an unbiased journalist with credentials? What a hit!

Until YouTube™ shadowbanned it.

What’s a shadow ban? It’s tuning the search and recommendation algorithms so they don’t point to specific content. She’s got a great example in the video below where she searches for her exact video title with her name . . . and, well, she’s not the number one hit, I’ll tell you that.

You can search her channel for the vidya on Antifa®. The first one hit over a million people. This one was at less than 15,000 (LINK).

For whatever reason, Antifa™ is a sensitive subject for the Left. They don’t want people knowing about the group that’s responsible for riot after riot all across the country. The FBI® has joined them, with the Director noting that Antifa™ isn’t an organization, it’s an ideology. I wonder if he wear Stalin PJ’s?

YouTube™ will, if they bother to answer it at all, blame it on the algorithm, expecting us normies to not understand that every single algorithm is written by a human. Or at least an autistic person who they pay with chicken tenders.

Fox News™ doesn’t have that excuse. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was on some news show on Fox®. Newt was shut down for mentioning that George Soros funded the campaigns of dozens of far-Left District Attorneys. Fat George is proud of this. He’s bragged about this.

But Newt mentioning this? Forbidden. Fox News© shut him down. Cold. Don’t take my word for it, watch it here (LINK). It’s less than a minute.

It’s like the computer chip that Fox™ HR put into their heads started putting electroshocks into their brainstems.

What subjects can’t you even mention anymore? Antifa® and George Soros, certainly. How many others?

The second type of Silenced Majority are people who don’t speak. Why? Fear. They live in fear because a person on the Left can make the most outrageous claims and have job security. Heck, job security? Make outrageous claims in some organizations and you’ll be rewarded.

“All White people are racist.” Yup. You can say that and not get fired. Heck, in some companies you’re required to say it. You can work in academia and call people who disagree with you “subhuman” on Twitter® and pray for their extermination. As long as the people you’re insulting are on the Right, of course. Your punishment for that? Enjoying your tenured position and taxpayer-funded job.

After I asked my astrophysics professor how stars died, he responded, “Overdose, usually.”

But saying something simple and factual like, “The autopsy report on George Floyd showed that he was as high as my electric bill in summer after I left all of the windows open, the AC set on 60°F (8,675,309°C. or “Jenny” degrees), the oven open and set at ‘broil’, and a pack of 37 blenders running continuously for a month.”

Factually, that’s correct. George Floyd was so high you can see his footprints on the Moon. George Floyd nearly certainly killed himself with drugs. But could you say that at the typical workplace that has offices and desks and HR?

I was amazed at how many people are offended by breastfeeding. Heck, I was just trying to bond with my dog.

Sure!

But if you offended someone?

Then you’d be fired. And then HR would whisper “fillintheblankaphobe” every time you tried to get a reference. Good luck finding work after that, right?

And, yes, the idea isn’t that you said something offensive, it’s that you offended someone. That’s the standard. And in 2020, every single Leftist is looking to be offended. Wear a Trump 2020 hat? I’m sure that you’ll say something to upset some Leftist burrowed into your organization. They’re watching. Understand they don’t want justice, they want Social Justice, which to them means you being fired.

There are dozens of other, equally factual comments you could make that would get you fired. Cisco Systems® fired several people after diversity training. What did they do? Well, on was fired for saying “All lives matter.” So you can be sure that whatever those people said was the worstest evar!

I Googled® cigarette lighters, and got over 56,000,000 matches.

Another example? James Damore was fired from Google®. Why? He questioned the “ideological echo chamber” at Google™. Since (for now) it’s illegal to fire an employee in California for their political ideology, it’s likely that Mr. Damore walked away with a big pile of cash – but he’s the exception, not the rule.

The idea of the Left is to take us from the Silent Majority to the Silenced Majority. They don’t want anything to spoil their “ideological echo chamber” because the one thing that Leftists cannot tolerate is competing ideas, especially competing ideas that work.

Nixon had this one right. He wasn’t alone, at least not then. But you’re not alone now.

And they can’t stop the signal.

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget

I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed. I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.

By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change. Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair. Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light. Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks. The economy was being motorized. Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses. That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved. I mean, too many horses for the barns? That’s un-stable.

But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?

Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?

Produce more. Which drives prices down. Which leads to . . .

Deflationary depression.

It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.

I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers. The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality. The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.

Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches. The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.

The flip side of that is business failure. I originally wrote that was the down side. It’s not. Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail. Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy. 2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19. It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border. No one will cross the Finnish line.

The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.

That’s not normal, of course. Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states. In Modern Mayberry? Not so much. But in San Francisco? You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi. I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people. St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can. Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.

In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy. The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®. Thank Heavens. But in these times of artificial economic crisis? Good, strong businesses fail.

Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us. Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant. The only real question is what happens next.

One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.

I’ve posted about possible good investments in the past – if I were betting, I’d bet that gold in ten years would be a better bet than Netflix® or Tesla™, even if Tesla© starts its own religion, and builds Elon Mosques. But who knows what the economy will even look like after this crisis? I can’t guarantee any of it.

I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars. They call it E-lawn.

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

Time is potentially quite short. How should you invest your time? In yourself.

There are so many skills that are required of a human. PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.

