COVID – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

A Day Trip To Another America

“The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” – Star Wars®, A New Hope

Well, at least they’re admitting it . . . (None of the memes today are originals – they are “as-found” on the Internet)

Pugsley is an athlete, and that causes us to have to go to places to see him engage in his sport (elk milking) across the state, and sometimes across state lines. These are, for the most part, the only trips of any significance that we have taken in the last two years. Pugsley, sadly, is old enough that I can’t skip the trip with him on his sports jaunts since he no longer buys my excuse.

What’s my excuse? I’m adopted. So, I tell him, “I can’t go because my parents won’t sign the permission slip.” He doesn’t even giggle at that. He’s got a cold heart.

Here in Modern Mayberry, masks have essentially disappeared from all public life. The only place that might still require them is the local hospital, and thankfully I have no idea if they do or not. We ate brunch today and, although many of the patrons at the restaurant were older folks, there wasn’t a single mask to be seen. These are country folk. They’re more afraid of bad weather for the crops than they are of a virus, and they feel that they can control the virus about as much as they can control the weather.

Everywhere our family has been across the state, it looks and feels like the same. It looks a lot like the elk-milking competitions I went to when The Boy (Pugsley’s older brother) was in high school. This was back before the Great Plague Of Overblown Impact hit us. There are no masks, and people just behave like . . . well, nothing ever happened.

Late 2021 looks exactly like 2019 in my daily life. We even shake hands when we meet people and we don’t act like we’ve just dipped our hands in some sort of biohazard, or have touched AOC’s teeth. But I repeat myself.

The elk milking competition went well. There were hundreds of people all inside for a day. I coughed once, I think (nacho went down the wrong hole, and no, I’m not going to make that a joke about my nacho hole) and no one bothered to even look. Here in Midwestia, we’re over it. We’re not afraid.

We don’t care anymore.

Or, at least I thought.

The Boy has been off at college. As finals were over, and Pugsley’s elk milking competition was near his college, The Boy came on to cheer his brother on. Those elk milking siphons sure make a guy’s wrists tired. After the competition was over, we decided to go and grab some food. As we have exactly six restaurants in our usual rotation in Modern Mayberry, eating somewhere new is a treat.

The Boy asked his friends about good restaurants near where we were.

They were all in . . . Blue City. Every Red State has a Blue City, where nose rings and “meat is murder” t-shirts outsell gasoline and beef jerky. The friends came up with three names. Two were burger joints, and the third was a Japanese place.

I’ll admit I was interested in eating Japanese. At first, I had some pretty big resistance, until I explained it wasn’t Japanese people that we were going to eat, but Japanese food. Then everyone agreed. I guess it’s a matter of taste?

Huh, that’s a specific list . . .

We got to Blue City. Pugsley, fresh off of his second-place elk milking victory, was driving.

The first thing I noted was this: in Modern Mayberry, if I want to go to a place, I can park near it. In Blue City, in order to get to the Not At All Cannibal Where You Eat Japanese People Restaurant, we had to park over a quarter-mile away.

Honestly, the walk didn’t hurt me. Nor did feeding the parking meter $1.50 to park to not eat Japanese people. Nor did walking through the faceless, anonymous crowd. But it wasn’t a pleasant walk. It felt like walking in a street from some sort of dystopian movie, like Bladerunner®, filled with people who hordes of people I didn’t know or and who didn’t care about me on crowded streets. It was like being in my house in the morning before anyone had any coffee.

Thankfully I didn’t have to fashion a cloak out of an abandoned tarp. Or did I?

I came to a store that I wanted to go into. I was about to open the door when I noticed the laminated sign on the clear glass door: “No entrance without masks. If you wish to purchase our products but don’t want to wear a mask, feel free to visit us on the Internet.” The Mrs. quite succinctly mentioned where she thought they could stick their Internet, but I wondered if it would be uncomfortable for them to have so much CNN® up in that dark, moist place. We left them in peace, and I hope they have a lot of dark, moist success.

We kept walking to the Restaurant That Definitely Doesn’t Serve Asian People As Food Because Of That Health Inspection, the foot traffic was continuous. Many people were masked, though not all. Finally, we got to our destination. On the door was another sign, just like the first store, though they didn’t offer to ship cooked people over the Internet.

This immediately caught the ire of The Mrs., and since she’s at least a bit Irish, you don’t want to get the ire of an Irish lass too Irish. Or something. Let’s just say that she can have a bit of a temper that makes Belfast in 1972 look like a Care Bears® movie. I looked inside the restaurant, though, and there were plenty of people not wearing masks.

They were mostly all eating, but they weren’t wearing masks. Apparently, the virus doesn’t travel when you’re sitting and eating, only when you’re standing and ignoring the duct-tape crosses on the floor in the line. When we first entered the restaurant, there was another person not eating and not wearing a mask. Since he could get away with it, I figured we could, too. As he was a people of color, I would have a jolly fun time making a YouTube® show if they kicked us out, and not him.

They ignored that we were unmasked heretics and were pleasant and served us.

Hey, that’s Internet me!

The restaurant really didn’t serve Japanese food, just ramen. It was expensive ramen, since ramen with steak in it cost $14.50 a bowl. They took our order, and we waited at our table.

We got the oddly shaped (14 inches wide and eight-foot long) table near the front. The chairs were weirdly high and the restaurant smelled of . . . farts. Really. The ramen, though, was excellent. Mine was filled with steak and mushrooms and was unexpectedly (and subtly) spicy.

I generally get the chair so I can see the entrance – The Mrs. is used to it. We had gotten to the restaurant right before the rush – patrons that came in right after us were told that they could get a text when a table was available. In Modern Mayberry, you can walk into the best restaurant in town and (generally) have no more than a zero-minute wait. And a quarter block is a long walk to it.

But it wasn’t that which bothered me the most.

What I noticed were the patrons coming into the restaurant. They all wore masks, even the young children. I understand that there is both a logical and a scientific case to be made that masks do help stop disease spread. And nearly every person in the restaurant was at zero risk of serious complications from the ‘Rona. The children were at zero risk. Heck, I was nearly the oldest guy in there.

