Category: COVID

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?

How Bad The Economic Crash Really Is

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

PEZHEAD

HC pointed out this picture.  How could I resist?

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

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

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

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

TRILLION

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

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

50%.

Half.

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

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

SHOPPER

Wish someone would have mentioned that.

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

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

But not yet.

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

GOLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUMP

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

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

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

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

PLAGUE

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

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

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

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

Riots, Misplaced Virtue And The Parasite Class

“Don’t worry. Many women learn to embrace this parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with other parasites.” – House

PARASITE

But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder.  I guess it was a nervous tick.

I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima.  This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E Marts®.  They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time.  This makes sense – those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.

Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world.  Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine.  Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.

That’s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isn’t so good in an environment filled with Twinkies™, Ruffles™, and two-liter Coke™ bottles.

What got me thinking about all this?

DIABETES

What do you call it when a diabetic won’t follow directions?  Insulince.

Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange.  I’m certain I’m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so don’t blame him for this piece.  For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind.  One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination.  Here it is, in Joe’s words:  “Biologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution.  Their reasoning is thus: many features in isolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.”

If you’re not reading Joe’s stuff, you really should be (LINK).  He’s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny.  His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.

PORPOISE

Is evolution overkill?  Did it defeet the porpoise?

As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it – rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.

Society is made up of individuals, so I thought I’d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy.  When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:

  • Altruism
  • Empathy

These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States.  They’ve been common in other places, too, but I’m going to focus on America.  These traits were the basis for and result of a “high-trust” society.  A high-trust society is one where most interactions aren’t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law.  Where I live, there’s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down.  It’s just something we do.

TRUST

I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.

Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasn’t a government program – people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them.  This had a benefit – it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt.  It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.

Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s.  The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:

It turns the act of charity into taxation.  Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes.  Last time I checked, if I decided I didn’t want to support ‘charity’ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years.  This removes all virtue for taking part in charity.  Forced charity isn’t charity, it’s extortion.

That’s bad enough.

But it gets worse.

STARVE

Crabs don’t donate to charity.  They’re shellfish.

The second thing that forced charity does?  When a person gives another person help, they’re often grateful – it’s human working with human.  When a government agency gives that same person help, they’re resentful.  Why?  There is no end to the needs an individual has – and when government doesn’t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment.  Let’s face it – nearly every government welfare program sucks – it’s just enough to get by in ratty conditions.  Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.

Add in the impersonality of the cities.  Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers.  Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees.  Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.

Stir.

The result is chaos.  The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society.  Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved:  as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.

What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?

Whoever had “go crazy in an orgy of destruction and violence” fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.

RIOT

Is it riot season or COVID season?  I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.

I thought a bit about how Antifa® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matter™ grew.  The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow.  Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, they’ve increased the growth rate.  In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.

Why?

Though born of misdirected virtue, Antifa© and BLM® have their own traits.  They contribute nothing to society.  They’re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people.  In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.

There’s a word for an organism living in this niche.  The name for that organism is parasite.

It becomes increasingly likely that Antifa™ and BLM® will leave city after city economically destroyed.  Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now?  Portland?  Seattle?  The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.

ANTIFA

Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it? 

The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation – criminals aren’t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges.  Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class.  If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances.  Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply can’t be allowed.

Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they don’t kill the host.  The mosquitoes I fed tonight didn’t kill me – just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so.  But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.

INSPIRE

Meaning: Do It Right.

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

MEANING

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

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

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

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

Why?

ISIS

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

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

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

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

JUNG

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

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

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

RDJ

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

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

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

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

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

TOOTH

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

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

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

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

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

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

LONELY

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

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

Nope.

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

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

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

I side with the Right.

CIVILIZ

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

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

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

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

Ohh!  Did you see that Lighting Deal®?

Want To Get Something Big Done? Start Small.

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

POOL

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIEHARD

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

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

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

ALARM

One alarm that always wakes me up?  Rumble strips.

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

Then I do them.

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

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

AZTEK

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

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

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

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

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

todo

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

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

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

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

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

LISTDIE

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

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

The solution?

