Category: Corona

Your Economy, Featuring: Romans, Rothschilds, and Rioters

“You have two settings-no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery!” – Veep

DOLPHIN

I had made a mistake and bought too many art supplies.  That was my excess stencil crisis.

Cui bono.  That’s Latin for “who benefits,” and in this case doesn’t have anything to do with the singer for the band U2©, who have been benefiting from everything.  Even my GPS is branded by U2™, and it sucks.  The streets have no name, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Cui bono.

That quote being in Latin is especially appropriate for today’s post.   Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 B.C. – 53 B.C. – they aged backwards then) goes down in history for creating the first fire department that Rome had.  At his own expense, he recruited and trained a brigade of 500 men who, at the first sign of a fire, would speed toward the smoke and flames.

Crassus would rush to the fire with them.  Once the fire department was on site, Crassus would find the building owner and offer to buy the burning building at an obvious discount.  I am not making this up.  Obviously, the longer the fire went on, the lower Crassus’ offer would go.  Once the property owner had sold, Crassus would give the signal and his fire department would save his newly purchased building.

I’m sure that sometimes the fire got away from him, but most of the time Crassus profited from the deal.  It was a fire sale, right?

ARSON

When I was working as a firefighter, in one building all that was left was the bottom of a shoe – it must have been the sole survivor.

Often, Crassus would then rebuild the building using his army of slave architects and artisans (not making that up, either), and then lease the building back to the original owner.  So, Crassus even had a way to get his money back.  Crassus was wealthy not only by ancient standards, but by any standards.  He’d be worth at least $11 billion in today’s money.

Cui bono?  Crassus.  I looked for a name I could call Crassus, but it was hard to find one, this being a family-friendly blog.  I’ll settle on cullion.

This is an early example of economic plunder.  Legal, yes.  Honorable?  No.

It didn’t stop with Crassus.

UBER

I once paid $20 to meet the Prince, but I partied like it was only $19.99.

When you search the Internet for tales of Nathan Rothschild back in 1815, you’ll find a host of stories that from the scholarship of 2020, don’t seem to be supported.  But what generally seems to be agreed with (even by the Rothschild Archives – LINK) is that during the Napoleonic Era, Rothschild and his brothers across the European continent had a fairly sophisticated system to transfer news and information to each other.

Information is just like a building fire in Rome:  the sooner you catch it, the more it is worth.

What had been vexing everyone in London during June of 1815 was the return of Napoleon from exile and his resumption of power in France.  Since Europe had been fighting alongside Napoleon or with Napoleon for nearly 20 years, people in the United Kingdom were scared to death that a victory by Napoleon could lead to another 20 years of war.  And just like today, no one wanted to watch a re-run.

NAPOLEON

Napoleon broke out of exile because he needed more Elba room.

Lord Wellington had been put in charge of a coalition of armies from across Europe, 68,000 total troops.  Joined by 50,000 Prussians under Blücher (cue obligatory whinny), Wellington met Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo.  Napoleon wasn’t alone.  He had 73,000 French soldiers, and Wellington had left his panzers in his other coat, so the French fought back like they’d have to shower and give up cigarettes if they lost.

Spoiler alert:  Napoleon lost, but barely.  I think it had to go into at least one overtime, and there were some controversial instant replays.

The story goes that with the Rothschild information network, Nathan was notified about Wellington’s victory before anyone in London.  By knowing that, Nathan could make a killing in the stock market.  How well did he do?  We don’t know.  His courier wrote him:  “I am informed by Commissary White that you have done well by the early information which you had of the Victory gained at Waterloo.”  It is reported (LINK) that the Rothschild fortunes went from £500,000 to £1,000,000 in that year.  So probably pretty well, since I assume a £ is a metric $ or something.

Yes, I know that there are other stories about Nathan’s Big Day Out® that are much more exaggerated, but this one does fine in proving my point:  the best time to make money is in an uncertain market.  Or, as has been attributed to Nathan:  “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”  Especially if, like Nathan and Marcus, you can remove the uncertainty and make your bet a sure thing.

ELMO

 I did invest in an Asian/Middle East fusion restaurant called, “Wok Like an Egyptian.”

This went on during Roman times, and it went on during Napoleonic times.  Is it going on today?

It certainly is.  I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other week, and he works for a company that was funded by a private equity firm.  Per my conversation, they deals that just his company is looking at are in the range of one hundred million to one billion dollars.  Sure, that’s a pretty big range.  But the kicker was this:

“There are pools of billions of dollars waiting for deals.”

What kind of deals?  Deals on great assets in a collapsing economy.

As we look at the wreck that we’re seeing in the economy due to the WuFlu and now the great #BLM (Burning Looting Marxists), what sort of reaction are we seeing?  Does it surprise anyone that 269 companies (LINK, H/T to CA at Western Rifle Shooters) are supporting the (actual, really founded by Marxists, look it up) BLM?

Does it surprise anyone that hundreds of millions of dollars are flooding in to BLM and affiliated organizations?  And I’m not exaggerating the amount – the fund just for bailing out rioters and looters in Minneapolis was over $90 million dollars.  Some people can loot a whole week and not make that much!

The support for BLM could be from one of the following sources, and I suspect that one or more is in play depending on the company donating:

  • Genuine support for civil rights. Sure, I believe that from companies that import goods made by overseas labor treated more poorly than the Wilder family treats our outdoor cat.
  • A cynical ploy signaling corporate virtue to get people to buy burgers. Think of it like an advertisement, but instead of featuring the social justice flavor of the week, it’s BLM this week.
  • Coordinated donations with full knowledge that the money will go toward a Marxist transformation of the United States.
  • Selected by the CEO’s secretary executive assistant at random.

SJW

I never let BLM members into my basement – I don’t want a whine cellar.

Amazon® has really been impacted by COVID-19.  I’m betting that every facet of Bezos’ business has been helped, from their online shopping to their web infrastructure to their movie rental business.  Coronachan has been good to Jeff.  But I don’t blame Bezos for that – I don’t think it was his plan to infect the United States with a virus and convince everyone to stay in the basement for three months and then have seven pages of BLM merch to sell.

Because if he did?  That’s some real Bond villain stuff and I’ve got to say, that’s the most anyone has ever done to try to convince me to buy a Prime® subscription.

Cui bono?  I mean, besides Bezos?

Someone is going to profit from BLM, even beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars donated recently to it, and even beyond the billions of dollars that will go to purchase assets during the crisis.  And it may not be money, or burger sales.  It might be measured in raw power, the power to turn a society towards the Marxist goals of the founders of BLM.

But even Crassus knew that once a fire got started, it just might get away from you.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Tsunami Begins, But You Knew That

“If we can stop him, we shall prevent the collapse of Western Civilization.  No pressure.” – Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows

CLOCK

I liked the ticking of the clock I got from the pawnshop, but in the end it was a second-hand emotion.

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

In the first issue of the Civil War Weather Report, I put together ten steps to a new civil war.  I did not expect that on the one year anniversary of that first report we’d move from step 6 nearly to step 9.  Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight.

We are very, very close.  I debated internally more than a bit whether we were at an 8. or a 9. this month.  I finally decided to stay at an 8., despite multiple jurisdictions doing everything but arming the rioting faction of the protest movement with automatic firearms and bullhorns that make them all sound like Gilbert Gottfried.  It is clear we are at least an 8., and you will see in the graphs section that our Wilder Violence Index has reached new highs.

In this issue:  Front Matter – You Knew Where This Was Going – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Balkans or Caesar Might Be The Best Case Scenario – 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.