As everyone in the Wilder fam has had the ‘Rona, my fear level was zero.

Oh, money can’t buy love, but it can buy fear.

But what I saw wasn’t so much fear or even altruism in wearing the masks. What I saw was subjugation in its nearly universal compliance. Would I have put on a mask to eat a Japanese person bowl of ramen? No. I wouldn’t put on a mask to eat a nice steak bathed in PEZ® with Johnny Depp as he drank Amber Heard’s tears.

After dinner, I was struck by the differences in attitude between Blue City and Modern Mayberry. I felt fear in Blue City that I never feel around here. It’s not that the ‘Rona is done here – there are still 50 or so cases a week in the county. But I get the sense that residents here are just done caring about it.

Of the people who have died in our county, I know exactly zero of them. Zero. And I know a lot of people around here. As mentioned before, I’ve had some variation of COVID, as have The Mrs., Pugsley and The Boy. From the data I’ve seen, that makes us functionally immune in a way better than (insert jab booster number here) can never achieve. The virus itself will hopefully have zero additional physical impact on the Family Wilder.

Oh, wait. They’re not done yet?

But what impact will baseless fear have on our lives? Right now there is a threat that if we:

don’t take an mRNA shot that doesn’t work,
we won’t be able to work because we might be able to transmit a disease that we can’t get,
but that those who get the mRNA jab can get.
And those who get “jab” can also transmit.

Fear is the source of most Evil things that have plagued (intended) mankind. At this point, the biggest shortage we have is a shortage of courage. Stand strong. I won’t suggest that you do or don’t do anything, but for me, the mRNA shot and its infinite number of iterations is a step too far.

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

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

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

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

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

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

Fun fact: he never ran for office.

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

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

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

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

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

Energy in 2022? I Hope So . . .

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy – sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body – anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

I went into a room with a negative person in it, and then there were no people in it.

Energy is freedom.

Energy allows one person to do the work of hundreds or thousands. I sit here typing this in Stately Wilder Mansion, it’s near freezing outside, yet a nice and toasty 61°F (43 and 2/3°kiloPEZ®) inside due to natural gas piped directly to my heater. I like it cold in the house, just like my heart.

My computer is running, the television is running, and because I am apparently the only person in the house who knows how to use a light switch, at least 32 lights are on in the house are on. It’s winter, so a light left on is (at worst) a little inefficient heater, so all is not lost. I will tell you that when I die, though, I will walk to the light. And turn it off.

Our energy costs aren’t all that high in winter, especially since I can keep warm by rubbing my thighs together like a cricket. I go and fill my gas tank about every two months, so gasoline isn’t even that much of an issue. When your commute is four miles a day (two miles each way) and takes four minutes (if I get caught at the one traffic light), well, it’s hard to use a lot of gas unless I pour it all over the truck and ignite it to look like a cool meteor while I’m driving. Again.

But energy is freedom.

I started bench pressing again. That’s a huge weight off my chest.

When energy prices are low around the globe, freedom increases. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, high energy costs act like a tax on nearly all physical goods. Sure, it won’t make the cost of a Kindle® e-book go up much, but it will increase the cost of a physical book – that has to be manufactured using energy, moved using energy, and delivered using energy.

So, what’s up? Why are prices where they are? Where are prices going?

I’ll start with “what’s up?”

We can’t create additional energy just by turning a knob: the process is a bit more complicated than one of Joe Biden’s coloring books.

Let’s take oil. In the 1930s, oil in Texas was so plentiful that it crashed the price. Pools of the stuff would show up if you stuck a McDonalds straw too deep into the ground in East Texas. Oil was so plentiful that people could barely tell the difference between water and gasoline. Of course, in Flint, Michigan, you can get the gasoline unleaded.

I hear their swimmers are always in the lead.

What happened then is the Texas Railroad Commission decided it was in charge, and it limited the amount of oil that could be produced. It was OPEC® before OPEC™ was even thought of – their idea was to stabilize the price of a seemingly limitless resource.

It worked.

But the era of oil abundance in the United States ended in 1973, and the Texas Railroad Commission (which still exists but no longer regulates railroads, seriously) ended allocations. Texas could no longer control the price of oil in the United States by restricting sales. The hunt for the next big oilfield was on.

We had then to hunt for oil in more and more distant places.

Alaska.
The Middle East.
Deepwater offshore.
Johnny Depp’s hair.

Also? When exposed to pollen, bees develop hives.

Then we hit the jackpot – fracking. Fracked oil is different than conventional crude. It’s hidden in tight rocks that aren’t as porous. That’s where the fracking comes in – the rock has to be fractured to let the oil out. To keep the cracks open, high-pressure water and sand (and chemicals) are forced into the cracks. The grains of sand remain and keep the cracks open. There are so many jokes I’m not going to do here.

When this process started, it was inefficient. But smart people spending billions of dollars will tend to make progress over time. Dumb people with billions of dollars? We call that the opposite of progress: Congress.

There are three problems with fracking:

One – fracked wells are most productive in their first year of production. Oil companies often run a rejuvenation process that increases flow after a few years, but mostly the later years are just a trickle in comparison to the initial years of production. So, to have a continuous supply, you have to keep drilling, which is not boring.

Two – you have to keep drilling. If the price drops and drilling stops, then the quantity of oil available drops quickly. Then the price goes up. Then everyone drills. Because everyone is drilling, then the prices drops again. And everyone stops drilling. This acts like a “crack the whip” on the economy, since, as mentioned above, high oil prices act as a tax.

Why fracking? Because I hear drilling is rigged.

Three – there’s more than profitability at stake. Let me give an example: if I have to walk to the grocery store to get food, and then I walk back home, that sounds healthy, right? Sure. I’m burning energy to go to the store.

But what happens if I burn more energy to go to the store than is contained in the food that I buy at the store?

I lose weight. I’m actually spending more energy to get food than the energy in the food I’m consuming. Plus, I’m rubbing my thighs together so I can stay warm.