The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental. In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences. Air conditioning when it’s hot. Central heat when it’s cold. Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky. Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.

What happens when you don’t have those things for a day? A week? A month? When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.

But still, these things are possible.

Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened? What would you do? I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?

After the mind, invest in your body. If you’re out of shape, get in better shape. Anything will help. Get out and run. If you can’t run, walk. Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest. I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.

Hmmm. Maybe I need some work, too.

I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year. I had asked for a heavy sweater.

What other ways can you invest in yourself? There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings. Can you do basic medical care? I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound? Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two? Iodine? All of that is cheap and available now. Will it be in six months?

The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day. I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds. What kind of books do you keep?

Can you garden? Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes. I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too. Her gardening knowledge is better than mine. It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes. There’s a whole Internet. Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.

This isn’t a bad time for a hobby. What kind of hobby?

Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
Carpentry, with and without electricity.
Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?

I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them. Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.

Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends. Plus? It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.

Yuri Bezmenov’s 1980’s Prediction of 2020

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

Video games never made me want to hurt people. Working with people did that.

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the West in the 1970’s. Bezmenov told everything he knew to the CIA, and was set up in Canada. He did several interviews which are available on YouTube®, which I’ll link to in a bit. Most recently, Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War™ brought Bezmenov back into the public consciousness by cutting in clips of his interviews in.

You can watch it below. It’s only a minute or so.

During interviews, Bezmenov made the quote that only 15% of the KGB’s activity was tied to James Bond® stuff. Their primary goal wasn’t to find out which parts of an F-15E jet fighter were made out of titanium and which parts were made out of paper-mâché.

Matching the United States in weapons systems was important, but it wasn’t number one. Besides, the KGB generally had a spy class of ideological communists built into numerous classified projects. Bezmenov said that 85% of the KGB’s efforts were spent in destroying culture in the West.

Why fight an actual war, if you can get your enemy to become you?

Bezmenov even set out the mechanisms that they were in the process of using. It wasn’t a complicated process, and it was just four steps. They called this process, “active measures” and it was nothing less than subverting the ideology that made America great.

The first step was Demoralization.

Demoralization is based around removing the moral framework of the country you’re attacking. The easiest way to do this is to co-opt the education system. Bezmenov said that this took 15-20 years, but his number was low. First, the educational institutions needed to be captured. The people who train the teachers, the people who are the “guiding lights” in educational theory must buy into Marxism.

I don’t have a direct measure of the ratio of Leftist to Rightist in those that teach education, but I’d imagine it’s no less than journalism, which is at 20:1. It may exceed history, which is 33.5:1. Regardless, the educational academy is now firmly in the hands of the Left. This leads to the production of teachers in a Leftist pedagogy (fancy word for teaching), with bad Leftist theory sometimes even enshrined into law. No Child Left Behind? Yes, that was bad. Common Core appears to be worse. Here’s one example:

Yes, this is really what they tried to teach little kids. From the Heartland Institute.

I have to wonder if the idea is that such simple things like addition and subtraction can be made so complicated that parents won’t be able to teach them to their children. In essence, it’s a way to further sever the ties between parent and child, while strengthening the ties between child and state educator.

Certainly, not all educators are Leftists. Here in Modern Mayberry, there are a few, but I think we likely have a more healthy balance. But there are those who look at the remote classes from COVID-19® as a potential threat to their attempts to indoctrinate children:

Is Demoralization 100% complete? Not as long as we have those pesky parents standing up for the customs, culture, ideas, and values of the West. Is it complete enough to take over society?

Maybe.

The goal of Demoralization is a lot of what we see now on the streets of Portland or Seattle or any other major Leftist city. Bezmenov described the end product of Demoralization as:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

In other words? Leftist robots.

Destabilization is the next step. This is the destruction of the systems that define the country. The economy. Social relations. Defensive systems.

In the last few months, the economy has been put into the most precarious state within living memory. The United States is more divided politically, ideologically, linguistically and ethnically than at any time in history. Naval vessels ram freighters. Senior officers are fired due to ideology. Women are brought into combat operations despite proof that their inclusion lowers fitness for mission.

Bezmenov said that Destabilization took two to five years.

Destabilization leads to Crisis. Crisis in this system is necessary to get people to accept a new government, new systems, and to give up the old system. There’s been a great deal of experience in creating Crisis by the Left. Think the Color Revolutions that have taken place all over the world, from Georgia to Ukraine to Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

What does Crisis look like in the United States? How about open violence encouraged by receptive District Attorneys that refuse to prosecute? Does it look like the dollar losing 7% of its value in three months?

Crisis leads to promises by the Left. High minimum wages. Free healthcare. Guaranteed basic income from the government. “Equality” in housing, in education, in policing.

Are the promises real? Of course not. The promises are whatever it takes to get enough support for the Left so they can take control.

If we are not in the Crisis, you can certainly see it from here. Ideally, for the Left, Crisis leads to control, or Normalization.

Normalization is the end game. It’s consolidating the country under the Leftists. It’s the creation of new institutions. In the Soviet Union and in China, it consisted of killing farmers and replacing them with people from the cities and expecting these collective farms will feed the nation.

Of course, all of the Leftists burning Kenosha and Portland think that they’ll be the ones in charge. In the new Socialist Utopian States they’ll be the ones who will write poetry and conduct gender reeducation camps, right?