You Knew Where This Was Going

The most popular posts on this site have been about the political state of the country.  The Civil War Weather Reports aren’t my usual form of post, but have proven to be very popular.  I’m sure it’s not just for graphs featuring bikinis.  Well, at least not only because of the bikinis.

I think the reason these posts are popular is simple:  many people could sense the fragile peak that it seems all of Western Civilization is perched on.  Whether it is a conscious review of the surrounding culture or just a feeling in the pit of the stomach when confronted with an outrageous news article, something’s just not right.  Society has been changing by increments over the years, but those changes are coming faster and faster and faster.

Claire Wolfe, the groundbreaking and iconic Freedom blogger said it very well at her place last week (LINK):

Each day I think I’ve processed the latest craziness enough to blog something coherent. Useful even. But then new waves of craziness wash over the world. I don’t know what to say. I can’t write good sense against the onslaught of the crazy. I don’t know how civilization is holding together under tsunamis of crazy.

But then, of course civilization isn’t holding together — and I’m not just talking about the one-two punch of totalitarian don’tleaveyourhouseism followed without pause by riotandlootallyouwantism.

Chains of rapid-fire events and chaos like this are not generally the friend of those that love freedom.  The Russian Revolution promised:

  • Peace, through ending World War I,
  • Food, because Communists are well known to produce excess food,
  • Land, whereby peasants would get parts of land owned by the wealthy,
  • Minimum wages,
  • Maximum working hours,
  • Running factories by elected worker representatives and
  • Lots of other promises.

In the end, up to 12,000,000 people (mainly civilians) died in the civil war that followed, and the promises that were made were largely ignored.  The Bolsheviks said and promised anything to get a force of disaffected behind them.  Not sure if this sounds familiar to AOC fans?

LENIN

Hey girl, are you the French Revolution?  Because I keep imagining you sans-culottes.

I get a sense that the Left today is up to the same trick.  They’ve “created” media events and have managed them to get power – political power and power in the street.  Some of the Leftists may even be stupid enough to believe that there are magic economic levers that they can move to keep the promises they’re making.  In reality, they really don’t care:  it’s all about the power.

Lenin’s reintroduction into Russia and subsequent funding from foreign sources bring George Soros to mind.  Soros continually funds groups in the United States that are directly opposed to actual freedom.  The protesters and their associated rioters have a structure that has been funded and provisioned with everything from water and medical supplies to pre-staged bricks and gasoline.  Not saying that George is funding those directly, but . . .

More on that, below.

Violence and Censorship Update

No politician has ever captured the attention of the Left like Donald Trump.  They hated Reagan, and George W. Bush was famous for “stealing” an election.  But something about Trump drives them nearly crazy enough to try to get a job.  The media’s portrayal of Trump as the anti-ChristObama, perhaps?

The violence, of course, is plain for anyone reading any news to see.  It’s not in just the United States:  these protests have been coordinated across nearly every Western nation.  If the protests had been confined to Minnesota, I could buy the idea that they were organic.  And to the extent that they are peaceful gatherings to seek political redress?  I celebrate them.

LOOT

It’s not looting, it’s just an involuntary clearance sale.

But to flash across the world with violence and destruction?  That takes amplification and organization and is clearly the seed of revolution against the West.

The amplification of the signal comes from both mainstream and social media.  Whereas the original death that started the protests was (rightly) exposed, the subsequent deaths of protesters, rioters, and innocent civilians hasn’t been mentioned much at all.  How many dead?

I’m not sure.  This should be a fairly easy number to get to, but I’ve seen numbers between 12 and 18.  Absent media tracking, I’m not sure how you’ll count them up.  If we wait long enough, I’m sure they’ll all be counted and attributed to COVID-19.  To add to the butcher’s bill, thousands have been injured.

Regardless, I have seen, at minimum tens of millions of dollars in damage.  I would expect the number to increase to hundreds of millions, at least.  A fire is, as I write this, blazing in downtown Phoenix.  Odds that it’s related to the rest of the violence?  Nearly 100%.

Censorship is on the rise, as well.  I already spouted off on that last week (Free Speech: Endangered Species – WRSA is Down) in response to Western Rifle Shooters Association being shut down (You Can Find Him Here).  I expect to see that it will be on the increase during the next six months – the election is too important to the Left to leave it in Biden’s hands – chances are good he might wander off to try to buy a rotary phone at Montgomery Wards™.

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.

May was again a difficult month.  I had to re-scale the graph on violence as this month nearly pegged every meter.  I will assure my faithful readers that I spent extra time this month finding just the right bikini-clad girl, since I want to at least reach the journalistic integrity standards of the Washington Post®.

Violence:

VIOLF

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.

Political Instability:

POLF

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.

Economic:

ECON2

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again.  I did change the basis somewhat for this month.  Previously it had been a spot measurement, but this shows more a relative measurement from a baseline.  But did you come for that, or for the bikini?

Illegal Aliens:

BORDF

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Down, probably related to WuFlu.  Until Mexico’s economy collapses. Then what?  Regardless, this is at a nearly five-year low.

Balkans or Caesar Might Be The Best Case Scenario

I’ve written both about the idea of the United States breaking up into regional governments that run either as autonomous countries, or close enough to autonomous that it doesn’t matter.  This irritates Right-thinking folks “behind the lines” in Leftist states.  They clearly don’t like the idea of being left behind in a People’s Republic of California or the New York Soviet Oblast.  I can understand that, especially since the divide is so much more rural/urban than on a state by state basis and the Right just wants to be left alone.

Being Balkanized remains a possibility, and probably guarantees border wars for decades unless we put up a big, beautiful wall around California.

I have, over time, began to think it’s much more likely that the nonsense will continue until a strongman arrives and proclaims that he’s “President for the Duration of the Continuing National Emergency.”  I certainly don’t think Trump is this person.  Biden is even less this person.  But some Cuomo or other acting as Wall Street’s puppet?  I could see that being more likely.  If we had a military hero of some stature, that would also make sense.

Maybe Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?

BEZOS

I guess Jeff divorced his wife because she was past her Prime™?

Is having a Caesar that bad?  Absolutely.  But a strongman will try to have to have some sort of legitimacy and will at least (in theory) have some desire to keep a relatively strong country together to turn over to his children.  The old forms of government will be nodded to.  The Senate may not have power, but there will be Senators pretending to have power.

Not good, especially since that pesky Constitution will be entirely ignored, rather than mostly ignored like it is today.  But Caesar’s United States probably more peaceful than a Balkanized America.

But there is one possibility that scares me more than either of those:  Soviet America.  The riots that started nine days ago (yes, it’s only been that long) appear to be the Left making the first push into creating violence to go along with our economic issues and the lingering Coronavirus.  I brought up the Russian Revolution earlier, because that more than anything is what this latest round of violence feels like:  violence, in part funded and provoked by a foreign enemy with the aim of destabilizing America and making people welcome those who promise what they never can really provide.

Links

links

From Hank:

Sheriff Thinks 4Chan meme (Boogaloo Bois) is real.

From The Mrs.:

Soviet America?  (Great article behind WSJ paywall).

Description of Russian Leftists from the article:

“The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were. So what you take from your education would be the ideology that would justify this kind of activity—justify it because the wrong people have the power, and you should have it. You don’t feel like you’re the establishment.”

These are from Ricky this month:

And a few others:

Twitter® shows Mayor with at least some backbone

Saker on Unz.

COVID Nightmares: The Karen, The Mrs. Grundy, and the AWFL

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

GBAKGA

The Four Three Horsefaces of the Apocalypse.  (Concept via JW, Photoshop via Pugsley, after an idea by Sergio Leone.)

“Okay, everyone, I’d like to welcome you all to this meeting of Karen Anonymous.  Who would like to start?”

I raised my hand.

“Hi, I’m John, and I’m a Karen.”

