Category: COVID

The Archbishop, Trump, And The Coming Great Reset

“Jahr null. Year zero. An experiment. A reset. A new America.” – The Man in the High Castle

I hear that Noah kept his bees in the Ark hives.

I first became aware of “The Great Reset” last week.  There are quite a few YouTube® videos about it, but one of the more unusual mentions was in a letter to President Trump from a retired Catholic clergyman.  This particular clergyman is Archbishop Carlo Viganò.  I don’t know what the difference is between an Archbishop and a Bishop, but I suspect it has to do with a better quality of footwear.

Anyway, Archbishop Viganò wrote the following in the letter:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

You can read the whole letter here (LINK).

Okay, the story the Archbishop was sharing seemed like an Infowars® segment, but with less tinfoil.  What was up?

I hear that Alex Jones’ wife left him because she said he was paranoid.  Alex was okay with that – he said he’d rather live alone than live with a government clone.

Well, it is stuff that’s directly out of an Infowars™ segment:  as I dug into the Archbishop’s clues, it was exactly correct.  The World Economic Forum©, which runs that annual Davos conference in Switzerland where 3,000 of the elite of the business world, academia, Hollywood, and the press get together to discuss how awesome they are for sacrificing themselves by flying their private  jets to visit a Swiss resort.

Alex Jones regularly says they’re up to no good when they meet at Davos.  Not everything is a conspiracy:  I’m certain that Alcoa® and Planters™ will never be allowed to merge, since everyone is afraid of the AlumaNutty.

I will say this about Switzerland – their flag is a big plus.

I know the Leftists complain about the 1%, but this is the 0.00004%.  The amazing thing?  The 0.00004% agree nearly entirely with Antifa’s® agenda.  Here’s what the Great Reset entails, as showcased in articles on the World Economic Forum©’s own website (LINK):

  • “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” The Davos folks describing freedom:  “Be free.  No!  No, not like that.”
  • “In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.” I’d like to point out that some things didn’t change at all:  WNBA games have always been empty.
  • “. . . will require stronger and more effective governments . . . .” I’m against both of those things.  If we have strong government, I really hope it’s Three Stooges®-level incompetent.
  • “ . . . governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes.” Remember – equality is we all have the same chance.  Equitable means we all get the same outcome.  Except, of course, for the 0.00004%.

Not mine.  Why doesn’t everyone just buy a ticket?

There are three main points that the World Economic Forum© is currently selling as the Great Reset:

  • International coordination on almost everything is the first component. If you thought we had too much globalization already?  Get ready for armies of international bureaucrats to write legislation and regulation that no one is accountable for.
  • “The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.” Who shares these goals?  Well, at least the 0.00004% do, and they know best, right?  Especially when they spend your money.
  • Finally, they want to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Davos-speak for the post-Internet acceleration in information technology and the way that it interacts with the physical world.

But the World Economic Forum dives deeper.  One of the more chilling aspects is that they no longer want individuals to own, well, anything.  You can read the article here (LINK), right off of the World Economic Forum’s© website.  I did a little digging, and found the author was a member of Danish parliament, but prior to that?  She had spent 8 years getting a Masters in theology, became a part-time theology teacher, and then was in parliament.  Sound like a blonde version of AOC?

I you can’t tell socialists jokes – not everyone will get it.  Photo by Johannes Jansson/norden.org, CC BY 2.5 dk

Everything that Archbishop Viganò suggests is an aim of the Great Reset is plainly on the World Economic Forum© website, with the exception for the Archbishop’s claim that that people would be put into camps if they didn’t comply by being vaccinated and chipped.  That, in my mind, makes sense.  It’s not normally something that a country advertises, “Hey come for the free stuff, stay for the concentration camps.”  Or, “Virginia, it’s for Lovers of Barbed Wire.”

I hear the socialist student got top Marx in school.

My review of the Great Reset is simple:

It’s the same hokum that the Left has been selling since before the French Revolution.  The Left promises they will make people into new men and they will share the prosperity with everyone.  But those in control will then ask the question – how many people do we need, really?  The answer is a simple one, and it’s always the same:  fewer than we have now.

In reality, the 0.00004% never even start to share.  The 0.00004% will make life easy and free.  All you have to give up?  All of your freedom.  Hmm, I can get the Devil to grant my wish in exchange for my soul, and I don’t even have to go down to the Crossroads?

Which is why an Archbishop might write a letter in the first place . . . .

2020: More Strange To Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take California.  Please.

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

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

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

And I enjoyed letting you know.

Magic and Money: More Related Than You Think

“It was the most amazing magic trick I’ve ever seen.” – The Prestige

Mimes aren’t magicians, they just have obstacle illusions.

This is a post about finance.  It’s an awesome one, so bear with me.

I’ve always been a bit of a ham.  When I was in third grade, I got up and did impressions and sang a song.  This was in front of the entire school on talent night, Kindergarten through Senior, and all their parents.  My impressions were horrible.  My singing was worse.

The next year, I got to play a drunken uncle in our fourth grade play.  I’m not making that up.  I had a flask and everything, and the teacher pinned the neck tie of my costume up over my shoulder, since drunks apparently can’t wear a tie properly.  However, you can bet that I delivered my lines with the best drunken slur a fourth grader can muster.

It was another time and place, where we could make jokes with the idea of being funny.  If they did a play like that today, I’m sure that the school district would be shut down, burned, and exorcised from Twitter™ and Facebook®.  I mean, the parents in the play were a man and a woman played . . . by a boy and a girl.  And they were married. And they didn’t have tattoos.

Sacrilege!

The floor collapsed during the fourth grade play.  I guess I was going through a stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, I lived pretty far out on Wilder Mountain.  The nearest kid to my house lived nine miles away.  The nearest McDonalds™ at that time was a two hour car trip.  So, a trip to a magic store was entirely out of the question.  But then came college.