Move your little finger.  And get going.

Money, Power, Politics, and Soros

“What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?” – Dilbert

GOB

My superpower is hindsight.  But I can see that won’t help us now.

When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, sometimes my dad would take me on his business trips.  They were always to the same city – the capital city of our state.  It was hours away, so it was quite an adventure.  Where I grew up there was exactly one elevator (in a two story building at the college) and one escalator (at the JCPenny®) building within a 130 mile radius from town.  We were so isolated that our Democrats were against communism all the way into the 1990s.

Did I mention I grew up in the sticks?

Pop Wilder was a small town banker, and sometimes the meetings in Capital City were at the Big Banks®, which were inevitably in huge skyscrapers.  It was quite a thrill going up into those buildings.  I’d sit in the lobby on the 20th floor, reading science fiction while Pop did whatever it was he was there for in the meeting room.  One bank in particular amazed me because the bathroom, on the 30th floor, had a full length clear window – you could stand up and pee and stare out at the city below.  There is probably a joke about Big Banks™ in there.  I’ll let you fill in that particular blank – this is a family blog.

These trips were fun.

BANKERS

I kept getting checks from the banks during the COVID-19 social isolation – the kept leaving me a loan.

But one trip, we went to visit the majority owner of the bank that Pop Wilder ran.  I recall this trip rather vividly, since we didn’t go to one of those gleaming towers.  Pop pulled the car into a strip mall.  Not a nice strip mall, but a dingy one in a sketchy area of town.  Pop never talked about why he was having those meetings, so I wasn’t exactly sure why we were there.  Perhaps he was going to sell me for a kid that didn’t keep his room in a condition that was specifically listed as containing elements of a war crime as defined by the United Nations?

Pop and I went up to one of those unmarked doors you see sometimes – just a steel door with a small diamond of glass about head high.  You could tell it was a classy area, because the glass was the kind with the wire mesh inside.  There was a buzzer next to the door, and Pop pressed it.

A voice answered, “Who is it?”

“Pop Wilder.”  The lock on the door made an angry buzzing sound and Pop pulled the door open.  We went up a flight of stairs – this particular strip mall doorway led to a second floor.

MAFIA

The Mafia chemist wanted the brake lines to rust – that way it would look like an oxidant.

I hadn’t seen any mob movies at the age of 12, but after watching them when I got older, the office had that feel.  Run down.  Dingy.  Like the world had passed this neighborhood by on its way to making those gleaming towers that were miles away in the downtown area.

A secretary (they were called that, back then) didn’t say much more than, “He’s waiting.”

I walked into the office with Pop.  The office had a feeling that I associate with movies from the 1940s or 1950s – dark, smoky paneling, a thin, worn carpet.  Even the desk was ancient, but not in the “oh, cool antique” way, but in the “early prison work camp warden furniture” way.

The man Pop was planning to meet sat behind the desk.  He didn’t get up as we entered.  His only acknowledgement that we were there was a glance, like an annoyed man staring at what was on the bottom of his shoe.  He looked, and I kid you not, exactly like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life.  So I’ll call him that.  After reviewing information on the Internet, I’d estimate his age at that time as about 85.

Pop Wilder:  “Hello, Mr. Potter.  This is my son, John.  I mean, my other son, John.”

Pop didn’t really say that, but it amuses me to write it, since my older brother’s name was John as well.  I guess he was Juan one, and I was Juan two.

Mr. Potter’s gaze fell upon me.  It wasn’t pleasant.  Normally, when I met an adult, they at least pretended to be interested and would ask some questions and make small talk.  Not Mr. Potter.

“Hi,” I said, more to break the silence than anything.

He never said a word to me.  Pop Wilder handed me the keys to the car, and said, “You can go wait outside, son.”  That was fine with me – I had a book.

POTTER

Bad puns?  That’s how eye roll.