The voices responded in unison, “Hi, John.”

“I’d like to tell you my story.  Two weeks ago, my family ordered dinner.  Due to the virus, we couldn’t go to the restaurant.  They delivered.  When they brought us the dinner, they forgot to bring the entrée for my son, The Boy.”  I paused.  “The Mrs. called them back and they said they would bring it.  They forgot.”

Everyone in the room nodded.  I could see the tension.  This was fertile ground for a Karening.

“So, the following Friday, I suggested we order again from them.  As The Boy was finding out what everyone wanted, he asked me if I wanted the Bigfoot roasted over moonrocks with a side of fried Dodo wings, which is my usual order.  I told him, sure, it’s not like money is an object, but then I reminded him that they hadn’t brought his entrée the previous week.  I told him we should get it for free.”

I looked at the rest of the KA members.  I could see beads of sweat on a few brows.  I could see a pulsating vein in the temple of one lady to my left.

KA

If you’ve never seen a pack of Karens migrate, you don’t know true terror.

“The Boy said, point blank, ‘Dad, if you want to do that, if you want to call them up and tell them that, it’s fine.  You go ahead and do that.  But I won’t.  You’re being a Karen about this.’  I was shocked.  I asked him exactly how I was being a Karen, and he responded, ‘Dad, this is a small restaurant, not part of a big chain.  The owner just bought it right before the virus hit.  He’s being beaten up financially already.  And now you want to bust his chops over an eight dollar chicken and rice dinner when we will never even notice eight dollars missing in our lives?  No.  I won’t do it.’

There were a few tears, and nods in the audience.  I continued.

“Yes.  I was being a Karen.  I had lost perspective.  And I was proud that The Boy called me on it.  I realized right then:  I don’t need to see the manager.”

Then they applauded, hugged me, and made me king of Lower Southeast Modern Mayberry.

KING

What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?  That’s the last time the mailman will argue with me!

Okay, there isn’t a real Karen Anonymous, but The Boy really did call me out for being a Karen, and I was proud of him for doing so.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop wearing the crown around town.

Karen is pretty simple to explain, and in reality.  We all know her.  Her hairstyle alone tells us a lot.  Karen wants things the way she wants them.  And if she can’t have them her way?  She’d like to see the manager.

That was me over The Boy’s entrée, which was the absolutely true part of the Karen Anonymous meeting.  It didn’t matter that I was technically correct, as The Boy pointed out, in the bigger picture of the world I was absolutely wrong.  The restaurant is small, locally owned, and has generally given us both great service and great food.

Is being a Karen morally wrong?  No, not really.  Karen is looking out for the best for her and her family, mostly.  Would I like to be a husband to a constant Karen?  No, it would be hard to decide who had to give birth to the kids.

CODKAR

Is it bad that the first thing I notice in this picture was the trigger discipline?

In the larger sense of things, Karens are harmless.  Karens stop worrying about most everything after they’re happy.  Sure, they might make noise, and they might be annoying FaceBook® friends, but if the manager has a designated employee to pretend to “fire” when Karens are on the warpath, Karens are happy.  They rule their own little world.  They have no real reason to mess with you, they just want things to go well for them.

Karen memes are peaking right now, so I feel safe in saying that we’ve reached Peak Karen™.  Heck, I bet in a few years it will be safe again for middle-aged women to wear the “can I speak to the manager” haircut without fear of becoming an Internet meme.

The second personality type that the WuFlu has brought to the forefront are the Mrs. Grundys.  Where the Karen is concerned about Karen, Mrs. Grundy is concerned about you.

Who is Mrs. Grundy?

Mrs. Grundy is Karen’s great-great-grandma who entered the English language in 1798.  Mrs. Grundy is obsessed with the rules.  The smaller and more petty and more obscure and meaningless, the better.   But if it were just Mrs. Grundy following the rules, that would be okay.  No.  It’s worse.  Mrs. Grundy wants you to be observant to the rules, and has appointed herself judge, jury, and executioner.  Me?  I say before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.  That way you have his shoes and you’re a mile away.

DREDD

The judge told me I was in court for drinking and kissing women.  I don’t think he was pleased when I said, “Excellent!  When do we start?”

Your grass is ever so slightly too tall?  Mrs. Grundy is calling the Home Owners’ Association (HOA).  But more likely, Mrs. Grundy is running the HOA.  She’s and her fellow Grundys are the first to try to be appointed to the HOA and the only ones who care enough to want to be in a cycle of continual judgement over their neighbors.

Why?  It’s likely that they’ve never had real power in life, so seeing the next door neighbor paint his house an unapproved shade of tan gives them the shiver of pleasure in anticipating the pain that they’ll cause their neighbor.  But they’ll wait until he finishes, first.

Is it easy becoming a Grundy?  Sure.  Heck, I was taking a walk in the city where I work (Modern Mount Pilot) and almost Grundifyed myself.  I was taking a walk during my lunch break, and saw a guy in an SUV pull up to a dumpster at a baseball field.  He popped his trunk and began dumping his garbage into the dumpster.

I had a moment where I managed a bit of indignant outrage, but then realized:  it wasn’t my city, it wasn’t my ballfield, and for all I knew the city was fine with what he was doing.  He certainly wasn’t dumping his trash all over his front yard or in the road.  I calmed myself, but I could easily see how one gives in to the Grundy side.

GRUNSIDE

I’ll give in to the Mrs. Grundy side when my badge shows up in the mail.

Mrs. Grundy has been such a feature of culture that she’s a fixture of Western culture.  C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Dickens, Barnum, Chesterton, Joyce, Heinlein, Jack London, and even P.G. Wodehouse have all referenced her in their writing.  And now her crowning achievement of recognition:  I mentioned her.

Whereas the Karen just wants the world to fit her expectations, Mrs. Grundy is far worse.  Mrs. Grundy wants the world to follow the rules, which she conveniently knows better than anyone else.

Karens don’t want to wear a mask.  Mrs. Grundy wants to see you executed for not having one, preferably after the torture of, say, having to listen to Miley Cyrus describe quantum physics.  Thankfully, Mrs. Grundy, however is only dangerous if you live in that small circle of control where she can stamp her puny feet and shake her wrinkled fists in rage.  Which is normally within 200 feet (37°C) from where she is at any given time.

But then there’s the last one: The AWFL.  AWFL stands for Affluent White Female Liberals.  And if Karen is annoying and self-centered, and Mrs. Grundy is the would-be tyrant, the AWFL is the Queen of the Left.

AOC

It’s also how many times she had to watch the Sesame Street® episode on the letter “O” before she realized that was her middle initial.

What’s an AWFL?

  • She’s a 30 year old Yale graduate in Woman’s Studies who marches against white privilege hand in hand with her Harvard husband who works in investment banking while their surrogate-born child is in the care of their illegal Guatemalan nanny.
  • She writes letters to the congressman she knew back in prep school about the lack of government spending for poverty while wearing a $380 sweatshirt that was hand embroidered in Pakistan.
  • She sends her kids to a private school for a “better education” than they could get in the local integrated school, and lives in a gated neighborhood to keep out undesirables.

A prototype AWFL is the Governor of Michigan.

HYPOC

Yes, this really happened.

Gretchen Whitmer outlawed, based on Corona (and I’m not making up any of this):

  • Driving a car between two houses you own. Because COVID-19 hides in vacant houses and might slit your throat because it hides behind the door with a knife to ambush you when you come in.
  • The Gretch said that grocery, pot, liquor and abortion stores could stay open, but buying plants was forbidden. Because having an abortion while stoned is a right, but growing food in a garden is a privilege.
  • Kayaks? They’re ok, liberals like those and they allow you to buy those cute outfits like Stacey has, and you look so  Motorboats?  A sure sign of the viral apocalypse.
  • And science certainly shows that fishing and hunting is the number one way that COVID-19 is transmissible. It’s proven science according to YouTube®.