Where I was still a ham.

In college, I was living near Capitol City, and they did have a magic store.  So, I bought three magic tricks.  All three were fun, because they were professional grade, and if you had the mechanical dexterity to open a beer can, you could do very professional, close up magic.

One was a coin trick.

COVID shut down the mint?  It makes no cents.

It’s still my favorite trick.  I haven’t done it in years, but it’s fun to do.  First, I’d show the person I’m doing the trick with (we’ll call them “Mark”) two coins – a United States $0.50 coin, and a Mexican 50 centavo coin.  Then, I put the coins into their right hand.  By the time the coins are in their hands, it’s not a half dollar and a 50 centavo piece – it’s now a half dollar and a United States $0.25.

I’d then ask Mark to put one coin in each hand, while his hands were behind his back, so I can’t see them.  Once each hand has a coin in it, I ask them to hold their hands straight out in front of them.  I’d then guess where the $0.50 piece was.

That wasn’t the trick.

Then, regardless of if my guess was correct, I’d bet them something (say, a Coke® or a beer – remember I was in college) that they couldn’t show me the 50 centavo piece.

They’d smile, and then open their hand, and then show me the quarter and look amazed that it wasn’t the 50 centavo piece.

Except the first few times, it didn’t work.  At all.  It’s not that I messed up the trick, one hand had $0.50 in it, and one hand had a quarter.  But the first few times I did the trick, the Mark immediately recognized that it wasn’t the 50 centavo, and knew it was a quarter.

Well, that sucks.

You have no idea how long this meme took.

But then I thought back – at the magic store where I’d bought the trick, the salesman performing the trick had said, “notice how much smaller the 50 centavo piece is than the half dollar.”  I tried that the next time I did the trick.

Perfect.

Mark, merely by my suggestion, had developed the mental image that the 50 centavo piece was small.  Every time I’ve done the trick using that phrase, and I mean every single time, ever, it worked like a charm.  Without saying “notice how much smaller . . .”?  Over half the time the person could tell that the second coin was a quarter.

The next refinement was the reveal.  Remember when I told the Mark to hold his hands out front, and I’d guess which hand had the fifty cent piece in it?  Amazingly, 90% of people put the half dollar into the same hand.  Which hand?  I’m not giving up all of my secrets.

I would, on purpose, guess the wrong hand after telling Mark not to show me the coins, right or wrong.

They’d smile and tell me I was wrong.  They felt awesome – they’d beaten the magician.  Obviously, the trick was going wrong.

All part of the plan.

The next thing I said was, “I bet you a beer Coke™ that you can’t show me the 50 centavo piece,” and then they opened their hand to see an ordinary quarter?  After seeing the quarter, I’d ask Mark to open the other hand where they’d see a normal fifty cent piece.  They were always amazed when I did it right, but in order for the trick to work, I had to say the right things.

The trick paid for itself in, um, beverages and things.  And the Mark didn’t mind – Mark was amused, and I got paid a small fee for that amusement.

But the things that sold the trick wasn’t the mechanics and metal, it was what I was saying, and how I was saying it, and, even being intentionally wrong was part of the final sale.  You can buy this trick yourself, for about $12 – search “Scotch and Soda Trick” on Amazon.

You’re welcome.

But what does this have to do with money?

A lot, actually.

His version of Purple Rain was awful.

Number One – People who sell stuff know how to sell.  Like my magic trick, salesmen do trial and error to learn what works.  If you buy a car every five years from a dealer, and they have contact with 30 customers a week, who has the upper hand?

If you’re listening to a politician who’s spent his entire life just getting elected, what likelihood to you have of understanding their real character and values?  They probably don’t remember them themselves.  If you’re buying a car, a house, or even a burger at McDonalds, they know the game.  There’s a reason that every well-trained McDonalds© employee asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

They know the game.  McDonalds® knows that a potato costs them pennies, but a basket of fries can go for $3.  Profits may be fleeting, but the pant size increase is forever.

One of the tricks that Bernie Madoff used with his customers was to dress very frugally.  Despite the fact that he was stealing billions ($20 billion by the best estimate I found), he knew the game better than his Marks.  He also was selective with clients – he wouldn’t accept just anyone.  No, you had to apply and be approved.  You had to know someone.

Number Two – Knowing the trick is everything.  When I did the coin trick, only I knew what was coming.  It was all scripted, and I knew exactly what the outcome was going to be.  When I asked people to let me guess which hand the coin was in, they thought that was the trick.  No, the trick was that there was no fifty centavo piece.  But because I created the structure, I knew where the trick was.

That’s a tremendous advantage.  I can use that knowledge to create a scenario where I can manipulate emotions to get the reactions and responses I want.  Why?  I control the conditions.  I control the reveal.

What sorts of tricks are out in the world?

  • “No money down.”
  • “I never got your text.”
  • “Yes, I’ll hold your beer, there’s no way this could go wrong.”
  • “No interest for the first six months.”
  • “Housing prices always go up.”
  • “CNN – The Most Trusted Name in News.”

Number Three – Things are rarely as they seem.  Mark saw only what I wanted him to see during the trick, and I carefully made sure by closing his hand around the coins after I put them there.  Then I told him to not let me see when he put the coins in each hand.  Why?  Because I didn’t want him to see what was really going on.

One of the biggest illusions that most people don’t recognize is that our money is entirely made up.  The $ and € and ¥ and £ only have meaning because we give them meaning.  The United States dollar has no backing other than . . . the promise to trade it for a dollar.  That’s it.  And people keep playing the game even though the Federal Reserve™ tells them the dollar will be worth less every year.  On purpose.

