Category: Feed Your Head

Purpose, Calculus, and the “Why” of Life

“As you will find in multivariable calculus, there are often a number of solutions for any given problem.” – A Beautiful Mind

When you take a calculus test, make sure you don’t sit between identical twins – you’ll never be able to differentiate between them.

Often as I go through my daily life, I have to step back and ask the question, “Why?”

“Why” is a really important question, but Sir Isaac Newton was focused in his science on “What”.

Newton figured out (to the best of available information and measurements possible at the time) a very large amount of the “What”.  His equations of motion and gravity are really, really accurate, right up until the point where very large speeds (think how quickly illegals pass over our “border”) or very large masses (think your mother) change the game.  Newton’s rules allow us to predict the orbits of most of the planets with precision.

This is all based on based on 1690’s tech, which your mother would have been familiar with.

He also designed a second Pink Floyd album cover that day, after he set his roommate on fire.

Gottfried Leibniz, though, was really focused on the “Why” question even though he and Newton discovered calculus about the same time.

For Newton, the “Why” was a given.  Newton spent more time in study of the Bible than he did in study of nature or of economics (Newton was the Grand Baron of the Mint, or some such, and was really in favor of executing counterfeiters and people who clipped coins.

Like I always say, for every problem there is a very simple solution.

Leibniz wanted to go further and understand why gravity existed.  Ultimately, that was a question that he couldn’t solve with the measurements available at that time, and we still really don’t have a good idea for the “why” of many basic features of the reality that allows us to make and enjoy PEZ™, watch movies, or sit in a hot tub.

Yeah, things like “time”, “inertia”, “why everyone likes Italian food”, and “why we are even here in the first place”.  Those are things that are, so far, beyond the ability of physics and science in general to explain.

And that’s okay.

What kind of chicken did Leibniz order?  He always Gottfried.

When I look at my own life, I often wonder “why” about a ton of different issues.  I really believe that I’m fortunate in many ways that I really can’t understand the “why” of.  I remember when teachers would tell me that my kids were smart, well, I’d feel proud.

Now?  I realize that I had (almost) no impact on that, at all.  They were born with it – as Rush Limbaugh (PBUH) used to note that he had “talent on loan from God.”  When I first heard that, I thought it was braggadocio, but then realized that Rush was acknowledging that his way with words and skill at communicating, even his sense of humor were nothing for him to be personally proud of – they were on loan from God.

I get it now.

The events of our lives are like that, too.  Some are random, and some have a deeper meaning that either is immediately apparent or is apparent at some future point in time.  The random ones are just that, random.  It doesn’t generally matter (much) if a leaf falls on the east side or the west side of my house – I can ignore them perfectly well on either side.  It’s meaningless.

When a BMW® owner learns to drive, what car do they generally switch to?

But I’ve observed that little delays in my life, the “where did I put my keys” moments that slow me up getting out the door have several times saved me from getting into accidents.  A small thing?

Certainly.  But there are bigger ones that happen, too, things that are so unlikely to happen that they are effectively miracles – those have occurred far too frequently in my life for me to ignore.  Yes, once you’ve lived through 10,000 or more days, 5,000 or more commutes, some unlikely stuff is going to happen.

But we all know the bigger coincidences when we see them – the events that occurred in our lives that, looking backward, were either omens or led to situations we never expected.

This leads, ultimately, to a contradiction in my life there is John Wilder who:

  • Tries to prepare all of the important things so that everything is covered, and tries to live a virtuous and Godly life,

And,

  • Sees the outcome of the planning slowing turning into a colossal mess and the attempts at being virtuous leading to negative personal outcomes and says, “Meh, whatever.”

It’s true – virtue and grace don’t guarantee economic success – soulless creatures like George Soros prowl the world like a Lovecraftian Monster, using their money to spread chaos and disrupt cultural traditions dating back thousands of years.  And he’s rich.  If Soros has even a single positive virtue, I have yet to hear of it.