This poetry comes from Seattle, I believe. Plans are now in full view.

No. The reality is that they’ll be most likely to be put up against the wall and shot or sent to the convenient leisure gulags. Why? They will be disillusioned when the actual power structure emerges. The reality of every communist paradise in history is that the intellectuals are shot first, especially the intellectuals that are communist. Why?

Dissent is a thing of the past.

Here are Yuri Bezmenov’s ideas, in his own words:

Friday Books, Because I Said So

“It’s the most pointless book since How To Learn French was translated into French.” – Blackadder The Third

I finished three books during the quarantine. That’s A LOT of coloring.

Books.

I had a great-grand boss (three levels up in the company) once upon a time who was fairly philosophical in an industry not at all noted for philosophy. One day he showed up in my office, unannounced. We sat and talked for several hours about history and corporate strategy and got along very well. It probably didn’t hurt my career with that particular company.

One thing that my great-grand boss said during that meeting always stuck with me. I’m not sure if it was a quote that was original to him or not, but the quote was, “there is a way that minds can speak to each other through the ages. Books.” I thought that was pretty powerful, nearly as powerful as when The Mrs. mentioned she was going to kill off some of the characters in the book she was writing. The downside is that The Mrs. is writing her autobiography.

Books have been with us for thousands of years, but the earliest books were just a taking spoken word and carving it into a stone or writing it on papyrus or parchment. The true development of the written word came later, where complex ideas that transcended conversation were formed. The medium truly changed the message. The image of a frontier boy, book in one hand and plow in the other was formed. Heck, when I was working gathering with Pa Wilder I remember reading a book on anti-gravity, which was really hard to put down.

On the plus side, I did get a book.

We are on a journey as a world to becoming post-literate. We can still read, but the idea of developing longer, more complex ideas and widely sharing them has gone a bit the way of an endangered species. The ideas that were formerly expressed in literature seem to be passing by the wayside in many ways. The last time I picked up a Time magazine at the doctor’s office, it seemed like I was reading a magazine written for not-so-bright kids.

Is this on purpose?

But for me, books were a formative experience. They remain a part of my life. I had another post planned for tonight, but decided I’d throw out a few books that just came to mind. Were these the best books I’ve ever read? No, this isn’t a best-of list. But, arbitrarily I added some rules: the books have to be at least 20 years old, and no author gets more than one. It’s obvious I love The Lord of the Rings (Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths) since I wrote about that last week, so it’s not on the list.

It’s mainly a list of books I just want to talk about today. Why? Because. So there. Feel free to toss the ones you want to add in the comments.

The Starship that can’t pay back a student loan? The Millennial Falcon.

One of the first books that came to mind was Starship Troopers. Robert A. Heinlein was a favorite author of mine growing up – he wrote a series of “juvenile” books in the 1950’s that I think are his best work. And of those? Starship Troopers is my favorite. I read it in junior high, and it was thrilling and thought provoking. Mobile Infantry? An amazing concept.

Starship Troopers isn’t the parody movie of the 1990’s. Nope. It’s a real discussion of the tension in the world between liberty and responsibility. It’s a discussion of honor. It’s also a depiction of a world where there is, dare I say, a spirit of nationalism? It doesn’t have Heinlein’s later squishy and retrospectively creepy, um, “free love” ideas. I’ve made both Pugsley and The Boy read it, as I’ve made them read the next three books on this list.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley was one my seventh grade teacher gave me to read. If she were still teaching in 2020, she would probably be shot for that. Huxley could see the future of conformity – the idea wasn’t that we ever had to ban books, we could just make them irrelevant by replacing them with amusements and intoxicants.

Into this world, Huxley injects a free radical – a handsome blonde individual that was born free and has awareness that the average citizen doesn’t have: John the Savage. Hmm. It’s almost like John was wilder?

Nah.

Anyway, the book for me was haunting. I got to the end, and had to do a full stop. And re-read. Then I got it.

Most babies are born at womb temperature.

I think that Brave New World was what we were living through in the United States from, say, 2000 until 2017. It’s a template for control through amusement. But what happens when the state runs out of other people’s money to spend? That’s the next book.

1984, by George Orwell. I read this one in eighth grade. I can recall reading about the rats while sitting in class on a warm spring day. Many people don’t know that Orwell was a committed socialist until he ran into actual communists during the Spanish Civil War, and at that point he was disgusted and repelled by what he saw. When exposure to actual communists makes you anti-communist, what does that tell you about the reality of communism?

Nah. Antifa® is sure it will work this time.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. The original movie was kind-of awful in many ways. The 2000-ish miniseries was okay. I’m sure it will be butchered in the latest adaptation that’s due out soon. But the book remains the book. It was enjoyable, but when I read it, it was confounding – it seemed like every decision the protagonist (Paul Atreides) made, I would have made the opposite decision.

The story is fairly rich in plot, and has truly wonderful villains. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was pure evil, but a smart, cunning evil. I always thought that Orson Welles would have been perfect for the role, since Baron Harkonnen was really fat, and Orson Welles had already eaten Ohio just to prepare for this role.

Some people call me the spice cowboy, some call me the Duke of love, some people call me Muad’dib, because I speak of the sandworm of love.