As I said, I think we we’ve hit Peak Karen.  Karen is harmless, and fun to make fun of.  But when I see her show up all over the place at the same time?  Yeah, that meme is a month from being a Doge.

DOGE

Keep Doge alive! 

Mrs. Grundy?  I’m on a solo quest to bring her back as a meme.  Mrs. Grundy makes society worse for all of us.

But the AWFL?

The AWFL is probably the single most dangerous thing in society today, and Whitmer is the Ur-AWFL.  And if you repeat “Ur-AWFL” fast enough, you can sound just like a Muppet®.  But Whitmer isn’t a Muppet™.   She has power.  She has money.  She has control.  And she’s not alone.  Even in a crisis, Whitmer’s ideology overwhelms actions that could actually be reasonably put in place to save lives.

And that’s AWFL.

KGA

Of the three?  I’ll take Karen any day.

Healthcare, Unemployment, and Soviet Nails

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.” – Firefly

LEATHER

But that’s not as bad as the unemployed jester:  he’s nobody’s fool.

As I looked at the headlines today, two of them jumped out at me.  The first was this (capitalization same as the original):

82% WANT MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS . . . . (LINK to actual study)

As usual, there are some misleading bits behind the headline.  If you clicked through the fluff pieces (several times) to the actual study on the stimulus checks that I linked to, it really says that 82% want stimulus checks as long as the government is mandating a shutdown.  That’s a lot more reasonable, since it’s not asking for that money, you know, forever.  Except in Michigan, where I believe governor will keep the economy in shutdown mode until scientists develop immortality.

So, the headline was misleading, and people didn’t want the money forever.  That made me happy.  Until I read the real story embedded in the study and saw this statistic:

74% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats agree that we should move to a universal health care system.

Stick a fork in it, folks, like a doughnut around Stacey Abrams, it’s done.  If the numbers in that study are correct, regardless of how you or I might feel about it, nationalized health care in some form is now probably just a matter of details and whose name goes on the package.

STACEY

At least the Washington Post can explain that unusual eclipse on the East Coast now.

I could spend a lot of time talking about how and why we got here, including discussion of how the system we have is just like Michael Moore:  it incorporates the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of socialism.  But I won’t.  This battle, I think, is effectively lost.  A shrewd candidate for president will make this a centerpiece of his campaign, and the only difference will be if the final version is called TrumpTreatment© or BidenBenefits®.

Obamacare has served the only purpose it was designed for:  it is the capstone of a series of Federal mandates since the 1980s that have served to make the costs of healthcare in this country so incredibly high that literally anything is better than the status quo.  Healthcare in the United States doesn’t in any way mimic a free market, except in plastic surgery and laser eye surgery.  Those costs have gone down because insurance generally doesn’t pay for them and doctors have to actually compete.  I guess the other nice thing about being a plastic surgeon is that they get to see new faces every week.

Healthcare should remind everyone of the mantra of the Left:  “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This crisis has been made through successive actions of the Left to make hospitals have to charge responsible people for every drug addled meth and crack head and pregnant illegal alien that drools or waddles their way into the emergency room.   But there’s enough blame for everyone, since the corporatist wing of the Republican party has taken action to ensure that insulin makers can charge Americans six times the cost for a life giving drug (insulin) in the United States as compared to our neighbors to the North.

If the first headline wasn’t bad enough, the second headline was:

68% Of Unemployed ‘Eligible For Payments Greater Than Lost Earnings’ . . . . (LINK to study, and not three layers of journo-fluff)

This is one with which the extended Wilder family has some experience.  Alia S. Wilder was recently working from her home composing Mongolian throat-singing mix tapes for the black market.  Normally she does this in an office, but due to BatFlu, she was sent to work from home.  Her boss called and told her they were temporarily shutting down the business.

CUTU

The cat then told me, “Snitches get stitches.”  I had no idea he was closely watching health care policy.

Since the market they serve of throat-singing aficionados was entirely shut down by Corona-chan, it was a logical business move to make.  Alia S. Wilder was also one of the first people to get called back.  Good?  Well, yes.  But she had to take an income cut to do so, since her job pays less than unemployment insurance plus the $600 a week that Uncle Sugar was kicking in.

I was proud of her that her complaint level was exactly zero:  she was roaring and ready to get back to work.  Those mix tapes won’t make themselves, after all.  But how many people would just love to stay home and collect the WuFlu bucks?  Get paid for doing nothing?  It must be that “new normal” that people keep talking about.

I actually understand the reason people would like free money, and would prefer to stay home and eat nachos and smoke weed on Gram-gram’s couch rather than deliver pizzas.  However, the $600 a week bump sets up bad incentives:  I read one story of a guy who needed pizza delivery dudes, and no one would take the job because unemployment paid so much more.  I can see that, given the horrible hiccup in the economy, why the government would want to print lots and lots of money encourage consumption, but the increased payments have essentially raised the minimum wage to somewhere between $20-$25 just to break even with current unemployment payments.  How much more would you have to pay people to actually work?

For markets to work, there needs to be some sort of connection between supply and demand.  If you pay people $1000 a week, how many will think that working for $1200 a week is a good idea?  Not many.  And I’m willing to bet that if the economy is as bad as I think it is, the Federal government will continue the payments for longer than the current end date in July.  During the Great Recession, the Federal government continued unemployment insurance for 100 weeks.  Two years.

What kind of distortion will that have on the labor market?

GRETA

Yes, this happened on a CNN special last week. 

In thinking about this story, I was reminded of an old story that I heard about the Soviet Union:

There was a Soviet nail factory.  In the factory, the communist leaders from Moscow called and told the manager, “Make sure you increase production of nails!  You must increase the tonnage for Comrade Stalin!”

The manager hung up the phone.  “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change.  Make very, very large nails this month.”

Accordingly, the factory had a record production month in tons of nails produced.  The communist leaders printed a picture of the factory manager receiving an award.  But soon enough, the leaders in Moscow realized that not a lot of people needed nails that weighed two pounds each.  The communist leader called the manager back.  “The tonnage was good.  But this month, make more nails for Comrade Stalin.”

The manager hung up the phone.  “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change.  Make many very, very, small nails this month.”

NAILEDIT

Not my translation.  The KGB spy school told me to pretend I don’t speak fluent Russian.

I wasn’t able to verify the basics of this story, but I did find the accompanying cartoon which at least hints that the Soviets themselves were aware that something was broken in their system.  And I did find a story about a Soviet plant that made a machine to help make tires.  They developed new technology that allowed the machine to make tires much faster, but refused to make it.

Why?

Then they would make fewer machines.  In a market-based economy the company would celebrate their new, better machine and use it as a selling point to beat their competition.  But in this case, the incentives were to make more machines rather than make better machines.

This is the primary failure mechanism of socialist systems.  They have bad incentives.  I read once that in Great Britain that people ring up the ambulance to take them to the doctor.  Why not?  It’s “free,” right?

Once a “free” system takes hold, however, it will never leave until the economy collapses under all the “free” money and “free” services.  Why?  People become dependent on free things.  If you want to make someone dependent on you?  Give them things.  Proof?

Ever hear your parents say, “My house, my rules?”  Giving is a form of control.

FREE

I think the last person I saw driving this windowless van was named Bernie.

Freedom comes from saying “no” to free things, but I have the sense that people are going to be saying yes to free stuff.