Kamala got chosen as VEEP for her race and gender instead of for providing sexual favors – which might make it the proudest moment of her life.

There is a scene from that great classic of cinema, BASEketball, where the main character (Joe Cooper) has reached rock bottom, he’s been abandoned by his childhood friend, his girlfriend is filled with contempt for him and he’s being publicly vilified.

His boyhood friend, however, has gotten everything:   public acclaim, money, and gets into a hot tub with a Playboy® playmate (they used to be girls).

Spoiler:  Joe Cooper sticks to the path of virtue, and in the end, everything is returned to him.

That’s the way that, as humans, we want to see life work out, so the good guys win.

What happened to the Russian who told a joke about Stalin?  I don’t know, either.

But it doesn’t always do that, and that’s okay – Soros will be rich until he leaves that money (along with control of dozens of Evil Foundations) to his son.  I can’t change that, and I won’t be upset about it.  It just is.

In the end, I’ll try to be like both Leibniz and Newton.  Like Leibniz, I’ll work as hard as I can to try to understand the “why”, but like Newton, if I don’t get there, I’m good with that.

I mean, they were okay with your mom, so you should cut them some slack.

Peter Turchin’s End Times: There Be Dragons Here

“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist

I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures.  I mean, why knot?

(Complete review in one post)

I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin.  I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.

Her book was bad.  Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.

Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough.  This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.”  To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can.  A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).

The XXX Files are a completely different subject.

His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse:  Elite Overproduction.  In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are.  Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power.  Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.

Turchin breaks down political power into four types:

  • Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this.  Think AntiFa® or .
  • Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
  • Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
  • Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.

Where do psychics shop?  The Seers® catalog.

In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power.  The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else.  In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast).  In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race.  Why?  Bored, I guess.  Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine.  But I repeat myself.

The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs.  That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin.  Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.

Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.

I once saw a baguette in a cage.  I guess it was bread in captivity.

Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.

There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.

So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown.  What else leads to problems?  Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person.  Another term for this is Bidenomics.  Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.

To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump.  Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable.  In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily.  The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats.  Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.

The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb!  To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.

I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”

Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes.  Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.

These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so.  This is in line with Strauss and Howe The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb.

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023.  American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion.  It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce.  We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world.  Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia.  While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.

Me?  I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.

I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire.  The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.  No bucks?  No Buck Rodgers.

Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today:  America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people.  As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.

Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes.  Whare are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?

  • Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration?  It’s perfect to keep wages down.
  • What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals?  Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh.  There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
  • Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.

This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.

That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given.  While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump.  Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion.  Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior?  They have such high double standards.

As noted above, per Turchin, the pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously.  As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college.  That’s probably the right number.  Now?  According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100.  This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees.  Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs.  Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition.  This would lower Google’s® profits.  This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action.  Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about a post back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society.

Stability: On A Scale Of Zero To Drunken Uncle, How Bad Is The United States?

Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States.  People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

  • Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies.  Men want a mate.  However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society.  Out of wedlock babies?  A scandal.
  • Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs.   Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
  • Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
  • Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us!  (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration.  I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general.  Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite.  The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal.  It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now?  Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book:  “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”  Whoa!  That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud:  something wicked this way comes.  We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming.  And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump.  It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time.  Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men (sic) were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . .  But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . .  Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme.

Again, wow.  I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups.  Who runs Bartertown?  Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government?  If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me?  You’re soaking in it.  A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002.  Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative . . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes . . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter.  The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent.  There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies.  Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Yup.  They’re not listening.  They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country.  That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra:  “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™?  It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business.  Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who.  (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists?  They make teeth straight and white.

A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything.  I think it was Farmer Geddon.

I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming.   Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at:

  • Every elite scrambling for position,
  • Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
  • the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:

There Be Dragons Here.

How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin.  “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.”  Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter:  “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.”  He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.

Give Turchin his props:  he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics.  I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.

This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like.  Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.

But back to power structures.  Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier.  I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy.  That’s what it is, really.

Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy.  It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power.  At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”

Honesty.

I love it.