This is the novel that really exposed me to the idea of resource constraints, and spice is certainly a thinly-veiled metaphor for oil. Can a lack of resources bring down an empire? Certainly – that’s why China is working so feverishly to set up systems that bring it all the resources it needs. And why we’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East.

Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. A mysterious space vessel shows up in the Solar System and is using the Sun to slingshot to a new trajectory. The astronauts sent to explore the vessel find lots of cool things, but no actual aliens, which remains part of the mystery.

I got this book when I was a kid of 10 or so. How? Some library sent us a catalog. Apparently, the Wilder Compound up on Wilder Mountain was viewed as so remote that they sent a list of books to us along with news that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected president. I put a checkmark by the three books I wanted and sent them the form, and they sent the books to me along with a prepaid return envelope and a new list of books I could check out.

Who paid for it? I have no idea, but they stopped doing it after two years or so.

The book? Not really great by the standards of today. The part that sealed the deal for me when I read it as a kid was the last line, which apparently was added in the very last revision. I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone read it in 2020, but when I was 11 years old and read it?

Magic.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. I remember this book because I devoured it in a single fall afternoon – the first book I picked up and didn’t put down until I was finished since my victory over the Cat wearing a Hat. Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang takes place after an apocalypse occurs and for (reasons!) the people decided to reproduce through cloning rather than the usual way. But a boy is born who isn’t a clone, and manages to, well, be human. It won a Hugo™. I just wish my nomination for a Hugo® would have gotten me a better place than sixth out of a field of five.

Oh well.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This is a deeply nerdy novel. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s fun. But it’s nerdy. Really nerdy. The novel revolves around codebreaking and looted WW II gold. It’s also the only novel on this list where The Boy and I met the author, twice. The first time, The Boy was seven, and I dragged him to an author reading.

The Viking longboats had bar codes on the side, so when they got home they could Scandinavian.

He acted like a seven year old. The Boy, not Neal. The next time I took The Boy to meet Neal Stephenson was when he was sixteen. The Boy’s favorite author in the world was at that time? Neal Stephenson. I made him apologize to Mr. Stephenson, who played along and said that he’d never recovered from The Boy’s previous antics.

Good times. If you like this book, Stephenson has several thousand pages of related books that are similarly Asperger-y .

So, what books do you want to add to the list and why?

How Bad The Economic Crash Really Is

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

HC pointed out this picture. How could I resist?

Last week it was announced that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States collapsed. If you’re not aware, GDP is simply a measure of how much PEZ® is produced in the economy of a country. Okay, it’s not just PEZ©, other (lesser) goods and services are included, too. Call it a rough guess at how well the economic machine in the country is working.

“Collapse” is a word that gets overused by the news media. They want to pump up your fear so you’ll click on their article and give them $0.000043 per click. They don’t make much money at $0.000043 per click, so they need a *lot* of clicks (87,209) to pay for their daily soy latte. The best way to get that many clicks? Either scare people, or provide nudity. Or, if you’re Kamala Harris, do both at the same time.

In this case, however, the use of the term “collapse” is entirely appropriate when 32.9% of the economy disappears. And that dismal number is after an unprecedented borrowing and spending. The US had a GDP of about $20 trillion in 2018. This year, so far, there has been about $5 trillion in extra spending and balance sheet expansion.

So, $10 trillion in half a year, reduced by the 32.9% lowering in GDP takes us to $7 trillion or so. That’s how big they’re saying the economy is. That’s bad. But if you subtract out the $2 trillion in “stimulus” funds that takes you down to $5 trillion.

Borrow a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Borrow a billion dollars, and you own the bank. Borrow $26.6 trillion dollars? You are the United States.

Even if NONE of the Federal Reserve’s® balance sheet where they sprinkled money into the stock market got added to the GDP figure, we’re talking a 50% reduction in the economy in real terms.

50%.

Half.

The economy isn’t an economy at this point – it’s a smoking crater. Well, it would be a smoking crater if there was enough money to pay for the smoke. Yet the Fed™ had pumped enough cash into the stock market to keep it at near record highs. Me? I avoided that and bought a warehouse full of chicken soup stock cubes. Now I’m a bouillonaire.

The solution to our economic crisis from the Left is to keep sending checks to everyone. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the Weimar Republic mentality. “We can print money and send it to people, that’s all we need to have a functioning economy.” It’s the post-economy economy. All we have to do is make PowerPoints® for each other and wait for our Leftybux payments and then we can go down to the grocery store where the food mysteriously appears each month.

Wish someone would have mentioned that.

If we were going to just send money to a few people to pay for their rent, it would probably work out okay. We’ve been printing money for years and giving welfare based on debt for fifty years. Heck, hundreds of people in town are getting unemployment right now, I even know some. I guess I finally have some friends with benefits. But that’s not good for the economy.

The result is stunningly predictable. As I said before, we’d see deflation, and then inflation. Deflation isn’t universal. Some parts of the economy are working, some aren’t. Inflation has shown up first in food and things people need. Eventually, even toys, say balloons, will show inflation. Inflation will show up later everywhere.

But not yet.

What is showing up is that people in the rest of the world are starting to do the same math that I did up above. How many years can a country’s primary production be debt and expect the rest of the world to ignore that? Well, in the last six months, gold is up 30% and silver is up nearly 50%. Part of that is to be expected – uncertainty driver up precious metal prices.