Oh, and the Federal Reserve©?  It’s not Federal, and it doesn’t have a Reserve.  Discuss.

Generally, people didn’t believe that the government had a super-secret plan to eavesdrop on all electronic communications from anyone.  Then Edward Snowden showed . . . they have a plan to monitor all electronic communications, everywhere.  When Snowden joined Twitter® he soon had more followers than the National Security Agency.  That’s okay, the NSA follows everyone.

I knew there was a reason my computer has a sticker that says “Intel Inside.”

Number Four – It’s super easy to suggest things to people.  This shocked me.  One time Scott Adams mentioned that in a line at a copier, if you have to make a copy, all you have to do is have a reason to jump the line.  He suggested, “Hey, can I cut in front of you?  I have to make a copy.”  Note that making a copy is exactly what everyone else was doing, but the request, coupled with a reason, seemed to work.  No matter how stupid the reason.

  • Yes, there’s a reason you want ice cream.
  • What, you thought that was impartial?
  • “The Arctic will be ice free by 2013,” – Al Gore.  Hmm.  Trust me.  Next time it really will be.
  • Asking them to do you a small favor. Oddly, this creates a pattern where people are much more likely to do a big favor for you later.  Oh, while you’re at it, hit the subscribe button.  Don’t cost nothin’.
  • Never trust a flatterer.  I had a boss that, one month after he joined the company, wrote a performance review that would have made me think that I needed to apply for the job of Messiah.  Except in my case it made me never trust him.  I was right.
  • Peer Pressure. People like to do what other people consider acceptable, since being socially acceptable is important.  If everyone is doing it, well, I should, too.  I went against the grain, and now Wal-Mart® insists that I wear pants from now on.

Number Five – The person proposing the bet may not have your best interest at heart.  In the example above, I ended up getting a few beverages.  The person involved got an equal exchange.  No one was ever mad – if they had been, I’d have told them to ignore the bet.

But.

I used the name “Mark” for a reason.  It’s what conmen (ever notice that the Politically Correct Police don’t object to that one?) call the object of their scam.  I’ve even been at carnivals where a guy running a game called out, “hey, Mark” to someone walking by to try to get them to break a balloon and win a poster of Gillian Anderson.  Only five dollars a dart!

I wonder if the aliens believed in her?

There are probably a few other examples that I could bring up, but it’s late, and I have to go practice not singing.  Bonus points if you can tell what two impersonations I did in third grade in the comments.

See, I told you this post would be awesome.

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

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

CAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deflationary depression.

AMISH

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

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

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

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

COVID

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

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

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

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

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

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

TESLA

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

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

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

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

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

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

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

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

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

But still, these things are possible.

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

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

Hmmm.  Maybe I need some work, too.

SUMO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?

“Prime minister? I thought Italy used a king?” – Archer

ANTIFA

There’s a joke to be made about that cake, but just like food under communist rule, you wouldn’t get it.

Sometime earlier this year, I asked myself a simple question.  Why would anyone be attracted to communism?  It’s the one single system that has never succeeded.  It’s a system that, when implemented as designed, kills tens of thousands, and in the twentieth century, over 100 million of their own citizens.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what would drive so many people to communism in the year 2020.  In 1900 in Russia?  Well, maybe.  A typical Russian peasant wouldn’t have known much about the failings in Paris of the Leftist French Revolution.  Some bald guy says, “free loaves of bread for life,” and that might have done it.

But during the 2000-2020 time period in the West, it’s clear that communism shouldn’t take root, right?  Up until the COVID-19, the economy in the United States was going so well that some of Joe Biden’s kids could afford to quit their second jobs in the Ukraine.  But even with that economy, young people were being recruited to communism.

Why?

I had no idea how they could be recruited.  But in roving through the Internet, I found a book, Anatomy of the Red Brigades by Alessandro Orsini, which had exactly the information I was looking for.  The Red Brigades were a Leftist terrorist organization that was formed in 1970 and lasted until the 1980’s.  They were most famous for kidnapping and killing a former Italian prime minister named Aldo Moro.  They were also responsible for the later kidnapping of American Brigadier General James Dozier, who was rescued.

PENCIL

I have other pencil jokes, but most of them are pointless.

Post-war Italy was a difficult place.  It was rapidly transforming from an agricultural economy to an industrial one.  Like me, I’m sure some were tempted to steal industrial cooking implements.  But I didn’t – I’m not a big whisk taker.

As people moved from rural farms to slums in the cities to work in factories, they were uprooted from centuries of continuity in life.  That uprooting was the first step in creating a communist.  As a rule, the Red Brigades recruits were disaffected.  These people were already at the margins of society.  Orsini calls this process disintegration.  The group manipulating the new recruits would do everything possible to remove the new members from their previous outside relationships.

Once they were removed from those old relationships, reality was what the group said it was.   And what reality were they focused on creating?  The basic idea is one familiar to doomsday cults around the world.  One Red Brigadist described it as the “fanaticism of a new religion.”  Communist recruits are taught that:

. . . they are “children of the light, arriving in this world to punish and redeem, to destroy and purify.  The Red Brigades want to wash away the sins of capitalism with blood.

GRETA

They are taught that the world is corrupt, and in danger.  Remind you of anything, say, Greta Thunberg?  The idea that capitalism is sin is now taught nearly uniformly to children of the world.  Of course, it has to have a name, and Global Warming® is probably the most convenient:  it’s a sin brought on by capitalism and the old people, and will kill them if they don’t take rides on multi-million dollar yachts and speak before the United Nations.  Oh, and then be invited by CNN™ to talk about COVID-19.  Yes, they asked Greta for her expertise on that.  And for her expertise on Some Black Lives Matter©.  Each of these three has the same story being pumped into the head of the Marxist – there is a threat to the existence of all that is good in the world, and only Leftism can solve it.