What might be good for me is devastating as an economy. At some point, it will be so difficult to get energy from oil, that, just like my trip to the store, we’ll be spending more energy to get the oil than the oil will provide us. The energy return on energy invested will actually deplete the amount of energy available for us to use.

The more energy we use? The faster we run out of energy.

I spent an hour on the treadmill yesterday. Tomorrow? I might turn it on.

Our primary energy source is that thermonuclear reactor that shows up every morning. Our secondary source is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from that same reactor, which just happens to show up in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. But the sunlight striking us every day has a problem: it’s so diffuse that it’s difficult to make profitable use of it. Sure, it warms us, it tans us, it makes the wind for our turbines, the photosynthesis for our corn, and the rain for our hydroelectric. Energy is only useful when it becomes concentrated in some way.

You can’t generate energy with a tan. Unless it’s a really, really good tan.

Are we at the point where it takes more energy than it’s worth to get energy? A wind turbine in a good location will return 10 to 20 times the energy it took to make it, though that’s over the course of 20 years. In a bad location? A wind turbine will never return that energy, though I hear they love music: they’re huge metal fans.

So, are we there yet, where the production of energy costs more than the energy we get?

I don’t think so. Not quite yet. When we do get there, it will become a cascading failure – every bit of energy we produce will actually dig us deeper into a hole. Just like the Red Queen I mentioned last week:

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

Never take a racing snail’s shell. That makes it sluggish.

To keep a world of 8 billion people alive and with enough energy to consume Doritos® and Disney™ and Facebook© takes an ever increasing amount of energy. 2020 was an aberration – people stopped driving and energy prices (temporarily) went down faster than Kamala Harris’ . . . approval rating.

The last question was “what happens next?”

Currently (today) oil is about $70 per barrel. The analysts that JPMorgan® have chained up in the basement of their skyscraper say that oil will jump to an average price of $125 per barrel in 2022, and then pop up further to $150 per barrel in 2023.

Double today’s prices. Yikes!

What about the Energy Information Agency (EIA, a .gov that seems to be actually interested in energy)? They say that in 2022, oil will average about . . . $72 per barrel – nearly the same as today.

It’s funny, because to know the price of oil, you have to know what is happening with economic growth, oil demand, and inflation. If any of us know any of those things with certainty, we could make bets and double our money or better in six months.

Why did Biden win the golf tournament? Because he finished it with one big stroke.

If JPMorgan™ has that genie in a bottle, they certainly wouldn’t be sharing it with mere mortals like you and I on the Internet – they’d make private trades and be zillionaires. The fine folks at the EIA probably don’t make nearly as much as the analysts at JPMorgan©, but they do have the abject despair of working at a government job every single day.

My prediction?

If the economy crashes and the stock market implodes, oil will follow. People who aren’t working don’t need to go to jobs. Will oil hit $40? Depends on how low the stock market goes.
But! If inflation spikes and the government keeps shoveling cash like coal into a train firebox, well, $150 per barrel oil might seem like a bargain that would be cheap enough to take a shower in.

Crappy prediction, right?

It is. Because with all of the difficult issues we simply don’t know. The easiest bet is that oil will be more expensive because once inflation is unleashed, it’s hard to put back into the bottle. The 1970s looked like this, so that would be my best bet.

Regardless, expensive energy has almost always been the enemy of freedom.

Prepare accordingly.

COVID: “Hey, look at the mess I can make.” The Jab: “Hold my beer.”

“Either put on these glasses or start eating that trashcan.” – They Live

So, if I take it I can still catch the ‘Rona and I can still spread the ‘Rona, but the unjabbed are the problem?

The endgame of the ‘Rona may be near.

“Two weeks to stop the spread” has now been going on for 630 days. “The Jab” got its Emergency Use Authorization about a year ago. And now, the latest stats I’ve seen show 59% of the people in the country have double-jabbed, and 69% have had at least one dose.

But what are the consequences? I would give you a conspiracy theory, but let’s face it: in 2021, conspiracy theories should be called what they really are: plot spoilers.

Honestly, the impact of the vaxx is not fully known, and probably won’t be for years. But there have been a stunning series of news stories showing up that tell us that whatever problems are causing the wave of excess deaths, it is certainly, completely, and utterly not the mRNA gene therapy causing it:

(LINK) Cannabis! Yes. That certainly is the only reason that young people who normally never have heart attacks and die are having them. Whew. Problem solved. The American Heart Association would never lie to us, right?

(LINK) Oh, the heart attacks are being caused by stress because of the ‘Rona. Well, that’s relieving to know! This is mainly in that heart-attack-prone age group of 30 to 45. Oh, and the 300,000? That’s in the UK.

(LINK) Don’t forget poor diet. Also, show a picture of keto food while complaining about sugar.

(LINK) Climate change! You have to remember that changes babies in the womb now, and makes their hearts do something . . . I guess.

Shakespeare had a line in Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” It’s like they’re explaining why a present and future wave of heart attacks has absolutely nothing at all to do with “the jab” or any side effects.

But, we’ve already listed the American Heart Association as a source, right? What else are they saying?

The study in question is here (LINK). Apparently, some doctors think . . . the jab might cause . . . heart attacks? But I thought it was stress or bacon or climate change or weed? By the way, The Mrs. informed me that Twitter® is reportedly censoring this link. Huh.

But here it gets deadly serious (LINK). If Dr. Rogers is correct, the blood of thousands of children will be on the hands of those that force kids to get “the jab”. Even adults over 65 are five times more likely to die of the mRNA than to die of COVID, if the cited literature is right. RTWT.

I would normally think of that level of misconduct as being, well, criminal. In Australia, however, there’s a manhunt for three folks who broke out of a concentration camp voluntary COVID isolation leisure facility. I guess criminal has a different meaning down there . . . .

I mean, it’s voluntary, right?

I guess that just makes one thing perfectly clear:

Why Leftists Hate You

“Well, I don’t care if he’s a Liberal or an ax murderer, I want you two boys to stay clear of him, understood? – Eerie, Indiana

I hear that Greta loves this blog – she knows most of my jokes are recycled.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” – Aldous Huxley

Regardless of whether or not you like Huxley, he certainly hit the mark with this comment. This has certainly been the case with the reaction of the “vaxxed” crowd to those that have chosen to avoid having themselves subjected to more-or-less experimental-level mRNA manipulation. I hear the lead scientist was Gene Hackman.