The Mrs. was yelling at me last night. Thank heavens! That reminded me we were out of duct tape.

In the last two months, however, the United States dollar has dropped by 5% versus a basket of currencies called the USD index. That means that people are liking the USD less, because they see the weakening of the economy. It’s bad enough that my tattoo of $100 bills on my hips is now a waist of money.

It’s tempting to think that all the stuff is there to restart the economy. And in many cases it is just sitting there. The restaurant that closed down is still physically there. The stoves and ovens are there. The refrigerator is still there. But the need for it isn’t there. People have less money to go out and eat, so there’s less of a need for restaurants. Heck, even our best fancy restaurant with a pork theme had to close. I’ll miss Swine Dining.

A growing economy is a virtuous cycle – new business spawns new business. A shrinking economy is a vicious cycle – each job lost at that restaurant has ripples further down the economic chain – the waitress can’t make rent if she doesn’t have a job that generates tips.

Banks have stopped (in many cases) loaning money. Why loan cash you have into an environment where interest rates are at 3.3% in an uncertain economy? Vox Day pointed out this disturbing story showing a collapse in bank lending (LINK).

Yes, collapse is the right word. I’ve long been on record that the economic system of debt-based welfare could only last for a certain amount of time. I had picked 2026 or 2027 before it folded up the tent, and given that markets can stay irrational for a long time due to inertia, pushing into the 2030’s was reasonable.

I had an irrational fear of a speed bump. But I’m getting over it.

Watching a complex system fail always provides unexpected consequences. The system has been headed toward failure for years. Without the extraordinary efforts of 2008, it probably would have collapsed then. I think it was far closer to collapse than most people were aware.

The downside of putting off a system failure is that the pressure from the underlying causes keeps building up. When it inevitably finally does fail, it fails spectacularly, and much worse than if failure had happened earlier. When huge failures happen, sometimes civilization doesn’t recover for hundreds of years.

We have seen, again and again, the concept of systems becoming irrelevant. Sometimes, it’s technology that makes them irrelevant the way that the combination of the Internet and Wal-Mart® has destroyed tens of thousands of small stores. The Black Death altered the economic balance of Europe, and destroyed feudalism while kick-starting the Renaissance.

I hope Covid-20 is different than Covid-19. I hate plague-rism.

What will our current crisis lead to? The end of Globalism? A world without debt? Free PEZ?

It’s hard to say. But the birth of any new civilization is painful.

Not as painful as having to admit they want a soy latte, but painful.

Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings

After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits. That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.

I’m probably in the minority on the following thought: there is actual evil in the world. The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.

Psychological problems.
Different cultures.
Bad parents.
No parents.
Being my ex-wife.

But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.

I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.

Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free. It was good. Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading. In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie. But then I was off to middle school.

I stumbled across Tolkien again. He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was: The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep. Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.

Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.

I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.

I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring. The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.

Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times. He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:

“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”

A Nazgûl floats into a bar. The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’

In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now. The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.

In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots. Murder rates are up in those cities. Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty. That doesn’t make the news.

Why?

The riots are described as peaceful protests. To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year. They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values. And what about all of the uprooted lives?

That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating. Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.

Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.

I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits. This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.

Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant. The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.

I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.

Yes, I believe True Evil® exists. The joy for me is, knowing that True Evil™ exists, I am also sure that True Good© exists, too, even though destroying the One Ring turned Frodo into a hobbitual drinker. I’ll turn it back over to Tolkien for one final quote:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

Oh, sure, Tolkien can write. But can he meme?

Meaning: Do It Right.

“Bender, it has come to my attention that this company has been paying you to do nothing but loaf around on the couch.” – Futurama

I gave The Mrs. a dictionary for our first anniversary. I wanted to give her something with a meaning.

Imagine you’re between 16 and 24. You live in a country (Great Britain) that has a robust social safety net. Your parents are doing okay. Not millionaires, but doing okay. The U.K. has a huge safety net if you can’t work, or don’t want to work. For instance, in London you can have:

Council flats (apartments) – in U.S. English: subsidized or (nearly) free housing.
Free crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies) delivered by singing Welshmen in chimney sweep attire.
Free Dr. Who™ costumes, though they only come in the sizes of “elfin” and “aircraft carrier”.
X-Box® games delivered at no cost via the luminiferous information aether (Internet).
A majority Pakistani population.
Free healthcare, including funds for Cockney coal-miners to blast and carve your teeth into pleasant looking shapes.
A zero effort, zero risk life.

At least 1,500 citizens of Great Britain turned their back on this life of shabby luxury to go live in a land without air conditioning, bangers and mash, Top Gear™, and cell phone reception for the opportunity to become bloodthirsty Junior Assistant Jihadis in the ISIS® organization.

Why?

I’ve heard that ISIS has a new name. WASWAS.

At least partially because life had no meaning for them – they weren’t accomplishing anything, and they knew it. Carl Jung observed this problem in the early twentieth century. Jung’s observation was made as religious belief was waning in Europe, and as people there were continually centralizing themselves in cities that became larger and larger. Jung saw that the loss of a belief system that allowed them to have a higher purpose in any setting – large or small, was devastating.