Always think back to what Admiral Ackbar says at a time like this:

ACKBAR

The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition

“I woke up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.” – Anchorman

WOKETREK

I hear William Shatner hates one pie:  Pe-Khaaaaaaan.

I like movies.  And I like television.  Up until recently, I used to read a lot of fiction books; now I read a lot more non-fiction.  Together, along with the news we read and the Internet sites we visit, this defines the core of our mythology, our legends, and our shared experiences outside of religion.

When The Mrs. watches movies she likes to watch them for characters – how people react and change based on the circumstances that they encounter.  That seems to fascinate her, probably because The Mrs. is a human.  Me?  I like to watch movies for new ideas and new information.  Billions of people have fallen in love, but how many have thought of a new idea?  Ideas catch my interest, which might explain The Mrs.’ cute nickname for me:  Soulless Human-Looking Robot.

But movies today, frankly, suck.  They’re awful.  Not all of them, mind you, but a big majority.  Seeing a good one is rare enough today that it actually surprises me when I see one that I like.  For the most part, what passes for a “good” movie is just one that doesn’t actively disappoint me.  The Mrs. rarely goes to movies, and even before Coronavirus made Netflix® the king of media, she just stopped going to movies in about 2014 or 2015.

NETFLIX

I had to stop talking to a friend who said that Netflix® was the cheapest streaming service.  I just can’t be around a Hulu™-cost denier.

About that time was another event:  the functional disappearance of an entire movie genre:  the comedy.  What happened to comedy?  Since the year 2000, there have been a total of 45 comedy movies that have grossed over $100 million (in adjusted 2000 dollars) at the box office.  The last comedy to hit this threshold was in 2015.  So, the numbers prove it – comedy is currently deader than a Clinton opponent.

The strange reason that this is happening is that comedy movies just aren’t funny anymore.  It’s not that I’ve lost my sense of humor:  objectively the movies aren’t funny.  Audiences have largely abandoned them.  America clearly has an appetite for humor, there were 45 comedy films that that made over $100 million between 2000 and 2015, but the numbers keep dropping over time:  comedy movies used to take in about 20% of the box office.  In 2019, comedy was down to 6.6% of the market.

So, why are comedies not funny anymore?  The audiences haven’t changed:  teenage boys are still teenage boys.  So, it must be the movies.

When you look at the movies, they’ve gone from broad comedies that focus on making people laugh to either comedies that are created to push a particular viewpoint or comedies that depend on getting humor from extremely explicit sexual content.  Certainly, there are good sexy jokes – remember you’re reading a post from the person who invented bikini economics graphs.  But, like anything, there’s a line.  And I’m not alone in being happy that Zack and Miri Make a Porno could have just as easily been titled Zack and Miri Make No Money since it did so poorly at the box office.

Another reason is that comedy is dangerous to the Left.  To paraphrase a J. Michael Straczynski and Neil Gaiman Babylon 5 script, “Comedians say serious things and get a laugh, politicians say silly things and people take them seriously.”   At some level, great comedy is about telling a truth, but an uncomfortable truth.  That’s the reason that Stalin didn’t allow real humor in the Soviet Union.  It’s the same reason that Jerry SeinfFeld said he won’t do comedy shows at colleges – the woke crowd wants to hear humor, but only the jokes they find politically acceptable, regardless of the truth.

HTTM

Obligatory Stalin Joke:  One day Stalin decides to go to the cinema in disguise and hear what people are really saying about him.  When the newsreel comes on the audience stands up and applauds each time he appears on the screen. Stalin is pleased. Modestly, he himself remains seated. After a few moments the man next to him leans over and whispers:  “Most people feel the same way you do Comrade, but you’ll be safer if you stand up.”

Sadly, the failure of comedies seems to apply to movies as a whole now – the movie industry growth has been stagnant since 2012 or so.  I think it’s tied back to the same reason, Leftists feeling that movies should be explicit carriers of Leftist politics.  Movies can have a point, but they have to have the politically correct point.  They can be poignant or uplifting, but only in a Leftist-approved way that involves someone saying, “But I’m a lesbian” during the movie, though most of the time the other patrons tell me to shut up.  Movies are crafted so they don’t allow the audience to come to conclusions outside of those approved by Hollywood and the globalist Left.

And it’s been getting worse.  By most measures, the last three Star Wars® films have been the worst of the franchise.  Sure, The Force Awakens® got big box office numbers, but that was primarily because people were so excited to see a new Star Wars™ film that they would have spent money to go see Chewbacca® having lice combed out of his hair for three hours.

ROSE

There was a movie about Chewbacca® making vases out of porcelain.  It was called Hairy Potter.

But Star Wars® became something different after Disney© bought it.  It became woke.  The main character was a girl.  I’m okay with that.  But in this case, the girl had powers far in excess of, well, anyone.  After merely touching a lightsaber® and never having trained with it, she defeated a man who had trained with one for years.

Yeah.  I would rather have watched the Wookie™ be de-loused.

To cap off The Force Awakens, a thoroughly uncharismatic group of characters with no chemistry defeated yet another Death Star™ in a way that was so memorable I can’t recall it.  Heck they might have unplugged it for all I remember, but I certainly do know that Luke Skywalker® didn’t drop a torpedo into a reactor exhaust.   When I left the theater after The Force Awakens, I was done with Star Wars®.  For good.  What had generally been a dependably fun series of movies was gone.

But having a series of movies is now the norm.  Movies had become a batch of either remakes of old movies or movies in a franchise.  Since 2000, 119 movies (at least) have been released as part of a franchise.  23 of those are Marvel® franchise movies.  And, I’ll admit that in many instances those franchise movies have been entertaining.  But after 23 movies, I think we’ve reached Peak Marvel™, since they’re quickly becoming woke, too.  The final straw for many will probably be Thor, who is reportedly going to be replaced by a woman, and Ironman®, who will be replaced by Nic Cage in a suit he made out of old Coors Light™ cans.

Understand – it’s not enough to create a new character, the Left wants to destroy existing characters by replacing them utterly:  2016’s Ghostbusters is another example.  I think these changes are because Hollywood simply cannot help itself.  For the longest time they were content to make money while slowly changing culture to the Left.  Now?  The message that seems to be seeping in is that there is a need to pay for the sins of humanity even if it costs the studio money.  Who should pay for those sins?  Well, not the filmmakers.  Really, it’s just the people they don’t like.

YACHT

Don’t forget, celebrities are just like us!

And why?  There has been a push to replace the dominant culture in the United States.  That includes replacing old taboos with new ones that reflect the new culture the Left is seeking.  The main idea is that you can do anything and there should be no repercussions.  This especially includes sex, where the purely physical has been raised to the level of the sacred and there is no whim that shouldn’t be not only tolerated, but celebrated.  This also includes career choices, where every Grievance Studies graduate with no discernible skills should be given a living wage, complete health care, and the respect that they feel that they deserve, paid for by you and me.

This is really an infantilizing of the culture:  it’s the promotion of the idea that whatever urge you have should be indulged.  The Mrs. described it as a culture of spoiled children with daddy issues:  the fault is with their boss.  Or their boyfriend/girlfriend.  Or their parents.  Or society.  It’s never their fault.

In this instance, it’s easier to blame a Civil War general or a Founding Father than to blame themselves for their condition.  The result?  Pull down a statue, and complain about Thomas Jefferson.

JEFFERSON

I was named after Thomas Jefferson.  He was named a very long time ago, so you were probably named after he was, too.

This spirit has even invaded books.  I used to pick up a science fiction book at random in the book store and feel that there was a good chance that I’d be exposed to new ideas and have fun in the process.  More recently, a lot of the books have become a slog.  I wondered if it was me.  I then picked up some stories written a few decades ago, and was pleased.  It wasn’t me.  Those old stories had more ideas and fun in a typical paragraph than most novels do today.  Today, the novels seem all about preaching and explaining how awful people are.  Back then, even though we faced a daily threat of nuclear annihilation, those stories were more positive about mankind and our future than the ones I see today.