I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts.  It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them.  We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least.  Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.

I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks.  That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today.  Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas.  But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.

End of digression.  Back to the book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road?  “Am I being detained?”

The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore.  Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.

This doesn’t happen gradually.  It happens when the University closes.  As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant.  The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

 

Who will lead that war?  Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry.  Why from the Elite?  They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly.  Examples from our history?

George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.

Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump.  I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990.  Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.

Astrophysicists started a radical protest group:  Black Matter Lives.

From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”.  Turchin notes that:  “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”

They want to stop the signal.  But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned:  you can’t stop the signal.

Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns?  It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government.  This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle:  it makes you a more compliant consoooomer.  And if they get the 2nd Amendment, the 1st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.

This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one.  The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.

Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.”  Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago.  Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased.  Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.

I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better.  And recovers from his dementia, too.

Who else have they attacked?

Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media.  Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”

Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.

Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.

What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?

  • In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
  • In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
  • “The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
  • 75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
  • In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
  • 60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”

Grim.  Really, really grim.

We are at the brink of a civil war.  I’ve been saying that for years now.  One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming.  They left 25 years too soon.

Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard.  I can tell you the future in some instances.  If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die.  It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now.  Just as my family saw the European war that would be known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.

It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.

I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine.

Here be dragons.

I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such.  Why?  Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.

Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.

It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.”

Turchin brings it home.

If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, even though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.

The Only Thing You Need To Read Today: Wilder’s End Times Book Review: The Face Of The Crisis And The Aftermath

“If that’s the end of time, I got a front row seat with a big tub of buttered popcorn and a greasy half-live chicken leg.” – Anchorman 2:  The Legend Continues

A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything.  I think it was Farmer Geddon.

I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming.   Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at

  • Every elite scrambling for position,
  • Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
  • the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:

There Be Dragons Here.

How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin.  “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.”  Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter:  “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.”  He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.

Give Turchin his props:  he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics.  I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.

This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like.  Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.

But back to power structures.  Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier.  I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy.  That’s what it is, really.

Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy.  It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power.  At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”

Honesty.

I love it.

I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts.  It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them.  We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least.  Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.

I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks.  That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today.  Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas.  But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.

End of digression.  Back to the book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road?  “Am I being detained?”

The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore.  Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.

This doesn’t happen gradually.  It happens when the University closes.  As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant.  The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

Who will lead that war?  Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry.  Why from the Elite?  They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly.  Examples from our history?

George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.

Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump.  I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990.  Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.

Astrophysicists started a radical protest group:  Black Matter Lives.

From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”.  Turchin notes that:  “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”

They want to stop the signal.  But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned:  you can’t stop the signal.

Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns?  It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government.  This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle:  it makes you a more compliant consoooomer.  And if they get the 2nd Amendment, the 1st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.

This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one.  The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.

Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.”  Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago.  Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased.  Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.

I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better.  And recovers from his dementia, too.

Who else have they attacked?

Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media.  Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”

Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.

Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.

What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?

  • In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
  • In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
  • “The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
  • 75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
  • In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
  • 60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”

Grim.  Really, really grim.

We are at the brink of a civil war.  I’ve been saying that for years now.  One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming.  They left 25 years too soon.

Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard.  I can tell you the future in some instances.  If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die.  It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now.  Just as my family saw the European war that would known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.

It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.

I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine.  I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such.  Why?  Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men, and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.

Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.

It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.”  Turchin brings it home.  If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.

Stability: On A Scale Of Zero To Drunken Uncle, How Bad Is The United States?

“As a result, our planet’s core became unstable.” – Man of Steel

I was on a horse being chased by a lion, and on my left was a giraffe.  I decided to stop drinking and get off the carousel. 

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes a country stable, recently.  I just can’t figure out why the idea of civilizational collapse keeps popping up in my mind, but, it does.

Why does a country remain stable?  Not wealthy, but stable.

One rudimentary idea is commonality.  Commonality of what, exactly?  Be careful, this gets progressively more controversial as we go down the list and moves from “Taco Bell® mild sauce” to “Scorpion Chili Reaper Death™”.