Also, Jung saw that this was coupled with the anonymity and lack of true community of large cities. To put it bluntly, for 99%+ of people living in a city, the city doesn’t care if you are there. Your contribution to the whole is diluted to the point of meaninglessness, like the guy in the BMW® factory that installs turn signals. Jung had ideas as to the result of this situation:

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power. It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.

Did you hear about Carl’s daughter? She was a little Jung, too.

In modern society, the numbers of people are huge when compared to the historical setting that mankind has experienced through time. I wrote a somewhat related post here (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings). Modern people have, at least a bit, developed ways to replace the meaning of religion and the belonging that only occurs in small bands:

Sports teams. This allows achievement by proxy. Your team wins, even though exactly one player out of 50 are from the state the team is in? You won! Your quarterback gets traded next year? He’s dead to you. Logical? Effective? Yes.
Video games. Video games are a form of artificial achievement. You achieve a pre-programmed victory designed to manipulate you into feeling good. Designers of video games have turned this into a stunning skill, making successive video games more immersive. And despite this immersion, it doesn’t make kids more violent – I rarely lose a fistfight with a sixth grader.
Work hard, do well, feel good. It’s a simple enough equation. It’s also one of the most real and most wholesome things on this list. Especially if you are a mummy – they aren’t evil – they just got a bad wrap.
Consumeproduct culture. No, that’s not a typo. What is a consumeproduct culture? It’s one that replaces shopping for meaning. Did you find a new Brad Pitt® flavored toothpaste to buy? Great! It shoots endorphins into your brain that make you feel you’ve achieved something. But it wears off, and you’ve got to find Johnny Depp shaped vitamin C gummis and buy them tomorrow to feel okay.
Politics. Just like sports teams, cheering for your side allows you to feel good when you win, and bad when you lose. The current Leftward polarization of the Democrats is very tied into this. How many Leftists does it take to change a lightbulb? 2500 to protest, and none of them working to change anything.
Mind altering substances. Cocaine. Alcohol. Marvel® movies. These allow you to escape just for an hour or two. Oddly, the common denominator in all of this? Robert Downey, Jr.

I just got back from my heroine dealer. I got Wonder Woman®, She-Ra™, and Black Widow©.

I’m not saying that these coping mechanisms are evil, or harmful. Some, like working hard, have huge societal and personal benefits unless you’re working for an evil company. Others, like politics? Not so much, especially the Leftist variety. Again, Carl Jung saw the rise of Leftism in his life and correctly described its rise in these two quotes:

Such people are very likely to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as having the power they as individuals lack.

If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.

So, the “British” ISIS-Bois sashayed to Samarra and moseyed to Mosul out of their comfortable council flat life. They did this because they felt no meaning in Great Britain. Great Britain was a country that they and their ancestors had no hand in building. They and their ancestors didn’t really contribute to Great Britain in any significant way. They knew that they were no more British than I am Martian, and won’t be until their great, great, grandchild is named Nigel and has horrible teeth.

What’s red and bad for your teeth? A brick.

Therefore, they weren’t assimilated enough to move their search for meaning to Manchester United®, so might as well go and kill some people down in the Middle East. This is just another example that soccer is an evil game devised by aristocratic European women so that they could play it while their husbands did the dishes. (Apologies to Mike Judge)

This isn’t just a crisis of the ISIS-Idiots. This is a crisis that faces mankind in general. Many of the spiritual, social, and political ills the world faces right now stem directly from the minimization of religion and the urbanization of population.

Big cities are dehumanizing. Do you know a person on your city council? Do they know you by name? Do you have their cell phone number in your cell phone? Do you have proof that they plagiarized in high school? Do you know what happened at Uncle Tom’s cabin, and what’s down in the wishing well? Would they pay attention if you called them on a Tuesday afternoon?

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

Does it make sense for any person to live in a city where these things are not true? Does it make the citizens of Dallas better off to have a city of a million people where their voice is so diluted that they are just one among millions, feeling no control?

My doctor says I should take meds for my schizophrenia. But look who doesn’t get lonely during quarantine – this guy!

Adding to the frustrations is that most decisions are made not at the local level in those massive cities, but at the national level where hiring a stupid person isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature. In the United States, most regulations that impact people on a day-to-day basis aren’t made in the Modern Mayberry office.

Nope.

Most regulations are made far away in Washington – and not the good Washington where the volcanoes and earthquakes will eventually eliminate all the Leftists. This results in one-size fits all regulations that meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. Why does the EPA design wood stoves for use in Alaska? Can’t the Alaskans be left alone to figure that out?

These rules do more than frustrate individuals. The confine those that could become great. Could a company like Apple® be founded today? I don’t think so they would be crushed by regulations – they would have to remain as an open sauce company. My next door neighbor, who runs a small farm bank, told me that starting a small bank from scratch today would be nearly impossible. The small has been eliminated, the middle is discouraged, and only large companies can compete.

The result is that people on all sides are done with the current system. On the Left, there is a desire for what only could be called a Marxist revolution because the state isn’t powerful enough. On the Right? There’s a feeling that the United States became a little too centrally powerful around 1843.

I side with the Right.

What civilization had the best tattoos? The Ink-ans.