If you’re a coward, the FDA has just approved a new drug. Ask your doctor if Growacet® is right for you.

Though Huxley tapped into a universal weakness, this is a reaction that is far more common on the Left than on the Right. Leftism is built on weakness. If people can take care of themselves, if they are confident, if they respect themselves, it is much less likely that they will become Leftists.

Leftists, at the core of their being, feel inferior. This is observable in the ways that they protest – they constantly put themselves in danger. They lie down in front of cars. They block highways.

The reason is that, due to their feelings of inferiority, they actually long to be either punished or to have their existence ended. And the data shows that Leftists are much more likely to suffer from a mental issue. Much more likely. Here’s a thread where data scientist Zach Goldberg breaks down a Pew® study (LINK).

If you didn’t click on the link, here is just one fact that says it all: 56.3% of white female Leftists between the ages of 18-29 have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental health condition. White “conservative” men in the same age group? 16.3%. Leftist men in the same age group? 33.6%.

Do insane accountants hear strange and threatening invoices?

If you are talking to a young Leftist woman, it is more likely that she has a mental health issue than not. If you are talking to a young Leftist man, you are talking with someone who has a greater chance of having been diagnosed with a mental health issue than any age/sex group on the Right.

So, Leftists feel inferior and lead the league in diagnosed mental issues.

What else?

This sense of inferiority coupled with mental illness makes Leftists especially brittle mentally. They cannot even listen to ideas that they disagree with. Ideas that they find distasteful, no matter how true, are psychologically devastating to them. When they say that they are “literally shaking” it’s probable that’s correct. Me? I only “literally shake” when I make James Bond® a martini.

We know the true villains the Left wants to stop . . .

This leads to the Great Counterfactual Gambit of facts that Leftists have to ignore to live on a day to day basis:

Men (on average) will always be much stronger than women. When a high school boy beats a woman’s world record time in swimming practice, it’s normal. Yet some people (weirdly) say there’s no physical difference between women and men.
This brings us to trans- people. Any suggestion that the latest mantra of “trans women are women” is against all manner of biological facts, well, is unacceptable. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to have a word for “trans women”. Likewise, “trans women” wouldn’t be upset that they often can only get dates from other “trans” people.
We aren’t all born with equal abilities, temperaments, or physical characteristics. We are actually not even remotely the same in many respects. Sure, we’re human, but some populations have extremely different DNA, with great degrees of differing abilities based solely on that. Intelligence is (studies suggest) at least 60% heritable, and maybe higher. The trend is that, in 2020, people segregate themselves by I.Q. before they marry – we’re mobile and smart people end up (mostly) marrying other smart people. This increases the number of very smart people, and it’s not random. (And, perhaps a reason that autism is on the rise.)

I could go on and on. The difficulty is that Leftism requires that people ignore reality when reality gives them results they don’t like. I read one article where a Leftist was writing a hand-wringing piece about how disappointed that he was that artificial intelligence could determine the race of the patient being x-rayed with a high degree of accuracy. This bothered him because the researchers intentionally took the data and degraded it.

The A.I. could still easily determine accurately the races of most of the people being x-rayed. This bothered the scientist because it violated his belief that race was just a social construct, yet here a robot was dismantling that very belief.

If you make a device that’s good at noticing patterns, you can either accept that patterns exist, or you can make the machine ignore reality and thus make it useless, and Congress can’t stand the competition.

If an A.I. takes a picture of itself, will that be considered selfie-aware?

This reflects outward in the art that Leftists love. They hate the world, so they like art that is to a sane mind repugnant is what they seek. They see themselves as afraid of any sort of competition, so they want to practice inversion:

Weakness is strength.
Cowardice is courage.
Ugliness is beauty.
Defeat is victory.

Oops, forgot! Slavery is freedom.

The result of an inverted Leftist utopia is a burned world, cleansed of all that they despise.

The philosophy of the Left is similarly bankrupt. The ideas are based on another rejection of reality:

All cultures are equal.
Scientific analysis is led by philosophy, and valid only when it backs Leftist talking points.
Classification of things – good and bad, smart and dumb, fat and thin is inherently wrong.

Remember, the best way to win an argument is to silence anyone who has a different opinion!

The granddaddy of all of these is this:

All truth is relative.

This one is especially insidious – it takes a True statement (we cannot know everything) and thus takes it to the idea of the general: we can know nothing for certain. Start with mathematics: if you believe that 1+1=2, then you believe that there is Truth. Gravity always pulls down. Truth.

Do I see every event from every angle? Can I know the position of every atom inside of every person in a play? If I watch the play from a different seat, do I get a different meaning?

Sure, I’ll buy that I can’t know everything. But if I jump in front of a semi that’s traveling down the highway at 120 miles per hour (4 liters per second) I will die and what’s left of me will look like someone dropped a bag of vegetable soup. Unless the semi is made of Nerf® material, but that’s fairly unlikely since it absorbs vegetable soup.

Lastly, the Left feels they have no power. Ever argue with someone in real life who has never had any real power? Whatever they have, they will use until it’s nearly abuse – the average DMV will prove my case. Power is the end product. They feel that they are inferior, reject reality, and wish to have power so that they can have revenge against those that they feel have slighted them.

A Leftist won a contest – he would get $100,000, but $200,000 would go to the person he hated most. I wonder what he’s going to do with $300,000?

Together, these ideas explain the absolute hatred that the Left feels for those who have refused to take “the jab.” These are based on the idea that, at last, they are superior. What would they do to get and keep that power? Would they put people into camps? Would they gladly watch them die?

Yes, yes they would.

The “Take This Job And Shove It” Economy

“Sure. Grab it, store it, shove it.” – Babylon 5

My parents always called me a gifted child. Turned out I was abandoned in a box on the front step.