Radical Leftism.  See how that works?

The process of radicalization was described by Jean Guitton (as related by Orsini):

  1. Segregation – They are kept apart from healthy past relationships – their new relationships only come through communist contacts. They are then immerse in Leftist thoughts and theory.
  2. Permanent Indignation – Inner purity is confirmed (and signaled) through outer indignation – the Left loves to despise any who think even slightly differently than they do.
  3. Desire to be Persecuted – When people in the “world” make fun of the Left, the Leftist love it – it shows how virtuous and pure the Leftist is, and confirms to them how horrible the rest of the world must be.
  4. Purification of Means through the End – Any violence is justified because it will lead to the promised land of no work and infinite goodies. Building it on a mountain of skulls is just a feature.
  5. Principle of Secrecy – Antifa’s© external goals that they advertise aren’t their real goals. They know that what they really want is the complete destruction of society, and to have it rebuilt just as they see fit.  But they don’t say that – so every member is essentially a member of a secret society.  That binds them together – they can only speak freely to each other.
  6. Preventative Internal Terror – The one thing Leftist cannot stand is anyone to the Right. Anyone collaborating with the Right in any way?  Betrayal?  Any member who strays from Leftism is certainly the biggest enemy of the Antifa©, even more so than actual fascists.

CLEAN

I got a puppy, but the ducks attack it.  Last time I get a pure bread dog.

The focus then becomes one of purity.

Purity, of course, can never be reached.  That’s why SBLM® and Antifa™ aren’t fighting for anything real or measurable.  The goal of SBLM® is “the end to systemic racism,” whatever that is.  The problem is it can’t really be defined.  It’s not a real goal – it’s a stand-in for purity, a purity that can never be reached.

The reality is that this impossible goal of for their purification must be unreachable.  It must be ludicrous.  Why?  The goal isn’t to end systemic racism.  The goal is to engender hatred in the members.

How bad is the hatred?  “Love and Strength will subdue and destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie; we shall build a society free from the slavery of salaried work,” is directly out of their literature.  To quote Orsini speaking about them, even when Marxists kill people, they see themselves as the real victims.  “They are desperate people who have no real alternative to murder.”

OJ

We all know that OJ was the real victim, right?

And that’s the difference.  The people who manipulate the communists want power.  That’s not the goal of the communists.  They want the power so that they can personally cleanse the world.  In one interview, Orsini quoted a communist who didn’t want any luxury himself after the communists won.  Nope.  All this particular commie wanted was to be allowed to personally execute capitalists after the revolution.

Capitalism is what they hate the most.  And fascism.  What’s fascism?  Anything that’s not communist.  Don’t be fooled – Antifa© isn’t against fascists.  They’re against Bernie Sanders because he’s too far right, and think he’s probably a fascist, too.  Antifa™ wants to kill everyone even slightly to the right of them.

In their current state, the concept of logic and argument isn’t something a Leftist in Antifa™ or SBLM© can even hear.  They will, due to their programming, ignore any logical argument, any evidence.  Point out that when Pol Pot takes over Cambodia in a bloody revolution that kills off nearly thirty percent of Cambodia’s population.  If they’re not too far gone, they just won’t hear you.

If they’re far gone, you’ll just hear silence, as they think, “They deserved it.”  Purity is the goal.  Their thought process that they cannot let the lives of people stand in the way of the future Earthly paradise.

CLEAN2

I had to use this picture.

How did Italy defeat the Red Brigades?  Massive numbers of arrests, and large amounts of jail time for those involved.  Hundreds of Leftists were forced to flee Italy to avoid prison.  I’m fairly sure this was fine with the Italians – as long as they never came back.

And our Leftists in the United States?  Getting rid of them won’t be easy.  They’re fully supported in most cities, even as they slowly destroy the cities – some district attorneys won’t charge Antifa© or BLM™ rioters with anything more than a misdemeanor.  Beyond that, they’re well-funded – SBLM™ alone has hundreds of millions of dollars available.

I wonder if they’ll make reparations to the business owners that were destroyed through their riots?

Nah.  The looters were the real victims of the riots, right?

Houses, Money, Stocks, and Bikini Girl Graphs

“Can the stock market survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes, says our next guest, and he’ll tell us what stocks to buy and what to sell in the event of a thermonuclear exchange right after these messages.” – Head Office

BIZ

Superman® won’t take Bitcoin as payment after dark.  He avoids crypto night.

“Housing prices only go up.”  I first heard that in the 1990’s when I was buying my first house.  The realtor was quite clear that a house wasn’t just a house, it was an investment in the future.  He had no idea what my kids could do with Sharpies®, hot sauce, and matches.  And that was just the living room carpet.

“The dollar is as good as gold.”  I haven’t heard that one used about the dollar in my lifetime, because the dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since August 15, 1971.

“The stock market is the place to put your money.”  That’s still what people are saying.

One thing that I’ve found throughout my life is that, generally speaking, if everyone believes in it, it’s wrong.  The major exception to this is physics, which explains gravity well enough that almost nobody can argue with it.  I read a book on anti-gravity once – couldn’t put it down.

gravy

I always fall for gravity jokes.

This is especially true in human systems.  If the entire crowd believes it?  It’s nearly certainly wrong.

As mentioned above, a perfect example of this is housing markets.  It was really common knowledge in the 1990’s that, barring a setback in a recession, housing prices always go up.  Buy a house, wait, and sell it 10 or 20 years later, and you’ll make a bundle.

In certain times and places, that’s true.  And during the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the idea that “housing prices always go up” became firmly fixed in the minds of, well, most everyone.  That made it true, for a while.  As the banks noticed this, they decided that mortgages weren’t a risky investment at all, unlike when I broke COVID-19 lockdown to go play board games.  That was a lot of Risk.