As nearly as I can figure it, three things.  There are more, but I think history has shown that these three things, when held in common, produce the most stable societies:

Religion.  I know that most readers live in the United States, which was founded on freedom from state religion.  That way Pennsylvania could choose to make Episcopalianism the state religion.  Regardless of that, the United States was historically very much a Christian nation, as in historically 90% plus, and in “you can’t get a mortgage unless your pastor vouches for your” Christian.

I have standards.  I won’t talk publicly about my sects life.

Have divisions among Christian sects caused difficulty?  Certainly.  Look at Europe post-Martin Luther and the religious wars that followed.  There are even problems within sects, given what I once saw a beheading at a Methodist potluck dinner over a stolen potato salad recipe.  To be fair, the potato salad was really, really good.  I think it was the mustard.

But back to American politics:  when JFK was running for president, there was a strong feeling that he wouldn’t be a good president because he was Catholic.  Why?  Because Catholics had to obey the Pope, and JFK would have something other than the best interests of the American people at heart – the orders of a foreign Pope.  After JFK, religion seemed to not matter so much in a presidential candidate, especially after Bill Clinton, a member of the 1st Congregation of If It Feels Good, Do It (Reformed), was elected.

Can people of different religions live together?  Sometimes, especially if the religions in question aren’t, well, Islam and Christianity.  Or Islam and Judaism.  Or Islam and Buddhism.  Or . . . hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.

Is a radical Islamic cowboy a yeehawdist?

It’s weird when I bring up a topic that I know is going to be contentious and I mention religion first on the list of controversial topics, but that should tell you about the minefield that follows.

The second leg of a stable society is Ideology.  If we all believe the world through the same framework, that helps to create stability.  A bad example of that is North Korea.  North Korea is actually a really, really stable country for several reasons.  Do they share the same religion?  Certainly they do – the worship of Kim Jong Un.

They also share the same ideology.  Do all of them like it?  I’m fairly certain that the answer is no, but for most of them it is the only ideology they know, and the only ideology they’ve been taught.  They might see problems, but they have no particular framework where they could even discuss them.  If you asked them what they thought about Kim, they’d say, “I can’t complain”.

Shared ideology allowed he Soviet Union to live long past the best-by date printed on the carton for several reasons – again, it was the only real ideology presented, and second, through the 20th Century Russia went from a Czar and a bunch of peasants to a nation with nukes and a pretty good spaceflight program that the German scientists they captured gave them.  I mean, our Germans were better, but they still had pretty good Germans.

Remember, to an orphan, every selfie is a family photo.

How big was ideology in the United States?  My grandfather-in-law was nearly 95 when we went to a meeting.  They asked us all to stand for the prayer.  He sat.  No one thought anything of it.  When it came time to give the pledge, though, he struggled to his feet to stand.

He had an ideology – and it was the United States and the 8th Army Air Corps, specifically the one that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches.  That ideology, his Civic Nationalism, was so strong in him that it was even stronger than his religion and gravity.

Ideology really is at fault for the Revolutionary War and the Civil War – both of them were from a fairly homogeneous population base, but the major difference was ideology.  In the Civil War, especially, the ideology was one of an honor-culture (the South) versus the Puritan culture of the North.  The North knows how to do iced tea, and the South knows how to do biscuits and gravy.

Outside of food, the South chaffed against the Puritan leanings of the North, and that ended up in war, because that’s what happens when you have a people whose culture is based on honor pushed back up against the wall.  Because the religions and ethnicity of the sides were similar, the result was a nation that could be knit back together rather rapidly.

Can I tell you what ethnicity Napoleon was?  Course I can.

Oh, yeah, ethnicity.  The final leg of the stool is ethnicity.  See!  I told you it was going to get progressively more radioactive.

The long period of stability that the United States has experienced (with the exception of the Civil War) provided a false narrative – the idea that the United States is a proposition nation, and that everyone who came here would be assimilated and become American.