I was at the store the other day with The Mrs. and Pugsley. We saw a retail clerk we knew and were discussing life with him. Normally, the retail clerk is very opinionated but upbeat. I’ll admit, it has been over six months since I’ve seen him, but his transformation was amazing.

He’s “retired” but spends his time selling things that he likes to sell. He’s probably one of the biggest experts in town, and a job like his is (more or less) being paid for talking to people about his hobby. He doesn’t have to work, but he wants to. Thankfully it wasn’t a weird hobby, like taking pictures of trout wearing cute outfits. That’s like shooting fish in apparel.

This visit to the store was different. Like I mentioned above, he’s normally upbeat. Now? Not at all. He was angry. He railed against management that didn’t care. He railed against customers that treated low-wage retail employees as if it was their fault that the store didn’t have their particular brand of banana mist spray. The store employee sounded as angry as Darth Vader – I mean he was really venting.

The clerk we talked with wasn’t quitting. Yet. But he was done. He’s done taking crap from management. He’s done taking crap from customers.

I got fired for asking a customer “rare or well done?” The funeral home said that wasn’t the right way to ask, “burial or cremation?”

One more customer screaming at him because something wasn’t on the shelf? He might take off the company shirt and step outside with the customer. After he’s finished the business with the customer he would probably just keep walking.

And this is in Modern Mayberry, where we’ve been essentially untouched by the ‘Rona crisis and mandates and masks. He’s done.

In society at large, I see the very same pattern.

Keep in mind, the retail worker that I described above was nearly at the sour cream stage on his taco because of the rude customers. Why were the customers so rude?

They’re done, too.

They’re done with an economy where they have been abandoned.
They’re done with shortages they don’t understand.
They’re done with rising prices to feed their family.
They’re done with expensive gasoline.
Oh, and they’re done with masks and mandates, too.

Voters on the Right are done, too. The idea of compromise is hateful – the positions are crystallized:

Vax mandate for the greater good versus basic human rights.
Collective guilt over crimes committed hundreds of years in the past versus meritocracy.
Five million other things. I’d list them, but you know them. You see them every day, and it boils down to the violence of the collective mob versus the rights of a constitutional republic.

In my adult life, the high point of our country being cohesive was on 9/12/2001. In that moment, we tried, really hard, to come together as a country. The result? Two of the longest wars in United States history, trillions in debt, the Patriot Act, and Obama.

What do you call Bill Gates’ divorce? An unplanned update.

The lowest point?

Right now.

This has significant political implications, but also economic implications. People like the retail employee, working because they want to, can leave anytime. But it’s more than just that one retail employee. How many other people are just walking away? How many are one rude customer away from wadding up the company smock, and walking out the front door for the last time?

How many firefighters will quit rather than get the jab? How many EMTs will simply walk away rather than submit to it? By my count, the number is not insignificant, and these are crucial jobs if you like keeping your house not burned up like and would like granny to get to the emergency room in some other fashion than you tossing her into the bed of the pickup after you move the Purina® Lion Chow™ out.

Often, the people who run the services that keep the economy running are paid at the lowest levels. What happens when they decide they are done with the nonsense, too? What happens when they look around and see that they could work at McDonalds® for 10% of the stress and 90% of the pay?

No matter how often I ask for a large fry, they keep giving me lots of small ones.

We hear about an economy where jobs are plentiful, and takers are few. From what I see here, it’s true. Except the jobs that are plentiful are at the lowest levels of pay and prestige, and the people are simply not interested in taking them.

We have shortages of everything. Inflation is wonderful at creating that: inflation pulls demand forward. Why buy a window tomorrow when the price will be up. Buy the window now. Buy everything that that you can, now. This is a rational reaction, but when everyone does it, it feeds inflation.

Tensions are high. People who make $30,000 a year have seen themselves take a $3,000 pay cut, simply through the government’s printing of money. The cause may not be apparent, but at the gas station they see it. At the grocery store they see it. When the time to pay the rent comes?

They see it.

It’s not just that. At the voting booth, they look back at the 2020 election.

They see the fraud.

I will say this, he’s certainly given himself an incentive to not slip . . .

This is, to say the least, a very, very chaotic situation. As I said, we have shortages of everything. In 2018, the economy was working because the people in it were working. Now, in addition to the shortage of “stuff” we have shortages of the people who make things go, as well.

What does that lead to?

Increasing dysfunction. Worse services. Longer waits on EMT calls.

Why?

I call it the IDGAF economy. People are done. How many folks simply don’t care? How many have been crossed out of the economy and have the attitude, “screw ‘em all, I didn’t need this job anyway”?

A lot. In the 1977 as inflation hit there were similar sentiments – Johnny Paycheck scored a big hit with Take This Job and Shove It. This is where we are in 2021. People are done. People are sick of it all. They know the economy isn’t right.

I got some extra money this Halloween. I went into a haunted house and on the way out they handed me a paycheck.

Economies consist of more than companies and procedures and policies. Each of those things depends on: people. Lose a foreman? The crew may or may not do as well. If it was a good foreman, it’s likely that they don’t do as well. Lose an EMT, and you’re one shy for a full shift? Which heart attack do they skip out on?

Who makes that ambulance run? Who gives time off to the weekend dispatcher? Who runs the window at the DMV? Who makes the PEZ®?

The reactions I’ve seen so far are discouraging. The idea from at least some management is that, “Well, isn’t that a part of their job?” which is technically correct. But if they can do another job for a dollar less an hour that doesn’t cause a sacrifice?

They’re gone.

That’s the difficulty. An economy isn’t Nike® or Amazon™ or Netflix©. An economy is made of the people that run it. We’ve seen that truckers can paralyze an economy. Now imagine the economy when all the people that make it go say, “IDGAF”.

We’re close.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We There Yet? (Part II)

“Brandon, come on, let’s go . . . Brandon?” – Brightburn

Midnight?

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve bolded both 9. and 10. That’s the lead story.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Making The Call, Part II? – Violence And Censorship Update – Models For The Future, It’s Personal – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – After Virginia – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 600 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

Making The Call, Part II?