On top of that, banks decided to make changes to the way that they had lent in the past.  Houses were a sure thing, right?  They could make them even safer by creating mortgage-backed securities.  Some of these were really unique.  You could buy the “best” performing loans out of a group of loans.  If there were 100 houses in the group, 90 would have to default on their mortgages before your security was impacted.

This mastery of risk was amazing!  Now all you need are more people to loan money to.  But not everyone qualifies, which is a problem.  They tried offering 0% loans, but there was no interest.

Solution?  Everyone qualifies.  No income?  No job?  No problem.  These were even called NINJA (no income, no job) loans.  The pool of borrowers expanded more rapidly than Joe Biden’s memory loss.  And if we add in refinancing of home equity?

That added even more borrowers!

What could go wrong?

HOUSE

And, hey, housing prices have reached new records.  Certainly they won’t fall?

Well, gravity kicked in on housing prices.  They dropped.  And when they dropped, the entire industry built up around building houses dropped.  And then the industries that supplied lumber, and pipe, and wire, and pavement, and concrete for driveways . . . dropped.

This mathematical fiction based on a delusion created a massive recession.  But, hey, housing prices always go up.

Except when they don’t.

Just like the dollar fell from its perch.  Originally, the dollar was backed by actual, physical gold.  That’s when the phrase, “as good as gold” was first used.  Why?  Because at any moment, you could go and change your dollars into gold.  Walk into the bank with a $20 bill, and walk out with $20 in gold.

This wasn’t always the case, there were periods in the history of the country where this wasn’t so (greenbacks issued during the Civil War backed by the credit of the country), but it was generally the case.  But after Franklin Roosevelt made gold possession by Americans illegal (yes, this happened) then you couldn’t go in and get gold for your dollar.  Once that link was broken, the government was free to print money more or less at will, creating inflation even in a “gold backed” currency.

PURCH2

You can plainly see that women are shorter now that the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped.

Now?  The dollar isn’t worth but a few percent of what it was in 1940.

And other countries realize it, too.  As the multiple trillions of dollars are printed this year to prop up everything from the airlines to the banks to the stock market, the value of the dollar has dropped.  Why?  The rest of the world can count.  There is only so much printing you can do before it starts to add up.

The dollar has dropped 10% in the last three months.

DOLLAR

The dollar’s fall is fast, but not as fast as when I fell into the coffee.  It was instant.

Good as gold?

No.

Which brings us to the stock market.  Money in the stock market is always safe, over a long enough term.  It took six years to recover from the Great Recession.  In real terms (inflation adjusted) it took from 1928 to 1955 for the Dow© to recover from the Great Depression.  It took until 1994 for the Dow™ to recover from the 1964 peak.  So, if you’re good waiting thirty years to break even, the stock market is a sure thing.

BOB

Speaking of up and down – I got a free yo-yo.  No strings attached!

While the economy is still stuck in lockdown in many parts of the country, massive unemployment, and a “riot-a-day” social structure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average® is only down 3%.

I wonder, just maybe, if everyone is wrong?

Shield Walls And Responsibility

“Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.” – A Fish Called Wanda

ROMAN

Four Norse gods, one Roman god, and two astrological bodies walk into a bar.  Everyone knew Wilder was going to make another week joke.

Farther back than written record exists, people have been fighting each other in an organized fashion. Though there are indications of earlier Egyptian battles, probably the first written records of tactics come from an inscribed stone thought to depict a Sumerian victory around 2500 B.C.  Again, perspective – the time of Christ is closer to us than Christ was to this battle.  Another way to say it?  Almost as old as your mom.

The tactic as shown on the stone would have been familiar to a Greek or a Roman or a Viking:  it’s a shield wall.  The idea is that soldiers working together would provide each other mutual protection through their overlapping shields.  In the case of the Greeks, the shield wall (or phalanx) was manned by citizen-soldiers called “hoplites.”  The Greeks had a lot of stories, though.  The half-human, half-horse who was a doctor?  They called him the Centaur for Disease Control.

Each hoplite protected himself and the man on his right.  Much of the most effective fighting was done by the guys in the second row, who were also protected by the shields of the front row.  The shield wall was generally employed by both sides during ancient conflicts.  As a superior technology, the choice was simple – adopt or learn to speak a new language, if you were lucky.

PROTON

Protons are underrated.  They’re always so positive.
Photo CC BY-SA 3.0, Sting, viaWikimedia

Combat was simple.  The opposing shield walls would meet and, as near as we can understand, a big sumo match between porcupines was the result.  The worst thing that could happen to a shield wall is breaking.  If a shield wall broke, the only real option for the side that broke was to flee.  For just that reason, the Greeks put the most inexperienced soldiers in the front and center of the shield wall.  That gave them psychological comfort of being surrounded by experienced fighters, plus they couldn’t get scared and run off.  They were stuck there in the middle of the fight.

The shield wall is one example that I could think of where the responsibilities of the individual to the group were vitally important.  Individual thought in a Greek phalanx is more than discouraged – it’s fatal.  That’s why the put the rookies in the middle.  The choices in the middle of a Greek phalanx are two:  fight as a unit and maybe win or be individuals and certainly die.

PHILIP

Philip also asked if he should come to Sparta as a friend or a foe.  The Spartan response?  “Neither.”

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between responsibility and individuality as I get older.  When I was younger after I read Ayn Rand I was a ready-to-move-to-Galt’s-Gulch Libertarian.  My thoughts were rather simple:  I’d do as I please, not harm anyone, and the world would let me be.