This is demonstrably false.

I still maintain that it takes three generations for a new immigrant family to really be assimilated, minimum.  If Mom and Dad aren’t willing to name their kid Brandon instead of Hans or Abdullah or Chaim, they really haven’t reached American status yet.  That used to be called assimilation, and it used to be generally considered to be good.

But not in 2023.  Back in the ‘teen, Tom Brokaw had to apologize for suggesting that Hispanics had to work harder at assimilating to American culture.  He had violated a new Leftist commandment that “Absolutely Everyone Doing Absolutely Anything” was defined as American.

Oh, and America doesn’t have a culture, bigot.

Of the three, I think ethnicity is generally (though not always) the strongest.  The Danes might not agree on everything, but do they agree that someone who moved to Denmark from Afghanistan isn’t Danish.  I could move to Japan, have kids there, and I would never be Japanese and neither would my kids.

All of this leads to what?

China is built on stability – it has a common religion – Communism, a common ideology, “what Xi said”, and a common ethnicity.  When people point to a coming Chinese collapse, I point to articles from the last 30 years that have said the same thing.  My bet:  China is stable – it may not prosper, but it will endure.

Ireland?  Not so much.  It used to be homogeneous in ethnicity, religion, and ideology, if ideology can be summarized by the statement “drinking and fighting a bit”.  But with a constant influx of immigrants who apparently have the ideology of “stabbing Irish kids is fine” it is clear that the future of Ireland is in doubt, less so if they start drinking and fighting a lot more.

What’s Irish and stays outside all year?  Paddy O’Furniture.

Finally, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the United States.  Viewed through this model, it’s clear:  we have lost our common religion – in 2009, 77% of Americans were Christian.  By 2019?  Down to 65% (Pew®).

Ideology?  The United States had been relatively homogeneous with respect to ideology, too.  Compare the 1950s to the Leftist onslaught we’ve seen 70 years later.  We are a nation divided ideologically.

Ethnicity?  Thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act along with an amazing disregard for borders over the last 30 years, the United States has experienced an amazing increase in the amount of foreign-born people here, and that amount is estimated at 15%, but I’m betting that number is far closer to 25% because I believe the number of illegals is greatly understated in official numbers.

None, exactly zero, of these indicators lead me to believe that the United States will be stable for the next 30 years or can continue to exist as a coherent country.  I’ve mentioned before that I thought the earliest dates for Bad Thing to happen were in the next 2 or 3 years.  My prediction of everything breaking apart remains at 2032 or so, but I see no hope, at all, of the United States existing beyond 2040 unless a Caesar appears at the point of crisis or unless millions of immigrants are sent via trebuchet back to whatever place they came from.

To be clear, I don’t wish for any of this, this is just what every trend is leading towards, and this model is an “in progress” model.  Your additions are welcome in the comments.

The good news?

I hear the Methodists now take a hard line on potato salad beheadings, which is odd, since they’re normally not against anything.

Think Movies Suck Now? You’re Right.

“Freedom costs a buck-oh-five.” – Team America:  World Police

I’ve lost to a computer at chess, but never at kickboxing.

I write about movies (and books) sometimes because they are important – very important.  They are a part of the myths and backstory that defines a people and a country.  Part of this entertainment is (often) a reflection of who we think we are, or who we aspire to be – those are the characters and stories that endure and grow over time.

Comedies certainly have their place, as well.  Comedies can be rooted to universal truths that are (more or less) unchanging with time, think greed, yappy women, and farting.  Yes.  The oldest recorded joke in history that we have yet discovered is a (not very good) fart joke.

Why can’t you make fun of Steve Jobs dying?  It’s not PC.

Part of comedy, especially movie comedy, is the unexpected.  For that to happen, most of the time someone is the object of the joke – the person who is being made fun of.  In comedy in the 1970s, that person was almost always a white male, and almost always was the father and was almost always on the Right.

Why?