We are in the midst of a concerted effort by the Left to destroy the culture we live in and the values it stands for.  Old writers, old statesmen, and old heroes are all being viewed through the lens of the new culture and the new values in an effort to destroy them for sins they never committed.  The Left understands the stakes:  until they destroy the old culture and values, they will be judged by the old standards.

And they know they will be found wanting.  Especially their comedy movies.

Those are just awful.

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet.  Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang.  Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

OPTIM

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist.  I don’t really think I am.  I am certain that I am going to die.  I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind.  Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead.  And the last six weeks our lives?  Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters?  Not me.  Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up.  The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned.  Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient.  For he that is so wants nothing.

SENECA

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets.  I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant.  Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college.  Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome.  Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service.  Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either.  Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work.  I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work.  I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans.  In winter.  After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  How bad was that particular plague?  It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died.  Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

GERMAN

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too.  But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder.  Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all.  That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure.  Sometimes you win.  Sometimes you lose.  There’s virtue in neither of these.   There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death.  All of us will fail.  Suffering?  Yeah, that’s going to happen, too.  To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live.  You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around.  There is no particular way your life “should” turn out.  Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad.   Was there luck in there, both good and bad?  Sure, but not as much as you might think.

BIGMAC

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad. 

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for?  Deal with it.  And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering.  You have electricity.  You have Internet.  You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating.  And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too.  You know, while you’re up.

PJBOI

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca.  Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses.  Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

  • I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
  • I’m too busy. Good news!  After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
  • I don’t know how to do ______.   Unless it’s differential equations.  Then just do what the book says.  Nobody really understands differential equations.
  • Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today.  What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

EXCUSE

American Factory and Thoughts on the Future American Economy

“China is here, Mr. Burton. The Chang Sing, the Wing Kong?  They’ve been fighting for centuries.” – Big Trouble in Little China

CAMO

I mean, the camo looks so good, maybe they wanted to show it off?

I watched the documentary American Factory this weekend, and it seemed like a good jumping off point to discuss several topics – globalization, employment, and Jenga®.  In 2008, the General Motors® plant in Dayton, Ohio was closed during GM’s© bankruptcy.  According to American Factory (now streaming on Netflix®), 10,000 people in the Dayton area lost their jobs when the factory closed.  In this current climate, I’m trying to come up with more unemployment jokes, but they all need work.

Fast forward to 2016, and a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass America®, started a new business making windshields for cars in the old GM© plant.  Fuyao bought the empty factory and spent on the order of $500 million dollars setting up the glass factory.  Then Fuyao brought hundreds of Chinese supervisors over to start the facility and train the American workers.  This makes sense – you don’t want to come across an ocean and have an employee like me when I sold used cars.  One customer, looking at a minivan, asked me, “Cargo space?”

I answered, “Car no fly.  Car go road.”  Obviously that didn’t go very well.

One of these Chinese supervisors mentioned that he was committed to stay for two years.  This was a father of two, and he’d receive no extra pay for being away from his family.  The Chinese supervisors were sleeping four to an apartment with furniture from the offices supplies aisle at Wal-Mart™.  Living with a roommate is tough.  One roommate suggested I had schizophrenia.  The joke was on him – I didn’t even have a roommate.

POSTER

Poster from the documentary.  That’s it.  No joke.  Move along.

Clips from workers talking as they were just starting their work at Fuyao made it clear that the Fuyao jobs were nowhere near the pay of the GM© jobs:  At GM™, one worker made about $29 an hour in quality control until the plant closed.  In the new Fuyao plant, she made less than $13 an hour.  I talked to a local dog breeder about a summer job for Pugsley.  She said that she only paid in expensive pure-bred puppies.  Pugsley thought about it, and decided it was income-petable.

And the work is tougher than the GM® work was.  The temperature in some parts of the production area was 200°F, or about 63 kilograms.  One worker spent over an hour a shift in ten minute increments in that heat in the furnace room, and the plant safety guy was trying to figure out how to keep him from overheating.  But that level of heat had a plus side:  during the filming I saw two hobbits throw a ring in the furnace room.

What surprised me was that the Chinese gave such access to the people making the documentary.  They caught candid moments with the Fuyao founder, Cao Dewang, (called simply “Chairman Cao”) throughout the documentary.  There were moments where he was clearly doubtful, arrogant, or out of touch.  We all have those moments, but most of the time billionaires try to avoid looking stupid in public.  I mean, except Elon Musk.

ELON

I kid.  I actually admire Mr. Musk, who seems to be able to do what NASA forgot.  Fly people into space.

On starting the plant, production levels were described as “low” so Fuyao took the step of sending several of its plant supervisors to China.  The clash of cultures was obvious at the start of the documentary, but it was during the sequence in China that really showed the difference in the way Americans and Chinese do business.

The conflict started at the first meeting.  All of the Chinese business people were in suits.  Most of the Americans were in jeans and t-shirts – one of them was wearing a Jaws® movie t-shirt.  In what was probably pretty embarrassing for the Americans, in the next scene you see them wearing Fuyao company logo polo shirts.  How did that conversation go?  “Excuse me, perhaps you would be more comfortable in a new company polo shirt and not your mustard-covered t-shirt advertising a forty year old movie?”

But it was far, far beyond just the informal dress that’s common with line supervisors in a factory.  One sequence showed all of the employees singing the corporate anthem.  Another showed line production employees in a line, yelling out productivity slogans and propaganda like Marines responding to R. Lee Ermey when he was a drill instructor.

LUNCH

They were all out of bat.

One of the American supervisors (who had learned Chinese) was bad-mouthing his employees to a Chinese supervisor.  To me, the American supervisor came across as someone who would do anything to make the Chinese like him – he was a suck-up.  After one negative comment about his own team, the Chinese supervisor said, “You should all be united and concentrate your efforts.”  It was a subtle but nuclear insult – the Chinese supervisor was slamming the American for not being united with his own workers.  And the Chinese supervisor was right.

KIM

So, refresh the page.  Am I still dead?

And working in China sounds as bad as I’d expected.  Workers typically only get one or two days off a month – a five day work week hasn’t made it to China yet.  The workers also work 12 hour shifts.  The Chinese want their workers engaged in the company.

In fact, the American supervisors were there for the company annual Chinese New Year party, where the show was put on entirely by the employees.  And as for engaged?  There were several marriages performed at the company party.  One of the Americans was so overcome with the sense of belonging around him that he was as emotional as a teenage girl watching Titanic.  Me?  I like my emotions like I like my beer.  Bottled.

A quick trip through the Fuyao workers union (which is also the company’s communist party headquarters) showed that the division between company, country, party, and worker is non-existent.  The Chinese are certain that they are superior to Americans – several times in the film this is stated by Chinese people on camera.  But they are also very proud of being Chinese – when Chairman Cao was talking to his Chinese employees in America, he told that that no matter where they go, or where they are buried, that first and foremost they will always be Chinese.

China is nationalist, (mostly) ethnically homogeneous, and unambiguously pro-Chinese at the expense of everyone else on the planet.  Work is for the government and the party.  Why are the Muslims in China in reeducation camps?  Because Islam isn’t Chinese.  China is a country built on unity and Islam isn’t on the menu.  And if you’re not on board?

SOUP

Literally.   