Last month we spent time discussing whether or not the United States has met the international criteria for being in a civil war. The answer (in my opinion) is that we are close enough that it’s hard to tell. Some people are solidly on the “it’s already going” and some are not. One bit of criteria that was sent to me by a faithful reader – thank you 173d VietVet. Mike Shelby (Forward Observer) wrote up a short missive on this question (LINK) and came out on the “no” side.

That’s fair. He put forward some criteria, and I thought they’d be worth discussing this month. These four bullet points are direct quotes:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police)
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens)
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide)
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting)

My responses are in bold:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police) – Have you seen the police recently? They have equipment that most world militaries would love to have. Heck, our police even have stuff we didn’t leave for the Taliban. To require military action seems irrelevant.
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens) – The trend in our current generation of warfare explicitly uses the citizen as a belligerent, if not the main belligerent. In my mind, it is more than enough that the government aids and abets citizens to kill others. This is indisputably happening right now.
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide) – This is the best point of the bunch. The violence (at some point) must go both ways. Right now, it is observably one-sided, and is looks much more like a genocide.
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting) – Another valid point, but remember, in dirty wars, state sponsored combat looks like . . . crime. I do hope the violence level drops, but there is no sign of it now.

Again, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shelby, but the reliance on his past military background provides an analysis lens that I do not share and he perhaps parses the terminology a bit more finely than I would. Thankfully, there’s room for both of us to be right.

If A is for apple and B is for banana, what is C for? Explosives.

I’m not going to (besides the notes above) belabor the point. I don’t care if the gun that shoots me belongs to a private from Louisiana or a cop or a Mexican cartel gunman. I’m still dead. And if the government is encouraging, it’s either genocide or, if the fighting goes both ways, it’s civil war.

There is more from Mr. Shelby a bit later in this edition of the Weather Report.

Violence And Censorship Update

Not a lot to add to violence this month.

Censorship, continues in full force. At the beginning of the month, Congress had a Facebook® “whistleblower” as the main witness at hearings where . . . she said the big problem with Facebook© is that they don’t censor nearly enough.

What does the “p” in Facebook© stand for? Privacy.

Yup. That was the story. But then it came out that that the “whistleblower” spent last October making sure that information that could damage Joe Biden was censored from Facebook™. She was on the team that made sure that information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed.

I’m shocked, shocked that she was wanting yet more censorship from Facebook.

Applying for work at Facebook® is easy. They already have your details.

Since it’s November, I thought I’d remind everyone of a picture from last year. Consider it a stroll down memory-hole lane.

There was more fraud in the 2020 election than in a Thanksgiving Wilder Family Monopoly® game.

Again, if you want free and fair elections, it’s absolutely certain that you block windows so the public can’t view the vote counting in any way. Stalin said it well: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Models For The Future – It’s Personal

I mentioned above that we’d see more from the Forward Observer, and here’s an excellent article where he discusses the model of the Irish Troubles as a model for potential future difficulties. You can read it here (LINK).

Similarly, Mary Christine put forward a fictional piece at The Burning Platform in 2019. Those set as a fiction, it describes how conflict escalated from the political to a guerilla war in Missouri during the Civil War. You can read it here (LINK).

A third model to think about would be the Second Boer War, where the British defeated the Boer Republics and forcefully integrated them into British South Africa. Like the other two, this conflict was based on guerilla tactics. To defeat them, the British finally just started putting Boer civilians (women and children) into concentration camps with all the expected brutality and tragedy that is implied by that. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the camps.

These models all have several things in common, but what strikes me is the utter brutality in each of them and the sometimes-targeted attacks on non-combatants. Conflict of this type is marked by tragedy in a way that lasts for generations – it becomes and remains personal.

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 combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and our perception of violence is holding steady.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it ticked up this month again, mainly on inflation fears.

Economic:

Economic measures ticked upwards in October – despite my prediction that they’d drop.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels last three months, and this rate is 4x the rate from any previous year in the last four.

After Virginia

Virginia has scared the Left, badly. In their minds, Virginia had become a permanent Blue state – a Leftist outpost where statues could be taken down and Critical Race Theory could start along with hormone treatments for kindergartners.

Then they lost. Big time. And it wasn’t just a loss, it was a loss that was a psychological blow. Biden is in political free-fall, and is less popular than COVID-19.

The Left is realizing the hard truth: they won’t sweep into a victory, everywhere and forever. The comments section in Leftist areas?

Calling for a peaceful split. Previously, when winning, they wanted it all – they were sure they were going to win and establish a socialist paradise from sea to shining sea.

This was a sea change. They realize that the attitude of the Right is changing, and they realize that they’re managing to make Trump look good to the swing voters. Is a consensus building for a split?

Is this where we might beheaded?

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

From Sea To Shining Sea

Brooklyn 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1NR_DWUeKI

Brooklyn 2: https://twitter.com/i/status/1454903434046578688

Lancaster PA: https://youtu.be/-Ch2q0Gw5Vg

Washington DC: https://twitter.com/i/status/1447913542674522117

Chicago 1: https://twitter.com/i/status/1445784277807890436

Chicago 2:https://twitter.com/i/status/1445483216475885576

Minneapolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_6hA9PgICc

Mobile AL:https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1449214856138305536

Berkeley Campus: https://youtu.be/dYB9-o5QklE

Army Boot Camp: https://twitter.com/i/status/1449910120364879880

Marine Field Exercise: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10159949/Royal-Marines-commandos-force-troops-humiliating-surrender-training-exercise.html

Bad Guys…Guns…Good Gals

https://alphanews.org/78-instances-of-fully-automatic-gunfire-in-minneapolis-so-far-this-year/

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-is-killing-10000-black-americans-every-year-158601

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article255162407.html

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/more-women-especially-black-women-are-becoming-gun-owners-ownership-firearms/531-49622eec-5ac8-4793-ab89-cfa0213ebff4

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-winsome-sears-becomes-virginias-first-female-lieutenant-governor