We have learned that the solutions from the Left, in the end, provide only death and tyranny. The “British” people who went to join the jihadis were fans of death and tyranny in their own way. The rioters of BLM are fans of death and tyranny, as well. As mentioned many times, that path is the path of destruction. The Left wants to destroy our civilization, the Right wants to build civilization.

On the Right, I’d suggest leaving the cities. Outside of the danger we’ve seen recently, like Mars, cities ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. Find your Modern Mayberry. Meet your neighbors. Build relationships.

Find meaning from something more than an Amazon® shopping cart.

Ohh! Did you see that Lighting Deal®?

Want To Get Something Big Done? Start Small.

“However, before satisfaction would be mine, first things first. Wiggle your big toe.” Toe wiggles. “Hard part’s over.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Why do the French have small breakfasts? Because one egg is un oeuf.

So, this was the topic that was originally scheduled for Friday – you can tell it has a much more “Friday” feel. Back to the usual schedule on Wednesday.

Sometimes starting something is the hardest part. When you look at the time and effort that I’ve put forth on this blog over the last three years, it’s been several thousand hours. If I had to confront that level of sweat on day one it would have been daunting.

“Do I want to put that my life and energy into it?” But every great effort starts with something small.

I was reading Scott Adams’ book, Loserthink, the other day. The book goes through dozens of topics. I recommend it even though I haven’t figured out how to get Scott Adams to pay me to recommend it.

One of the (many) stories that Mr. Adams relates is that he has a formula that he used when faced with something large that he’d like to try. Think of the absolute smallest thing you could do to start. Then? Take that small action. Start. Do it.

There is an invisible presence, which reviews our actions, passes judgement, and decides who lives and dies. But enough about the NSA.

When Mr. Adams decided he was going to start writing comics and become a world famous cartoonist, the step he took was to go to an art store and buy some high quality paper and ink. How long did that take? A few minutes. But that first step was important. Becoming a world famous cartoonist is hard, and requires thousands of hours of effort. But buying some paper is easy. Now, making a toilet paper joke is hard: I tried making a toilet paper joke at the start of the Coronavirus panic. Nobody got it.

Adams talks about his preferred strategy to get out of bed when he doesn’t want to: do the smallest movement possible. “Wiggle your little finger.” Once that action has been taken, you can move. You’ve built up momentum, you can take the next step. You’ve started with just a single ounce of motivation rather than having to chug an entire pitcher.

One alarm that always wakes me up? Rumble strips.

I do something similar when the alarm rings and I just don’t want to get out of bed, The Mrs. doesn’t have this problem because I got her an alarm clock that swears at her. Every morning she’s in for a rude awakening. Me? I think of the first three things I’m going to do, in detail. They’re easy things. Sit up. Turn off the alarm. Stand up.

Then I do them.

But by then, I’ve got momentum going, and I’ve already passed the toughest test of the day (so far). I got out of bed. I know that it’s the lowest level of achievement, probably somewhat similar to that friend of mine who was bragging he had a “participant trophy” wife, but it’s a start.

Heck, I even follow this strategy with each time I write a post. I open up Word®. It’s just selecting one icon and pressing. It’s easy. But I’ve started. I then open up half a dozen or so tabs for making memes in a new window. Then I start typing. But having those small actions to prepare for the larger post (that can take hours to finish) gets me going. It’s now automatic and almost a ritual.

The Aztecs had a wonderful motto: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

This strategy even works for me on a far larger scale. Years ago, one particular Thursday night I was at home with The Mrs. I was planning on taking a vacation day on Friday. We were enjoying a nice glass of wine while Pugsley and The Boy were upstairs asleep. We’d kissed them goodnight, which is sweet. There is nothing more wholesome than a goodnight kiss. Unless you’re in prison.

I digress. We were having wine downstairs . . . then the phone rang.

My boss was on the other end – there was an emergency at work, and they needed help. I ended up working 12 hours a day for 45 days straight without a day off. During that time, the sheer volume of work that I had to do was huge.

Every day, I started by making a list. An exceptionally detailed list. Why?

My chiropractor has just one thing on his to-do list: get back to work.

There were hundreds of things to do. By breaking them down to the forty or fifty that I needed to get done that day, I could focus on those items. Without the list, I’d have been distracted by the sheer scale of stuff that needed to be done. With the list, it gave me concrete tasks that I could do to get progress.

If I was overwhelmed? I could just pick the next item. It might not be the most important item. But it kept me moving.

At the end of each day, I’d summarize the things we’d gotten done and the major things we had to do the next day. The next morning? Back to the list.

By breaking up big, complex tasks into small ones, it’s easy to get going. Once I’ve got momentum up, the list often becomes irrelevant – I’m accomplishing everything on it, and only looking back to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

Vikings aren’t afraid of death. As pagans, they know they’ll be Bjørn again.

It has been my experience that people are happiest when they are working on meaningful work at the edge of their ability. But that kind of work is scary to start – the edge of ability means that failure is a real possibility. Often, it’s hard to start because of that fear.

The solution?

Move your little finger. And get going.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Year Down The Road

Count de Monet: “It is said that the people are revolting.”
King Louis XVI: “You said it! They stink on ice.”
–History of the World, Part I

When I copy in these big clocks into my posts, it’s a huge paste of time.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight. I didn’t move to step 9. last month because last month, violence was just happening. This month? Violence is being commonly justified by local and state authorities. When protesters a mob tore down a gate to access private property in St. Louis, which set the stage. When the Modern Sporting Lawyer™ and his wife pulled out firearms to protect themselves, the sane world cheered.