Feminism.  Comedy of the 1970s and onward was almost always written from the Leftist perspective.  Think Archie Bunker, who ended up being popular in spite of them trying to make him a buffoon.  Who had the first flush of the terlit on television?  Archie.  To make fun of white men who were on the Right.

Another tip:  don’t use the toilet brush as a microphone when you sing in the shower.

Heck, when I was in junior high and wondering why the only funny things were Leftist (I was on the Right, even then).  Then I read P.J. O’Rourke, and understood that it was more than possible, it was far, far funnier than Leftist humor ever imagined it could be.

The Right is funnier because the Right has Truth on its side.

For a long time, movies have been propaganda of one type or another.  Top Gun?  There’s a reason that the Navy spent millions to help make the movie – they approved the script.

There have been wild cards – people who make fun of everyone and everything – think Airplane.  One that really pushed the boundaries was Team America:  World Police.  South Park used to be funny, back when the stories were about the kids.  When the stories started to be about the adults?  Less funny.

But Team America:  World Police was something else.  It made fun of jingoistic movies while at the same time gutting hard-Left, virtue signaling idiot actors like Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Tim Robbins.  They were all part of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G.

Yes.  They went there.  They also made fun of AIDS and homosexuals.  And Moslems.  And movies like Top Gun.  The rumors are that the studio approved it because it was so politically incorrect, and might be cheap because it was made with puppets instead of actors.

I’m glad COVID didn’t come from a Chinese bear.  Then we’d have had a pandademic.

Needless to say, making a movie that makes fun of any protected group is no longer allowed.  Why are comedies dead?  Because it gets really old, really fast, when the only person you can make fun of is the same person who buys all the movie tickets:  heterosexual white Christian men who have XY chromosomes.  You know, “literally Hitler”.

Comedy is now unfunny, mostly.  Please feel free to leave exceptions in the comments.  And movies as a whole are borderline unwatchable.  Part of the collapse of the box office (and small theaters) was COVID.  The other part is that movies suck.

The reason that movies suck is that they’re now just blatant propaganda, start to finish.  The latest Marvel® movie, The Marvels™ is a commercial failure, and a box office flop.  The studio is blaming the usual suspects:  the actor’s strike, superhero fatigue, white supremacy, anti-feminism.

That’s easy.

Harder to face is that their stupid movie sucks.

This was even in his speeches . . . remember him saying, “Let me be clear”?

Why does it suck?  It’s about women that don’t need no man.  Oh, and couples who have kids don’t want to spend money to have their kids watch Gay Buzz Lightyear™ and ask questions about why Buzz© has two mommies.  That’s it.

Who is the primary consumer of superhero movies?  White men.  Who is the primary consumer of movies for children?  People capable of making children, which, for every year in the history of mankind before 2020, were known as “men” and “women”.

Yes, white men like to look at attractive women in skintight costumes, but only the most Leftist is willing to sit and watch a movie that makes fun of them and marginalizes them.

Why does Marvel© (and Disney™) lose money?  Because they forgot who buys the tickets.

Men.

I’ve gotten to the point that, unless I’ve heard about a movie, if it was made in the last four years, it’s a hard pass, even if it looks interesting.  The movies started going south in, say, 2018.  My take is that was a reaction to Trump.  It so triggered nearly everyone who writes or acts in a movie that all they wanted to do was attack a relatively Centrist guy who just happened to be President.

What do your get if you take an entire human digestive tract and lay it out on a football field?  Arrested.

The reaction led to . . . crap.  Every Leftist simply had to get their message out that trans was the new normal and white men were awful and stupid and that NASA stuff on the Moon was a fluke.  Oh, they tried to take credit for that, too.  Because white guys, you know, can’t do math.

I also noticed it with books.  I was a lifelong reader of science fiction – I loved the ideas.  Then, around 2010, I started to notice that the books in Barnes and Noble® mainly . . . sucked.  I thought it was me.  I thought I was old and jaded.  But, nope, I read some of the old stuff and it was still great.