Election Tidbits

https://twitter.com/GlennYoungkin/status/1448396312098050048

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/breaking-fulton-county-georgia-ordered-one-million-absentee-ballots-printer-days-2020-election-knowing-no-time-mail/

https://www.wtnh.com/news/politics/emails-released-to-news-8-show-a-flurry-of-confusion-over-mass-absentee-ballots-mailed-to-guilford-voters/

https://www.defendflorida.org/canvassing

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/secretary_raffensperger_calls_on_department_of_justice_to_investigate_allegations_of_fulton_county_shredding_applications

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/ap_news/gbi-chief-not-enough-evidence-to-pursue-gop-s-ballot-fraud-claim/article_edd11901-b7a1-524f-9815-6bedbdd4bc98.html

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/kline-zucks-bucks-were-illegal/

Secession – Thinking Nationally

https://link.medium.com/yNzD8Sxhzkb

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-md-rodricks-1010-civil-war-20211008-sy33rtzmind5vnsawrshjh2tw4-story.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-saw-americas-crackup-coming-in-2011he-says-its-worse-now

https://alt-market.us/in-a-civil-war-the-authoritarian-left-would-be-easily-beaten-but-it-wont-end-there/

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/09/a-new-confederacy-and-the-have-already-seceded/

Secession – Acting Locally

https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously

https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/california-secede-one-group-got-a-key-approval-last-week-to-try/

https://www.axios.com/atlantas-whitest-neighborhood-may-secede-7ae8755d-d378-4aa1-8534-f90faf029356.html

https://dnyuz.com/2021/10/22/bye-maryland-lawmakers-in-3-counties-float-a-plan-to-secede-from-the-state/

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-canada-health-public-health-idaho-0d2015c826bb01a2cd04b31254c870c5

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/10/10/civil-war-trending-on-twitter-after-comment-made-by-trump-supporter/?sh=3c6d9b0b1853

https://www.laconiadailysun.com/news/state/lawmaker-wants-new-hampshire-to-declare-independence/article_d2717e73-5b7b-55b8-a8b3-aa7a45da9bf2.html

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/voters/should-the-2022-ballot-include-a-vote-on-new-hampshire-seceding-from-the-united-states/poll_fc16f69e-161c-11ec-8c39-b318093e8de3.html

https://www.amazon.com/Break-Up-Secession-Division-Imperfect-ebook/dp/B07X9PWSVG

https://www.amazon.com/American-Secession-Looming-National-Breakup-ebook/dp/B07N94RL11

Secession – Everybody Calm Down

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/no-were-not-more-divided-than-we-were-during-the-civil-war/

https://www.governing.com/now/is-america-in-a-cold-civil-war-not-at-all

https://www.sunjournal.com/2021/10/10/rich-lowry-national-divorce-is-a-poisonously-stupid-idea/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443

https://www.silive.com/news/2021/10/its-dangerous-for-pro-trumpers-or-anybody-else-to-want-to-secede-from-the-united-states-opinion.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043401926/russia-expert-fiona-hill-there-is-nothing-for-you-here

Secession – The Least Of Our Worries?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10154745/The-pace-China-moving-stunning-Americas-No-2-ranking-military-officer-said.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moment-biden-casually-committed-ww3-over-taiwan-last-nights-town-hall

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/secret-chinese-philosopher-lessons-for-america/

https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/

https://dokumen.pub/america-against-america.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

Masque Of The Red Death, 2021 Version

“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.

Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner. It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner. Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth. The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.

It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.

Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago. Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it. Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs. (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people. It just takes timing. You should try it.)

But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?

When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .

The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference. There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever. How to make that better? Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.

As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today: The Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:

Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside. Spoiler alert: it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party? Death.

The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.

Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.

What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?

Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up. Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it. Nurses and doctors? Not taking it.

The result? Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities. Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.

Oops.

I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview. “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.

In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates. If you need an ambulance ride, you get one. It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.

Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands. Why? Pilots don’t want “the jab” either. Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.

Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.

The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
Inflation? Happening everywhere, and with everything.
Political collapse? FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.

Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.

As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic. This isn’t the script for a happy ending. This is the script for a collapse.

I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades. Those ripples are here and now. Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.

Energy? More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity. But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.

He must be fun at parties.

I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding. While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward. This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story. That’s where Death joined the party. To me? That sounds creepy.

I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death. I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner. At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.

Books, Because I Was Asked To

“Three books? Wait a minute, hold it. Nobody said anything about three books! Like, like what am I supposed to do, take, take one book, or all books, or… or what?” – Army of Darkness

Shakespeare opened a camping store last year and has too much inventory. Now it’s the winter of his discount tent.

It has been over a year since we did a Books post. When I looked it up, It felt like it was much more recent than that. That was creepy – like the time in the book store when I was looking for books on paranoia and found they were right behind me all along! Last week, constant reader and good friend CH asked for another one.

Absolutely.

Books will outlive us all. They will outlive the Internet, and words from them will be read from them four thousand years into the future. Which books will make it? I have no idea. It could be that our present day culture will be represented in that distant future by TV Guides® from the 1980s and think we only wore pastels and drove Lambos®.

What do you call a horror movie set after the end of oil? The Silence of the Lambos®.

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that now. As I write this, it’s October near Halloween, so why not start out with a horror novel?

One of the best writers of horror that I’ve ever read is Robert R. McCammon. My favorite novel of his?

Swan Song.

It’s a book from 1987, so it’s certainly it was written in a different world than today. The ever-present fear hanging over everyone then were nuclear arsenals held at hair-trigger ready to start a nuclear war within minutes.

What to do?

How about starting the book with nuclear war? Yup, McCammon does that. The book works. It’s focused on the battle between Good and Evil.

The phone’s for you. I think it might be the devil.

I enjoyed it. Was I changed by it?

No.

But it was fun to read, and sometimes that’s not enough. Honorable mention in the Horror Category is Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, which follows a group of young boys as they fight evil in 1960’s Illinois. Sadly, the evil grew and grew and is now the mayor of Chicago.

And you thought your middle school was tough.

Starship Grifters.

I like funny science fiction, if it is well written. I especially like it when it’s written by /our guy/ and Robert Kroese is /our guy/. Why worry about plot when you have a main character named Rex Nihilo, which itself is a pun of the Latin phrase ex nihilo? And what if Rex was a (not very good) conman?