Heck, I even went to a meeting of the largest Libertarian group in the state I was living in.  When I saw it was just six guys in a booth at Taco Bell® (I’m not kidding) I decided to skip the meeting.  Libertarians are horrible at organizing.  Everybody wants to do their own thing, which makes for lousy coordination.  It shouldn’t have surprised me that there were only six of them, and that they met at a single booth at a Taco Bell™.  Also, since then I’ve come to the realization that the world will never let us be so we don’t have the option of going to Galt’s Gulch.

I still love the idea of individual freedom.  And even when I was young, I realized that individual freedoms came with individual responsibility.  You make a mistake?  You’re held accountable for it.  But there’s a component that’s missing that complements the first two:

Responsibility to the group.

ALIEN

Do Transformers® get car insurance or health insurance?  Neither, they are illegal aliens.

Does that constrain your individual freedom?  Certainly.  But it’s reality.  If you’re on a football team, working at a business, part of a family, or even in a tribe of Libertarians living in Galt’s Gulch, your individual freedom is limited to an extent that you have responsibilities to the group.

Just as the Greek hoplite was responsible for his own life, he was also responsible for the lives of those around him.  Each individual hoplite was responsible for the success of the group.

As I get older, I realize that responsibility does exist for each of us.  It’s not the same immediate life or death imperative of a hoplite, but it’s serious nevertheless.

BIDEN

If Joe wins the election, at least Hunter can get a job closer to home.

In one sense, the State (mainly the Federal government, but also small-s state governments) has done it’s best to remove that individual responsibility to society – it’s now nothing more than a series of payments to the State – taxes here and taxes there and you can go about your life without worrying about your responsibility to the state.

Poor people?  That’s easy.  The State will pay for them.  The break between individual charity is gone, but I’ve written about that before (Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires).  But it goes much further with similar stories in education, medical care, and retirement care.  There are a million ways that the State has replaced the responsibility of the individual to that group.

One impact of that has been the recent riots.  Reparations?  Make the State pay.  Burnt out buildings?  Make the State Pay.  Chose to get a degree and rack up enormous debt?  Make the State pay.  Unhappy with your life?  Capitalism has failed.  The State should fix this.

STALIN

During the Soviet Revolution, they didn’t get every goal, but the did aim for the Tsars.

In the minds of Leftists, every solution requires more State power.  That’s been at the root of every issue we’ve seen in 2020.  Beyond the riots, COVID-19 has provided another outlet for the religious fervor of the Left.

  • Vaccines? Should be mandatory once one shows up.
  • Masks? Previous:    Now:  Required.
  • Trump’s response? Previous:  He doesn’t have authority.  Now:  Every death is on his head.
  • Voting?   Protests?  Just fine.

The cause of this is that there is a natural desire to want to have responsibility that the State has severed.  In its place, there are still chances to do that – be a Little League® coach.  Volunteer at the food bank.  Volunteer your time down at the local shooting club to teach people how to protect the man to their right.

That’s what a responsible hoplite would do, after all.

Victory and Sacrifice

“It ain’t over until we say it’s over.” – Animal House

VICTORY

After one victory, I threw my ball into the crowd.  The people at the bowling alley did not like that.

This is not going to be a typical Wednesday post.  I had one planned out, notes ready.  Then, while smoking soon to be worthless Federal Reserve Notes™ while drinking one my last bottles of Leftist Tears© from 2016, I changed my mind about what I was going to post about.  I think you’ll like it.  And the best part is I already have notes for next week.

I first heard about the following story from Lindybeige.  His video is below.  It’s long, at nearly an hour.  It also has the very best commercial for ear buds (in the middle of the video) that I’ve ever watched.

On February 26, 1943, German forces in Tunisia began an attack toward the west.

American and British troops were to the west of Tunisia in Algeria, and British troops were to the east, based out of Egypt.  The idea of the attack was to cut off the British and American troops in the west, so the British troops coming out of Libya and Egypt could be defeated in the east.

North Africa was a mess for the Germans.  The British were doing a magnificent job sinking Axis supplies, so they were running out of stuff they needed to make war.  The Axis had also lost most of its territory: the Italians and Germans had been kicked out of Libya and were just barely hanging on in Tunisia, whereas the British were desperate to take Tunisia so George Lucas could film Star Wars® there in 1975.

Fun fact:  Star Wars© is closer in time to World War II than it is to 2020.

NOTPANZ

Of course, in the last interaction I had with the police, it was the goat they were looking for.

The Italians hadn’t switched sides yet, so they were still fighting alongside of the Germans in North Africa.  Like Mitt Romney, the Italians tend to switch sides quite a bit.  I heard a rumor that the Italians were going to switch sides and join with COVID-19 and fight against humanity this August, but that hasn’t happened.

Yet.

Anyway, the German operation had the super sexy name of Operation Oxhead, which also describes the operational name I gave to my divorce.  Also, like my divorce, it was a last ditch effort to maintain my sanity.  The German word for Oxhead is “Ochsenkopf” which is what I imagine Germans yell at each other during sex.

As part of the Operation, a German colonel named Rudolf Lang was given command of a pretty significant body of tanks and troops.  He had 77 tanks.  For a battle in North Africa, that was a pretty sizable force.  He also had a technical advantage – of those 77 tanks, 20 were the new Tiger tanks.

Tiger tanks were big and slow, but they were well armored and likely the most technically advanced tanks in North Africa at the time.  Heck, they might have been the best tanks in the world at the time.  To have 20 of them was quite an advantage.  And the Tiger was far better than the Swiss tanks, which were always in neutral.

TIGER

I’m really into turrets.  I love tank tops.