Science fiction was destroyed by The Narrative, too.  The people who picked the books that made it to the shelves only picked Leftist crap filled with weak people who hated themselves and hated everything True, Beautiful, and Good.  In this breakup, it wasn’t me, it was them.

They came for comics and killed them.  They came for books and killed them.  Lastly, they came for movies, and killed them.  Every book and every movie has a message, and most are propaganda of some sort or another, for good or bad.  Propaganda to get kids to brush their teeth?  That’s good.

But propaganda to turn them into self-loathing transexuals?  That’s 100% against the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

This was the 2022 “woman” of the year.  Guess guys do everything better.

Watch what goes into your mind.  Watch what goes into the minds of your children.  Help them to aspire to be noble and virtuous and strong.  Help them to understand that jokes about yappy, farting women have been funny for 4,000 years, and will be funny for as long as women fart.

There are still good books out there.  There are still good movies, though they are uncommon, since the rot is very, very deep.  But freedom?

It still costs a buck-o-five.

Shaving, Emotions, And Having A Good Day

“I have gold. What can I buy with gratitude?” – Game of Thrones

I’d tell you a joke about a broken pencil, but there’s no point.

I was in a meeting with a guy that I worked with. We were discussing a project and an everyday task that one of the employees would have to do. “Well, that shouldn’t be controversial. It’ll take, what, a minute for someone to do that every day?” It would have taken something like $50,000 to automate the function, and people would still have to check that the automation was working.

He responded, “John, that’s how you and I think. It’s part of our jobs, right? But I know these guys. They’re gonna fight this with all the power of Oprah Winfrey fighting Whoopi Goldberg to get the last piece of cheesecake on Earth. To you and me, it’s a minute of our day. No problem. To them? These are people who get up in the morning and think, ‘What, do you mean I have to shave? Every day? For the rest of my life?’”

He was right. We still didn’t spend the money, thankfully.

This comment about shaving . . . every day . . . for the rest of my life . . . always cracks me up. There is a category of people that are eternally and forever upset about everything, and get upset about every aspect of life, even (and maybe especially) for things they had no control over.

Those people? I avoid them as much as possible, and I’d rather spend a day chewing aluminum foil or having someone take a cheese grater to my spinal column (the bone part, not the fleshy bits).

Then The Mrs. asked me why I lost the whisk. I told her, “It beats me.”

Instead, I’ve just started a simple experiment to control my own mood. The first part of the day, I try, even before the toothbrush hits my teeth, to think about the things that I’m grateful for.

This is not the first time that I thought about feelings the first thing in the morning. That would have been in sex ed in high school, which I took because I needed something first hour and the teacher was so mellow, I don’t think he left any pot unsmoked in the 1960s.

One exercise that he asked us to do was to think about our feelings and make a (I kid you not) feeling wheel the first thing in the morning. As a man, I only have a small number of feelings available to me: salty, drunk, hungry, cold, and sleepy are the three that come to mind.

Newton walks into a bar. Or did the bar walk into Newton?

Other guys on the wrestling team in the class with me would, I kid you not, copy my answers for their feeling wheel. The other reason I didn’t have much to write is because I was 17. The only way I ever felt for every day of my 17th year on Earth was AWESOME! Being 17 rocked. Gratitude? What was that, I was too busy enjoying life and feeling awesome every day.

Now I’m no longer 17. I find that, for no reason at all, something hurts every morning when I get up. I look in the mirror and can see I’m definitely not 17, at least after my eyes focus, but thankfully the mirror is blurry because I haven’t put my glasses on yet.

I could choose (and I see many people who do this) to feel a little grumpy. To be clear, I did notice that I was waking up grumpy recently. And I thought is this fun? Do I enjoy this?

No, no I do not.

If it’s not enjoyable to me, and it doesn’t serve any purpose, then why am I doing it?

I read that someone in New York City gets stabbed every 43 seconds. Poor guy.

So that’s why I started the experiment. I would, from the first moment that I got up avoid thinking about:

  • Things I wasn’t looking forward to that day.
  • Things that make me mad.
  • Situations that I couldn’t control.
  • How warm the bed was and how cold the room was.