Mr. Potter, as I mentioned, was the majority owner of the bank that Pop ran.  Pop and his brother owned a fairly small amount of the shares, but Mr. Potter owned the vast majority of the bank.  From snippets between my parents in those conversations that last the length of a childhood, it turns out that Mr. Potter was far more than an angry bank owner working from a shabby office.  He was actually a kingmaker in state politics.  He was a Democrat, and no one got “the nod” unless he approved.  He had spent decades of his life building up connections with every important person in state politics.

In today’s terms, the big, shining gleaming banks had Money, billions of dollars.  This was the sort of Money that Mr. Potter didn’t have.  Sure, Mr. Potter had millions back when millions meant something, but Mr. Potter also had raw, naked Power.  Want to be governor?  He couldn’t guarantee it, but he could probably make sure it didn’t happen if you made him mad.

Money and Power are different things – most people equate them, but it’s not really so.  Elon Musk has Money, but he certainly lacks Power.  Yes, there’s another fill in the blank joke in there about Tesla™ and power.  If Elon Musk had Power?  They wouldn’t have closed his car factories due to WuFlu. Power is where the governor would have found some way that the factories were found to be “essential” businesses.  Real power is when the governor does what you want before you even ask.

Elon Musk has Money, but as only one out of 157 or so billionaires in California, he doesn’t have Power.  But he does have $46 billion dollars*, so don’t feel bad for him.  *That’s because it’s mainly in stock – a big Tesla™ crash, and it could be discharged.  See, I finally made that electrical joke.

SOROS

Soros was going to organize a riot of amputees, but he was worried it would get out of hand.

George Soros, on the other hand, only has a listed net worth of a little over $8 billion dollars.  But Soros has invested heavily in politics.  He’s created and funded a vast network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that drive politics globally.  How many connections does Soros have?  According to Discover the Networks (LINK), which looks to understand who funds all of the Leftist organizations, Soros is associated in one way or another with 210 organizations that are hard Left.  How hard Left?  How about “Catholics for Choice”?  It’s like I created a group called “Muslims for Bacon”.

But $8 billion. That seems low.  Can you plot a Leftist overthrow on the cheap?  Not at all.  Soros has spent a staggering $32 billion on his foundations since 1984, including a recent transfer of $18 billion to his Open Society Foundation®.  Heck, it once took Jeff Bezos a whole month to make that kind of money.

George Soros is just like that Mr. Potter I met, but on a global scale.  Just a single one of his initiatives is active in over 120 countries in the world.

SOROS3

I heard that George Soros is the Lucky Charms™ evil twin – he’s tragically malicious.   

What drives that kind of raw lust for Power?  I mean, it must mean something to Soros, since he’s given away tens of billions of dollars to get it.  Soros gives us a clue in his own words in a book he wrote about his favorite subject, himself: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.”  It’s no wonder that Soros looks like the evil Emperor from Star Wars™.

And what drove Mr. Potter?  I have no idea.  It wasn’t luxury – his office reminded me of the chief psychiatrist’s office at the asylum that all of those movie serial killers break out of.  Notoriety?  He had a very sparse Wikipedia page a decade ago – it’s gone.  So not that.  Philanthropy?  Nope, none I know of.

I am always concerned about the motives of people who seek Power over others.  Is it ego?  Is it insecurity?  Is it a genuine desire to help others?

Always remember what Mao said:  “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.”   You can have Money, but when Josef Stalin has the NKVD pick you up, you’ll learn quickly the difference between Money and Power.

SOROS2

Soros has evil lessons with Satan every week.  I have no idea what Soros charges.

While mentioning Money and Power I’d be leaving out one very important part of the equation if I just kept in terms of those two material concepts.

There is at least one other type of Power – and that’s Personal Power.  You can call it Spiritual, you can call it Virtue, or you can call it a dozen other names it goes by.  It’s the Power that comes from standing up for what’s right despite the storms that will come.  It’s telling your boss, “no” when he asks you to do what you know is unethical.  It’s standing up when everyone else in the world seems to be against you, but you know that you’re right.

I’d take that Power over any Power that Mr. Potter ever had.  And Soros? He may gain the whole world, but he’s already lost his soul.