Lang was supposed to attack up a mountain pass, Hunt’s Gap, and the only thing in his way to achieving his objective was the 5th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment and the 155th Battery of the 172nd Field Regiment Royal Artillery.  Certainly that sounds pretty impressive if you don’t speak military, but the 5th Battalion probably was somewhere between 400 and 600 soldiers and officers, whereas the 155th Battery was 130 soldiers and officers.  So, somewhere between 600 and 700 guys.

Lang had 300 guys just sitting in tanks.  There were at least another 13,000 soldiers, many of which had already seen combat on the Eastern Front.  All of Lang’s troops were headed for those 600 or 700 guys.

At least the British were highly trained, right?

No.  Those 600 or 700 guys who were trained in lightning fashion and mostly hadn’t seen any combat besides a fight over a girl in a pub.  So, unless you counted numerical superiority, experience, or weapons superiority, the British had everything possible going for them.

There is a moment in time that you know that life is about to become very challenging.  That happened for the British troops around 6:30am on February 26 when they came under mortar fire.  Mortars are those tubes that you see soldiers drop ammunition in before it goes “fwoop” and shoots up in a ballistic arc.  The German mortars had a maximum range of about a mile.

MMORTAR

Was this the 1943 version of a “free continental breakfast”? 

The guns the 155th Battery had were 25 pounders, but they only had 8 of them.  These had a range of ten miles.  For a fight to occur with the enemy at less than a mile wasn’t what they were set up for.

The German mortar fire was accurate.  But the British held.

Then?  All the things that you might imagine if you were living a nightmare where you were waiting for happened.  The Tiger tanks showed up around 11AM.  And the British took out four of them.  The Germans withdrew, until 1PM when they showed up again, within 600 yards with thirty tanks.  And they had company, with 8 Bf-109 Messerschmitt fighters, who generally shot up the place, setting the British ammunition and explosives on fire.

The British, realizing they had to have ammunition, actually unloaded the ammo from the burning trucks.  The British knocked out another three tanks.  Again, the Germans withdrew.

At 5:30PM the next attack began.  Tank fire took out British cannon, one at a time, with some fighting between tank and 25 pounder taking place at 10 yards or less.  I personally can’t imagine the courage that took, launching an artillery shell designed to go miles at a tank right in front of you.  Since they were using armor-piercing shells, the also had to use the highest propellant load.

Courage, plain and simple.  The last voice message on the radio was, “Tanks are upon us.”

I can’t find casualty figures for the infantry.  I’m sure the numbers were horrible.  The survivors eventually broke and escaped to the west, probably not long after the 5:30PM attack started.

The artillery?  When the day started, there were 130 men, as I mentioned.  Nine made it back to British lines, and seven of those were wounded.  Several were taken as POWs, and survived the war, but I don’t have a definitive number.

25POUND

This is the same model that was used by the 155th.

It sounds like this might have been a useless activity, but it wasn’t.  The actions of the 155th Battery slowed the Germans down long enough so that the British were able to put together a defense to turn them back.  This blunted the German attack, and the last German offensive in North Africa was over.  A few months later, 250,000 Axis troops would surrender in North Africa.  This was at least partially because the 155th held.

Their sacrifice turned the tide of battle.  Whenever you feel that you can’t win, well, you might not win.  But continuing to fight the good fight for as long as you can may help others win.

Rudolf Lang, the German commander, even got a nickname from his own troops after the battle – Panzer Killer – I was able to find the dispatch online which was sent to Berlin where it was mentioned by his superior officer.  Now, that sure sounds like a cool nickname.   But when it’s given to you by guys whose job it is to drive Panzers?

Not so much.

I said the last voice message from the 155th was, “Tanks are upon us.”  That, however, wasn’t the last message the 155th sent.  There was one more message, in Morse code:

. . . –

If you think of this as a sound, think of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that’s the sound, and that dot-dot-dot-dash was played on every BBC broadcast during the war.  It’s a letter.

. . . – is the letter V.

For Victory.

Your effort matters.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Life at Two Minutes To Midnight

“I can’t sugarcoat this. We’re at Threat Level:  Midnight!” – The Office

CLOCK

If you eat a clock, know that it’s time consuming, and don’t go back for seconds.

  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.

We are at step 9.  Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock.  Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Talking About Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Living Two Minutes To Midnight – Links

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, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

Talking About Divorce

I read an article once that said that couples that talk about getting a divorce are much more likely to get a divorce.  Heck, when my ex-wife said she wanted a divorce on Valentine’s Day, I was surprised – I wasn’t planning on spending that much.  But talking increasing the divorce risk – that made sense to me:  every time you talk about an event, you tend to bring the event closer to becoming real.

How?

It’s not magic or a witch’s incantation, or at least I didn’t see my ex-wife doing incantations, though there was a smell of sulfur around midnight.  It is simply that when people talk about divorce, they start imagining what it would be like.  When divorce fantasy is better than marriage reality, the lawyers get called in.

DIVORCE

But they stayed together because of the kid.  Nobody wanted custody of him.

In a recent “war game” of different election scenarios, John “Spirit Cooking” Podesta played the role of Joe “stay in the basement until November” Biden.  Crucially in the war game scenario where Biden lost, “Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states (California, Washington, Oregon) to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.”

Both sides are talking about divorce.

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence associated with the protests is now so common that stories that would have made national news four months ago are, at most, up for a single news cycle.  “Peaceful” protester draws an AK on someone driving by and gets ventilated?  Yawn.  Two women (I guess) are frolicking on an interstate at night and get (inadvertently) mowed down by someone driving a car?

MAYOR

The Mayor insists that Chicago isn’t violent, noting that they’d only lost three school bus tailgunners this month.

It’s bad.  In Chicago, 2,249 people have been shot this year as of July 29 (LINK), which is nearly 700 more than in all of 2019.  At this rate, more people will be shot in just Chicago this year than during the entire Falkland Island War between Great Britain and Argentina.  This is patent proof that black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter®, since deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of cops in all of 2019 were, according to USA Today™ (LINK) only . . . 25.