Yes, I recycled this one. Couldn’t resist.

That’s why a District Attorney vowed to find something, anything to charge this couple with. The one thing the mob cannot stand is decent, armed people standing up to the mob. The politicians have made the mob and know that it must be fed.

The fact that CHAZ/CHOP was allowed to exist, with the rampant lawlessness of the mob in charge for weeks was another sign. We are very, very close to open warfare.

I stole the clock metaphor from the (Leftist) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists©. It’s a good metaphor, because it creates an immediacy. And I can and will go backwards if events justify it, though at this point it seems like no one wants to go backwards.

In this issue: Front Matter – A Year Down The Road – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

A Year Down The Road

I started the Weather Reports a little over a year ago because I could see the changes coming faster and faster. I’ve been concerned about the economy since I read The Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) back around the year 2000. When you look at all of the trends – social, economic, political – I could see trouble on the horizon. If you want some in-depth thought on how The Fourth Turning is progressing, Jim over at The Burning Platform (LINK) is your man.

The 2007 housing price collapse wasn’t a surprise to me. When I bought my house, I was (fortunately) in the position to negotiate with my employer that they’d cover any loss on sale if I moved for them. As house prices were going up, up, up . . . they agreed. And why not? It wouldn’t cost them a dime.

It did. My house dropped 20% in price between when I bought it and when it finally sold two years after I moved out. I don’t give myself genius points for this, but when they offered me a loan that was nearly ten times my salary? With no income verification?

Yikes.

The tensions we face aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re not anywhere near their peak. Those same social, economic, and political factors have gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years.

Is anything out of the question?

Will one more year down the road have as much change as we have seen in the last year?

Why wouldn’t it?

Are you ready for that?

Violence and Censorship Update

In the previous posts, it has been either violence or censorship that’s shown up in a month. This month? We get both. I’ll start with censorship.

What’s out? Statues. Toppling statues is censorship – censorship of the past. George Orwell described it well in his book, 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”

No bit of American history is safe, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt to “American Pioneers”, Spanish explorers, and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yup. All have to go. And not by vote, not by decision, but by the raw power of the mob.

An episode of the British television classic Fawlty Towers has been removed because of offensive language, and the wind has done gone with Gone With The Wind, which had to be shuttered “temporarily” so that (pulls answer from hat) people won’t be offended.

So, history has been judged to be insufficiently woke.

Right now the media is so woke, it’s like they took NoDoze® with coffee and meth to get ready for their Gender Studies final.

YouTube® just concluded its next round of purges. Dozens of large channels with millions of views are now gone. The biggest personality banned was Stefan Molyneaux, philosopher and badthinker. His crime? Not sure. People think it’s because he has had guests (scientists) on in the past that indicate that there might be group differences in cognitive ability. Oops – can’t discuss that idea in 2020.

Among other channels that YouTube® suggested for me and that I listened to from time to time was The Iconoclast, a British guy on the Right who advocated for lower immigration into Great Britain. Now? Gone. Plus? A major newspaper published a story on The Iconoclast’s identity. In 2020, having the wrong views means going without a job.

But that’s not violence, right?

On Reddit®, I heard that over 2000 subreddits were banned. I had been to several of the banned subreddits in the past, and was a bit surprised. One of them, r/consoomers was specifically set up for self-improvement and rejection of globalist commercialism. A little politically incorrect?

Yup.

Now gone. Another dead subreddit is r/The_Donald. It’s crime? Can’t be sure. I think it was too popular, with over a million subscribers. And a group of a million people who like Donald Trump? Triggered!

Reddit™ made rule changes as well. They initially rolled out this new rule for commenting:

“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority….”

After someone got on Wikipedia and figured out that, for instance, men are in the minority since there are more women in the world, the rule on protecting people from hate wouldn’t apply to people who were misogynist. Oops. They changed that rule.

But it sure showed what they were intending.

This is the biggest month of censorship against the Right in, well, ever. I expect it to get worse. The idea that Donald Trump could be re-elected is mind poison for the Left. Leftist fetishize politics as a religion – Trump is the ultimate demon. They will do everything and anything so that he isn’t re-elected.

Share this meme and help a Leftist lose sleep so they can stay woke.

I’d spend more time updating you on the violence of the past month, but it’s probably easier to update you on the places that weren’t violent. Modern Mayberry was one. Here, we watch the news and see the world falling apart, and it’s like there’s another country out there.

There is. It’s just waiting to be born.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

June has been the worst month so far – economic, violence, and political instability are all in bad shape. It’s so bad that even the illegals don’t want to sneak across the border.

Violence:

Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement. I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June. I was almost right, and now June has pegged the scale. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. Yes, the Y-axis label shows 350, but that’s because I didn’t notice until I’d put the graph together and it’s 3AM.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall. I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December. I expect more instability heading into November, and may make some changes to the inputs next month.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again. I’m hoping this is the worst that we’ll see, but I expect a market crash this month (July) or next.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is at a five year low for this time of year.

LINKS