Next, Fuyao fired the plant manager when production and profits were too low, but it was probably the lawsuits on safety that sent him over the top.  The plant manager had been an American – they replaced him with a Chinese guy.  I’ve actually seen this in real life in one company I did business with.  When things weren’t going well, the owners fired the American and replaced him with a person from their country.  I mean, if you’re going to yell at the guy, you probably don’t want to do it through a translator.

The documentary ended with increasing tensions ahead of a vote to bring in a union.

I’m torn.  Nearly every union person I’ve ever worked with has been the opposite of what I see on television.  They’ve worked hard and with great skill.  But to listen to a labor organizer for a union talk makes me feel nothing but that I want to keep one hand on my wallet.  They have a sense of entitlement that seeks to make the worker feel that they are a victim, and to a certain mindset that’s an easy sell.  One person who early in the documentary had been so thankful to have a job, any job, had now put himself in the role of a victim at a union meeting.  Heck, in America we even have unions for pirates – but their claims always end up in arrrrbitration.

As noted above, safety and adherence to American laws wasn’t really a Chinese priority, at least at first.  But with the union vote on the line, the Chinese gave a $2 per hour raise across the board and the Plant Manager committed to solving most problems in just one day.  The plant workers voted to reject becoming unionized, by a 2-1 landslide.  After that, the Chinese terminated several vocal union supporters, but since this wasn’t China, that wasn’t a literal termination.

Some thoughts that this movie brought out:

  • The Chinese like being Chinese, and like being around Chinese people. They don’t have much use for everybody else on the planet except economically.  I’m sure they keep visiting the United States to measure to make sure that their stuff will fit.
  • A factory worker used to be able to support a family as a sole breadwinner. The same can be said of the skilled trades.  Immigration (illegal and legal) destroyed this because demand for jobs didn’t increase, while numbers of workers did.  “Greedy” factory owners get blamed, but the reality is open borders means all jobs that don’t require certificates or diplomas are under pressure from about several billion people willing to do it cheaper, especially if it can be done over the phone by “Bob” from Bangladesh.
  • Every union worker I’ve worked with has been awesome. Every union organizer I’ve ever seen on a documentary has reminded me of a conman.
  • This documentary showed the aftermath of the outsourcing of American manufacturing, a transition that has been ongoing since 1995.
  • The next economic transition is upon us. The new jobs that will be created are going to be quite a bit different than the ones disappearing.
  • The Mrs.’ Grandmother would offer her a shiny nickel to rub her corns. There’s a job that won’t be taken away soon.
  • The documentary ended with discussions on how the Chinese were trying to automate the factory even more – replacing workers with robots. It was less than thirty seconds of the documentary and the equivalent of writing something at the end of the essay that you wanted to write about but forgot.  Given Chinese recent history with something as simple as eating bats, I imagine that automation will turn into automated killer robots that will kill all of humanity.  But, hey, productivity is up!!!

VARMINT

I purchased some suspenders a few weeks ago.  Pugsley immediately pounced.  “Want me to get your varmint rifle, Pa?”

I’d like to think that globalization is doomed, however I read a story two weeks ago about a surgical mask and protective equipment maker in Dallas.  During the Swine Flu wave back in 2012, the owner had expanded capacity to meet with demand.  What did the buyers do after the rush?  They went back to sourcing from China.  The owner was left with high unemployment insurance cost and new equipment that he had to pay for even though it was unused.

This time, the owner was more than happy to expand production, but he’d only do it on a long-term contract.  Last I heard?  No takers.

But nah, I’m sure that we’ll figure out that at least partially, globalization was what made our economy so fragile that a virus could cause it to collapse like a Jenga® game played by a drunk Michael J. Fox.

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on.  There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played.  Yes . . . no.  You have to tell her before.  He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday.  She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein!  Now he . . . he was nuts!  He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

AOC

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body.  Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.”  I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.” 

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement.  On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil.  Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies.  Crude oil, that is.  Black gold.  Texas tea.  The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative.  How negative?  Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes.  You read that right.  People were being paid to take crude oil.  How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™.  The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning.  You UFO abductees know what I mean.

CARTM

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™.  But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank.  Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit.  Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline.  Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom.  Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

PHELPS

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it.  You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles.  I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO2 back into the atmosphere.  After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.”  No, I really haven’t.  I still have a very positive outlook about the future.  But one think I don’t have is illusions.  For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past.  I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again.  Besides, who would want to?  You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too.  I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry.  Those are jobs that typically pay well, too.  At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday.  Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

TIGERKING

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface?  It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes.  It’s not a static thing.  A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job.  That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden.  You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea.  Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years.  “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t.  Learn to live with it,” was my answer.  I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid.  Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better.  No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life:  seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes.  These were one-way events.  The future seemed to be a one way street.  People got older.  Paint on the house faded.  Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this:  entropy.  Entropy means that things age and wear down.  It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix.  When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection.  For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better.  It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better.  I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect.  Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

BULG

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity.  Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions:  the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time.  It would never be more perfect than that moment in time.  The second that I finished, it would start aging.  Dust and time would take their toll.  They’d be dropped.  Or things would drop on them.  Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it.  Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time.  But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power.  But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower.  It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day.  For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®.  The Sun.  Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

GRETA

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies.  In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone.  Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus.  That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change.  A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose.  Like my back hair, they just happened.  That doesn’t make me a victim, though.  I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes.  Sometimes, changes just are.  I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them.  For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into:  it can never be undone.  Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life.  But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up.  There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®.  We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better.  And it will be ours.  We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

“Because there’s no crying in baseball! No crying!” – A League of Their Own

WILDER

Wash this.

As we contemplate the wreckage of the economy and the cracks in our culture, I return to that question that many of us have been thinking of:

What happens next?

By next as in next week, well those patterns are short term. Just like the stock market has spent most of the last ten years going up, some weeks were down. The overall aggregate of those weeks was up. Until it wasn’t. The short term direction of the market varied, but like China’s expanding sea claims or my expanding waistline, the long term trend did not.

That’s what I see with the United States as a whole. Over the short term, things go up and down, but the long term stresses in the system keep building up. A brick building having foundation problems will build stress, until the bricks and mortar both snap in a line under tension, just like Joe Biden snaps when people move too quickly around him because of Crimean War flashbacks.

One major tension: people have been concerned about the national debt since before I’ve been alive. Why? The silly idea seems to be that “having an unpayable mountain of debt” might be a bad thing since you have to pay all of that back just to be broke. It’s only money, right? But the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now larger than at any time since the end of World War II. At that time the United States had mobilized to spending nearly 90% of Federal dollars on military spending items. That level of debt, 110% of the GDP, existed before COVID-19 gave us a gut shot. What will it be after all of the Chinese Virus spending? 120%? 150%?

At least with World War II we got cool tanks and games like Axis and Allies®. In the last bailout all we got was a bigger penthouse for CEOs like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase. You might remember Dimon’s tone-deaf Christmas cards like the one he sent out below in 2013. Sure, people are allowed to send out glaringly condescending tennis-ball filled Christmas cards while they spend enough money to pay off your mortgage on a lunch trip to Switzerland for their dog. But to celebrate their wealth after having been the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008? That’s just tacky.

I guess Dimon’s Christmas card is nearly as neat as 49,324 Sherman tanks, plus twenty-three aircraft carriers, and a zillion movies, at least some of which had Clint Eastwood. Okay, I’ll take that back. Having Clint Eastwood World War II movies is even more important than the ultimate comfort of a billionaire banker. There. I said it. Go ahead and judge me.

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

KELLY

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

At some point, there’s a mathematical limit where debt actually matters. After World War II, the United States dealt with debt through a crazy plan: paying it back, while growing the economy. As we stand right now, with the exception of spending enough on defense to cause the Soviets to collapse, we’ve gotten very little out of that debt. It’s like the nation has since 1990 gone on a spending binge like a six year old with addled on sugar with Mom’s credit card, ending up with a pile of Amazon® packages and next-day Prime® diabetes.