Unjustified use of police force is horrible.  But . . . cops killing unarmed black people is nearly the smallest problem faced by black people in the United States.  BLM©?  It’s a lie.

QANON

Alcoa® and Planters Peanuts™ secretly rule the world.  They call themselves the Aluminutty.

Censorship was up again this month.  In focus was Qanon.  I wrote about Q a long while back (QAnon, The Chans, and Other Cryptic Stuff), and haven’t kept too much up with that subject.  But this month in another set of coordinated censorship Twitter® banned over 7,000 accounts that Tweeted™ about Qanon.  YouTube® has deleted “tens of thousands” of videos and “hundreds” of channels that were about Q.  Facebook© won’t be left out – they nuked a Qanon group with 200,000 members.

What about Qanon scares the mainstream?

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.

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II.  Let’s go to the graphs.  As is custom at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, the graphs are presented with girls in bikinis, because if civilization is collapsing what better time is there for bikini graphs?

Violence:

VIOLF

Up is more violent.  June pegged the scale of violence.  This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300.  It’s lower this month.  Does that mean it’s less violent this month?  Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence.  Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking.  That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

POLIF

Up is more unstable.  Instability is down only slightly, which might seem weird, but the political system is still stable overall.  I expect this to spike in the next two months, and may introduce a new measure based on the election as we get closer to November.

Economic:

ECONF

Down indicates worse economic conditions, but this month it’s up.  The part of me that hopes, hopes we’re on a real upswing.  The part of me that thinks says we’re nowhere near the bottom.

Illegal Aliens:

BORDF

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

Living Two Minutes To Midnight

Two minutes to midnight is a tough place for the United States to be sitting, and we’re here.  The confluence of great events, economic, political, and social is upon us.  It’s in these times of upheaval that systems collapse in complexity from a high level to a lower one.  Highly complex society provides us nice things like video games and delivery of eyeglasses made in China in a week.

Societies of low complexity struggle to feed themselves and live in mud huts.  Low complexity societies are always on the edge – a famine could mean real death due to starvation, not that the shake machine is broken at McDonalds® again so you have to go to Sonic™ if you want a shake.

In order to grab or consolidate political power, there are politicians that would gladly drop our standard of living to that of starving people in mud huts.  Those that would support them imagine a world where they’ll be allowed to be artists and poets and philosophers and the mud huts will be left for those who oppose the new way of doing things.

Living in this time, I have one suggestion:  be as prepared as you can be for nearly anything to happen.  Understand that things you’ve taken for granted your entire life can change in a day.  I never thought I’d live in a society where rioters could stop cars of peaceful citizens with impunity and the tacit approval of local and state governments, but here we are.

Things are moving fast.  Be ready.

LINKS

LINK

These are from Ricky this month:

CW chatter continues….

https://www.startribune.com/are-we-ready-for-a-civil-war-lite/571920212/?refresh=true

https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/07/29/stephen-kessler-is-trump-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/

…with Republicans promoting a vote for Biden to stop a CW…

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/6568575-Candidates-View-Minnesota-trying-to-prevent-a-civil-war

https://time.com/5870475/never-trumpers-2020-election/

…and the Washington-Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine invoking Godwin’s Law to prevent a descent into Nazi-ism…

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/23/portland-fascism-trump-election/

…while the MSM maintains the threat is all Boogaloo Bois…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/american-boogaloo-meme-or-terrorist-movement/613843/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53269361

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/16/civil-war-20-the-boogaloo-movement-is-a-wake-up-call-for-america/#206ec67b71ab

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/28/conservative-armed-militias-protests-coronavirus/?arc404=true

…and not peaceful Antifa….

https://www.csis.org/analysis/who-are-antifa-and-are-they-threat

https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-329-since-1994-antifa-killed-none-2020-7

https://www.csis.org/analysis/tactics-and-targets-domestic-terrorists

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/30/anarchists-and-antifa-not-according-to-the-data/

…all an example of the ongoing propaganda war…

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2020/07/21/propaganda-rules-america/

https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-the-medias-insane-whitewashing-of-portlands-violence-2083324/

https://fee.org/articles/vandalism-is-violence-destructive-riots-are-not-just-property-damage/

…part of a different kind of civil war, with skirmishes over property lines, not state lines; families, not soldiers….

https://ammo.com/articles/war-on-suburbs-how-hud-housing-policies-became-weapon-for-social-change

https://mises.org/wire/why-marxist-organizations-blm-seek-dismantle-western-nuclear-family

…while real battles heat up….

https://apnews.com/1dd1bb39093a3691f4e78093787ab877

https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/how-seattle-chaz-got-chopped/

https://farleftwatch.com/antifa-militia-group-encourages-facebook-followers-to-shoot-federal-agents-in-the-face/

…as costs mount….

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/george-floyd-protests-expensive-civil-disturbance-us-history

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riots-designated-a-catastrophe-in-multiple-states-a-first-for-pcs/

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riot-losses-said-up-to-1bn-in-u-s-retentions-may-protect-reinsurance/

https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2020/07/06/298012.htm#:~:text=Rioting%20set%20off%20during%20protests,a%20single%20retailer%2C%20he%20said.

https://www.genre.com/knowledge/blog/riots-and-civil-commotion-disquieting-times-ahead-en.html

Friday Books, Because I Said So

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

GERMAN

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

Books.

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

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

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

BIDEN

On the plus side, I did get a book.

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

Is this on purpose?

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

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

STARSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

Nah.

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

BRAVE

Most babies are born at womb temperature.

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

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

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

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

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

DUNE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic.

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

Oh well.

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

NORSE

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

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

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

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