Charles Peguy said, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  I think this was sometime before his last quote, “Germans, what Germans?” at the opening of the Battle of the Marne during World War I.

Tyranny seeks Money and Power.  Yet?

Freedom keeps winning.

The Amazing, Collapsing, Dehydrated Economy! Just Add Water!

“Whenever Corey and Trevor go out with Ricky and Julian, what happens? They come home crying.  Dehydrated.  Mysterious wounds.  They won’t tell me what happened because they’re scared to death of those guys.” – Trailer Park Boys

DEHI

And people say I have a dry sense of humor.

I remember hearing about dehydrated water as a kid – probably the first time was a joke from my science teacher in 7th grade.  He also told us (I’m not making this up) drinking stories.  He taught us that if you go out drinking when you have just donated blood, you get drunker faster.  Who says that middle school science doesn’t teach important life lessons?

But the idea of dehydrated water as a product still got filed away somewhere in the six million neurons I have that are dedicated to 7th grade science.  It’s filed somewhere between “don’t stare at the Sun directly through the telescope again Wilder” and “mercuric oxide might look like cinnamon, but it’s not as tasty.”  And dehydrated water popped into my mind as I was preparing to write this post today.

Why?

The economy of the United States is dehydrated water at this point.  The unemployment rate from Shadow Stats® is somewhere around 35%.  Even the Department of Labor thinks the number of people that are unemployed is somewhere north of 20%.  Heck, I heard a guy was upset about losing his job at McDonalds™ even though he worked for a clown.

BURKA

The head of Old McDonalds® Farm is the CIEIO.

As I first predicted when the WuFlu was just coming over the horizon and the first lockdown hit, this is devastating to the economy.  The difference between 2% growth year over year and -2% growth is enough to cause Washington D.C. to be as uncomfortable as a Joe Biden voter when Joe starts talking about how he thinks that JFK has the plan to save us from the Spanish flu.

I was not surprised by the quick action money shower from the .GOV folks.  What did surprise me is that they used the occasion to juice the economy also by giving money to working people rather than just bailing out banks.  Many people on unemployment are actually making more money on unemployment than they made when working, thanks to the extra $600 a week the .GOV folks are adding to their unemployment insurance check.  Some could be making up to $50,000 a year.  For not working.  But Congress makes $174,000 a year for not working, so there’s still room for career growth!

But the .GOV isn’t just juicing the average unemployed worker.  As noted in a previous post, the Federal Reserve Bank™ is engaged in “plunge protection” where money is strategically pumped into the stock market to keep it from crashing.  That’s generally accepted.  But now?  The Federal Reserve© has been, for the first time in history, buying corporate bonds.

Bonds are really just loans.  A company, say, Apple® decides it wants have more slave labor camps factories built in China.  So, it calls up the Chinese partner, and says that it will pay.  But since the cushions in Steve Jobs’ couch have been raided for quarters already, they decide to borrow money.  You or I would have to go ask someone to borrow money from them.  But Apple™ sells their debt in the form of bonds, or promises to pay the borrowed money back, plus interest.

DYE

When James Bond was offered a sandwich, he had a choice of ham or turkey.  Of course he chose bacon, not bird.

Normally, Apple© would sell those bonds to places like pension funds and 401k’s.  But in 2020, the Federal Reserve™ buys them.  Yes.  One of the most profitable companies in the world gets its debt purchased by the Fed®.

Why?

The stock market needs to be propped up, and so does the bond market.  And after hundreds of millions of loan payments haven’t been made.  Which of those loans are good?  Where is the cash to pay the lender coming from?  No one knows.  No one wants to take a risk.  Money is like me on a vacation day, it just sits there.

Markets are freezing up because the money isn’t moving, because the economy is freezing up.  What the Fed® is doing is artificially injecting money into the market because the market has ceased to work.  It’s like my can of dehydrated water – there’s really nothing in it.  The joke is that you can add a gallon of water to the contents of the dehydrated water can to make a gallon of water.