Outside of the economic mess which would have gone off at some point with our without the WuFlu, we’re a nation divided politically. The split has been getting worse and worse through time. People have cut off relations with relatives because of political differences that would have made for amusing table discussions even a decade ago. The creeping socialism that’s been winding its way through society since FDR’s New Deal used the Great Depression to introduce sweeping social changes that wrapped themselves around the national brainstem is now fresh again, back like Nic Cage on a bad sequel.

The idea of infinite benefits from a magical printing press is as old as any fairy tale, and we share it with our children every year – he’s called Santa Claus. But lots of people don’t believe in Santa Claus. Why?

Because Santa’s not real.

Santa can’t exist as he violates a fundamental law of the universe – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL, as Pournelle and Niven would have said. Heck, the one thing the Soviets in a gulag and hard-core libertarians agree on is: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. No wonder my kids came back so tough after a week at Ayn Rand Preschool – you had to have the will to take the bottle.

SOCIALIST

People in socialist countries are the only ones who envy the high tech that the Amish have.

These tensions – the financial system collapse tension plus the political division tension – don’t lead to a good outcome. It’s been noted by commenters here and elsewhere that as long as things are good and bellies are full, people won’t revolt. But if you were saving for a rainy day, look outside: it’s pouring.

As I see it, there are three major ways this situation plays out – and none of them end up with 2030 being “business as usual” anymore.

First alternative: the Left takes over. Just like in Virginia, the Left will spend about 20 minutes before they decide to implement their entire basket of changes. I don’t think that this is likely. The reason is that at this point I don’t think the Right will go gently onto that goodnight. They have realized that gun rights “compromises” include only taking rights away. The Right is not keen to compromise on any rights, which is why the recent push-back came against the Coronavirus-related state shutdowns. If the Left tries this, there will be some level of anarchy. And we all know how many anarchists it takes to change a lightbulb: none. Anarchists have never changed anything.

Second alternative: the states Balkanize. The entire experiment breaks up. The Right isn’t interested, for the most part, in controlling what goes on outside of their state, and would be quite amused to watch New York and Los Angeles figure out that the things that make their lives good, like food and gasoline, all come from places they don’t like made by people who don’t like them. Pretty soon they’d be trading Netflix® subscriptions for potatoes. The reason this is a solution of the Right is because Red State people want their freedoms and to be left alone to grill. This is a difficult outcome – splitting up the states seems to fall along party lines, but lots of Blue states have a Red ring around them, and lots of Red states are covered in Blue dots.

The Third, and in my mind an increasingly likely alternative is an American Caesar.

The Roman Republic officially started in 509 B.C., but at the beginning wasn’t much more than a high school audio-visual club with dominion of around six neighborhood blocks until about 282 B.C. It was at that point when the Romans finally took over most of the other tribes in the local area and began to vie for domination of the Mediterranean against Carthage for Blockbuster® franchise rights.

PRICE

“I hate it when they price just one dollar over. Seems so, disloyal, right Brutus?”

The Roman Republic was fed by expansion. At the time when Caesar became a de facto emperor, Rome controlled not only modern day Italy, but most of Spain, Portugal, Greece, a lot of the northern coast of Africa, France, Belgium, and the Balkan area. Does a republic or a democracy expand? Yes – whoever thought a democracies don’t start wars was as deluded as Joe Biden when he recently denounced President Lincoln for the way he’s handling the polio epidemic.

The Roman Republic lasted until Julius Caesar created and took the throne as dictator after political intrigue. He stepped into a situation where his political enemies were out to get him, and had passed a law to strip him of his troops. Politically and popularly, Caesar was already famous – he had written Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was a bestseller that described his military exploits. It was popular in Rome, and meant at least partially as propaganda to the common people to sidestep the Senate and official media. Sound familiar?

Caesar knew that his political enemies had a trap set for him when he returned – he was certain they’d strip his titles and wealth from him, but, he had an army that was more loyal to him than it was to Rome. When he led Legio XIII (the 13th Legion) across the Rubicon River, Caesar legendarily said, “The die is cast.” By law, Roman Consuls gave up command at the Rubicon, some 200 miles north of Rome, which was probably about a hard 10-day march over the good roads at Rome. The Senate heard that “Julius is coming,” and got out of there faster than your Leftist friends when it comes time to split the bill for lunch.

Although things were politically precarious at that point, this was the big step. Rome tipped into a civil war. Caesar won, and the people were, generally, pleased, mainly because salads were popular back then. That’s why a few years after Caesar was assassinated, Augustus Caesar was able to take the title – the people were wanting to end the political nonsense, even if it meant a kind of tyranny: this wasn’t the first nor the last time this deal would be made. The people of Rome at that point didn’t want to elect a leader – they wanted an end to the chaos. If the result was an Emperor? So be it.

CAESARD

Spoiler, Caesar died. It would have been much worse if he had continued as a vegetable – let us mourn him.

So far, the leader of the United States has been (more or less) elected through legal means. The Electoral College itself is a great bulwark against fraud – it’s hard to fake enough votes because the dead voting in Chicago alone won’t do it. You’d have to have recounts in cemeteries in dozens of states.

With the jobless increasing 22 million in four weeks, chaos is on the way once people can leave their basements. Unless COVID-19 interrupts, I expect actual riots at the Democratic Convention, especially if they forget the Tupperware® they keep Biden in. Given how much economic activity has already cratered in the United States – total credit card spending is down nearly 30% since last year, but the rent for the store is the same. Businesses won’t be hiring anytime soon, and there’s no way that this will be a sharp recovery.

That economic and political turmoil that we’ll see in the next few years is ripe for a hero, a savior to come forward. Will this new leader look like the old Caesar? No, certainly not. Certainly this savior will be someone that many people know, and look up to.

Tom Hanks?

HANKS

Maybe President-for-life Tom Hanks? Nah, I hear he eats baby kittens.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean.  Apparently.  And my job is to sit and look at paintings.  So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting?  Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

SAVAGE

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women. 

The death of the United States as we know it is near.  COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian.  Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom.  Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death.  This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence).  That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires.  You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole.  Mr. Cole was an American painter.  I say “was” because he’s now dead.  This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848.  Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976.  Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State.  It’s the first picture up above.  Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes.  His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom.  In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough.  It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man.  This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

PASTORAL

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times.  Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one.  I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State.  Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization.  The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals.  The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture.  If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight.  This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan.  Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism.  It’s how it feels to be on the winning team.  Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable.  Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle:  “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!”  Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan.  After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general:  “Don’t fall for it!  It’s a trap!  There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier.  At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck.  The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

CONSUMM

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings.  Of course, I had to meme all over it.  And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power.  Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation.  Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®.  It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created.  While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success.  Virtue is replaced by vanity.  Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it.  Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

DESTRU

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set.  Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid?  Okay.  Not everyone.  But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence.  Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire.  Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®.  Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture.  Why?  Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society.  Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome?  I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears.  Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash.  The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits.  I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World.  Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold.  How much wealth?  So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do.  So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold.  After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War.  I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful.  But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so.  The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked.  It was really good.  Why was I shocked that it was good?  No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves.  Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears?  Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

DESOL

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth.  This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire.  The Empire is over.  The drama is over.  What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization.  It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were.  Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it.  Would the Roman Empire collapse?  Certainly.  Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse?  No.  But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome.  What was the first name of the United States Army?  Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her.  It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us.  There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well:  “Hard times breed strong men.  Strong men breed good times.  Good times breed soft men.  Soft men?  They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times.  But don’t fear.  This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.