It’s funny.

So, how much for just the planet?

These stories are told first person by Rex’s robot, S.A.S.H.A. who has an A.I. program that shuts her down whenever she has an original thought. Why? If the robots can’t have original thoughts they can’t . . . . rebooting.

This is another book that is simply written for fun. And there is lots of it to be had. Kroese has other titles as well, including one series of five books where astronauts from the future crash land off course in ancient Viking times. Astronauts, Vikings, aliens? Good yarns.

The Golden Age.

John C. Wright is a wonderful author. His trilogy, The Golden Oecumene was a joy to discover when I bought it on a lark not long after we moved to Alaska. I read most of it on airplanes moving back and forth across the country, and kept turning page after page. The first book in this trilogy?

In the future, we’ll all be a part of The Blue Man Group.

The Golden Age.

What if you found a hole in your memory?

What if, the reason for that hole in your memory might be . . . important?

What if you also have a factory orbiting the Sun making antimatter?

John C. Wright is a great storyteller and is also /our guy/. I haven’t read anything from him that I haven’t enjoyed.

How about we go back to the Halloween theme with John Steakley’s novel . . .

Vampire$.

Steakley wrote exactly two novels in his life: Vampire$ and Armor. You could do a lot worse – I enjoyed both of them. Vampire$ was made into a John Carpenter movie that starred James Woods as Jack Crow, vampire hunter for hire. I liked the movie, but it wasn’t the same as the book. Plus they dropped the $ for the movie. That was weak.

That’s okay, both stand on their own. That means the good news is that there’s still some magic here that you haven’t seen if you haven’t read the book. Guys who fight vampires for cash financed by the Roman Catholic Church?

Cool.

Timelike Infinity.

Stephen Baxter is a science fiction author who has the actual science chops, yet can write engaging fiction. He’s been doing it for, oh, 30 years now. His first novel (and the first novel of his I read) is Raft. It’s in the same universe as Timelike Infinity, but I think Timelike Infinity is an easier entry point.

Be a friend of Wigner, that’s one way to control your destiny! (LINK)

What can you say about an integrated series of novels and short stories spanning thousands of pages that builds a story that covers the Universe from beginning to end, plus humanity’s war against multiple alien species? Sure, I can write that sentence in just a few seconds, but I read Baxter’s work over decades. Masterful use of science and fiction to . . . create. This is a good novel to start. Warning: If you want to catch up, it will take more than an afternoon.

It’s a great ride.

Conan the Buccaneer.

My brother, John Wilder, bought me my first Conan book when I was about 13. I then started reading them whenever I could put my hands on them. I read Conan the Buccaneer when I was about 14. In it, it describes Conan running for mile after mile. Inspired, I put on my running shoes and ran six miles, up and down hills, going farther than I thought possible.

See, he has muscles on his muscles. Just like me.

This really could be any Conan book by Robert E. Howard or by de Camp and Carter who continued the work. The picture says it all. Swords. Axes. Hot chicks in scanty clothes.

A Planet Called Treason.

I’ve read a lot of Orson Scott Card. One criticism of him is that he takes a story and just can’t stop fiddling with it. When I read Ender’s Game the first time? It was a short story. Later, a novel. Later still? I can’t count how many books about Ender. I stopped after the third. Ugh. I mean “end” is literally in his name!

I find if I take that exact pose in front of the electric door at WalMart®, the door opens.

He tried to do the same with this novel, but, thankfully got distracted by (probably Ender) and wandered off. A Planet Called Treason is fine just the way it was originally written. It tells the story of a group of people who were convicted of treason. They were stashed on a planet with no iron, so they could never build spaceships.

Each family on the planet descended from one treasonous leader. What has developed in the centuries that have passed? What have the geneticists done? What have the physicists done? What (shudder) have the politicians done?

This is the one book I’ve read that has a politician worse than Biden, but Biden still has over three years to screw stuff up.

The Black Swan.

What? All horror and science fiction? How about something else?

This is nonfiction, and timeless. Nassim Nicolas Taleb knocks it out of the park in his best book. He does a masterful job of describing different ways to more accurately model reality. The short version: unlikely things are going to happen, and most people have no idea about risk.

We started with Swan Song, so I guess ending with The Black Swan makes sense.

It’s the most fun I ever had reading a book about probability and risk. Sadly, I think most folks have no idea of the dark forest we walk in even when we think we have no risk. Wonder if a certain “jab” will prove to be another Black Swan.

It remains to be seen.

I won’t wait another year for another version of a Book post. I have many more to talk about than this list, and I’m sure that there are dozens that you can add below.

Let loose the hounds! What’s on your list?

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note: Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017. It’s nice to be back. Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road. It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago. There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road. I was going to see my parents. The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour. There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles. Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt. One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape. Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe? I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box. It slowed my car. On one side. Just a little.

The result wasn’t little. A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth.

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum. I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator. But you can think about it this way: how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational. As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything. Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road. Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal. It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on. The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do. I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on. It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear. Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning? Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch. I was now pointing due south. The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road. I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette. I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear. The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous. It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one. When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something. Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit. It was (sort of) a prepping situation. We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up. And up. Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill. Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit? Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean. And we didn’t buy a single sheet. We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t. Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified. It echoed down the system. What kinds of shocks?

Initial runs on supplies.
Federal stimulus.
Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
More Federal stimulus.
Lower demand for office space.
More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
More Federal stimulus.
Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done. It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal. If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst. But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years. The debt is right now at $29 trillion. That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year. That’s a lot of money. Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House. The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential. The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at. Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons? We need to have a great documentary about oil. We can save it under non-friction.
Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint: all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed. I’m sure this time will be different.
The man is a potato.
Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day. They were shocking!
China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required. Oh, wait, have a job? Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy. It is certain that they won’t. The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways. When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail. No chips for new cars. No drivers for trucks. Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops. The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse. How can I tell that? It already has. The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard. Really hard. The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see: The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time. It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago. It was moving down the road at full speed. One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring. Prepare. Stay away from crowds. And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.