The Fed® is adding billions of dollars to an empty economy and pretending that nothing’s wrong, that they didn’t just make an economy out of nothing.  “Hey, instant economy.  Just add money.”

KOBE

Planes are different than an economy.  Planes only crash once.

My prediction is that the extra $600 a week won’t go away, unless Congress wants the economy to crater even more before the election in November.  Why?  Since giving away money to people and companies that haven’t earned it is literally the thing Congress loves most in the whole world, I think they will.  And I think they’ll ultimately manage to extend it.  Probably for at least 100 weeks.

We’ve borrowed more in the first quarter than we spent in 2011.  What’s a few more zeros on the national deficit?

But when I wrote that first post about the crash, I was (more or less) assuming we’d be done with the economic mess associated with COVID-Forever no later than July.  I thought that people would, as much as possible, not go licking all the doorknobs that they see and the disease would run out of people to infect.  Yay, normal summer.  And given that, I still predicted at least five years to recover, but more likely a decade.

Nope.  States are re-locking down right now.  States that never experienced the devastating deaths caused by the nursing-home stuffing Governor Cuomo set up in New York are seeing cases rise.

>Uh-oh.jpg

When large segments of the economy simply disappear, you can’t simply replace them with money.  In the end, money has real purposes in the economy:

  • Money provides incentives for good behavior, like starting successful companies and saving. Blowing it all on Three Stooges® videos from Amazon™ is probably not the best investment strategy I ever had.
  • Money provides an allocation of resources throughout the economy without central planning – it’s a way to allocate the productive energy of the economy without a team of Central Politbureau Commissars picking and choosing winners and losers. Congress hates  How can you get votes if you don’t mismanage the economy?
  • Money provides ways for people to trade for “stuff” without bartering. I could trade your (for example) a vast quantity of Beanie Babies® for a pickup truck.  But then you’d be stuck with all of those Beanie Babies™ and have to trade them for the goat milk and pantyhose that you really need.  Unless you can milk Beanie Babies© and then use their skins for leggings?

BEANIE

She was upset when the prices crashed.  I tried to tell her she’s not worthless – her kidneys are worth a lot on the black market.

But money isn’t the economy – money only has value if everyone believe in it.  You can’t just give everyone money and expect that good things will happen.  At some point, people need to make things.  And people need to believe that money has value.

You can’t grow plants with Brawndo©, you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck, and you can’t rehydrate an economy with money.

But the Fed© is trying to do that.  Not grow plants with Brawndo®.  But make an economy work by sprinkling money on it.

The next phase of our economic crash, however, is default.  Unless the Fed© keeps rehydrating, eventually people will stop paying back money – it will be a Cashpocalypse – borrowers won’t have money, and lenders won’t get paid.  But that’s okay, we can simply have the Fed™ just shower the money onto both of them?

CARGO

The French, of course, had to jump on the Cargo Cult bandwagon, so they called it “Special Cargo Cult”, or S-Cargo for short.

In the 1940s, massive amounts of men and material flowed into the South Pacific so that we could beat the Japanese back from Australia so it could be handed over to the Chinese in the 21st century.  Several cults known collectively as “Cargo Cults” formed.  One speaks about their deity, John Frum, or, as I prefer to think of it, John From Wilder’s house.  (Seriously, they think the name of John Frum came from “John from America”.)

The idea behind these Cargo Cults was that if the natives built symbolic airstrips and symbolic airplanes out of bamboo (or whatever they had) then the flow of cargo that the American and British armed forces brought in would resume.  Then?  Perfect prosperity.  Hurray!

The Fed™ has become infected with the idea that the economy can be summoned.  That’s the definition of a Cargo Cult.

Sadly, I have bad news.  It won’t work.  It can’t work.

You can’t make an economy by rehydrating it with money.  But you can regress an economy.  And you can destroy the belief in the money you’re flooding the system with.

Just because it’s gone exactly the way I’ve thought it would and told you it would, don’t mind me.  In all seriousness, I could be wrong.

But I could be right.  What then?

Have some water on hand?