Instead, I decided, I would think about something that made me happy or something that I was grateful for. It didn’t have to be a big thing – the way that the coffee was going to taste, for instance, or the idea that I was going to get ready for the day faster than usual, or a song I liked that I could play while I brushed my teeth.

I also learned that you should never brush your teeth with your left hand. A toothbrush works much better.

Instead of being mad, I would focus on something that made me want to get out of bed, something to look forward to, no matter how small. Maybe today I could do just a little more than I did yesterday, or serve just a little more than I did yesterday, or be just a little bit better than yesterday. It’s possible, right?

Immediately, my mood was better. Oh, I certainly wasn’t skipping down the hall, but I was not in the mood to complain, in fact, I was feeling happy about things that

I would think about something that made me want to get out of bed.

Oh, sure, the chaos of thoughts about things I had to do would come, but I could push those off until after I had a cup of coffee. Each day I have is a unique day, and the biggest variable is how I deal with it.

If someone gave me a dollar for every time I didn’t understand what was going on, I’d be like, “Hey, why are you giving me all these dollars?”

As I’ve mentioned before, I get to choose how I feel, and I get to choose how I react. In this world, sometimes those are the only things fully under our control. So, if I have to choose?

Today, I chose to be grateful. And, it felt pretty good. Maybe sometime I’ll choose to be grumpy, or angry, or mad.

But not today.

And the good news about having a beard? I didn’t have to shave today, either.

Great News: Everything’s Going Wrong!

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

How many contractors does it take to screw in a light bulb?  I’ll let you know when I get one to call me back.

Many times we look at a mess, and think, “Well, that’s just so broken that nothing, nothing will ever be okay again.”  That would describe my first marriage.  I don’t write more about that bad marriages because bad marriages aren’t all that interesting unless it’s in Florida and involves an alligator, meth, and a Clinton.  Besides, it’s over.

So, did it really matter?

In my case, yes.

When I sat back after it was all concluded, one of the things that I did was really think about it, and try to figure out what (if anything) that I had done wrong in the marriage.  On hindsight, there was plenty that I did wrong.  Though I’d love to blame it all on her since , I certainly played my part.  In the end, I knew I’d never find anyone like my ex-wife again.  Of course, that was my goal.

There I was, recently divorced, in debt, underwater on my house, and with a stack of bills that were immediately due.  It was the worst place I’d ever been in my life, with the exception of being married to my ex.  Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.

Do divorcing stoners get joint custody?

I realize now that this wasn’t as bad as I thought it was then, but back then it looked like a jet had crashed into my life.

What did I do?

I put one foot in front of the other, met The Mrs., paid off my bills (that took four years), had first one kid and then another, and sold the house right as the housing boom was taking off.  None of this was predictable to me at the time of the divorce.

But this isn’t about me.

What kind of eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie?  That’s a moray.

When you look at, say, Japan in 1945, it was almost worse than my divorce.  Almost.  The land had been nuked, bombed, and about 4%, nearly one out of twenty, of the Japanese population had been killed in the war.  Their industry had been devastated; their army dismantled, their anime undrawn.

So, they gave up.

No, just kidding.  They didn’t give up.  They buckled down and became the economic growth story, leading the world in the production of quality cars and electronics by the early 1970s, just a little over a generation after the end of the war and the devastation.

You could not have predicted that Japan would have been so successful that by the late 1980s people were expecting it to have an economy that many felt would soon be larger than the economy of the United States.  Luckily, the Japanese discovered mascot suits, and have settled back into being one of the largest, most functional, highest standard of living places in the world who is also a bit crazy.

Why did U-Boats in World War II have dogs as mascots?  So they could have a sub woofer.

The point remains – you cannot guess the end by the beginning.

As I look around the world now, I see a world that is filled with conflict, some of which is horrifying.  Some of the conflict threatens to change the entire world balance of power.  Some of the cataclysmic changes we’ve seen in society have ripped apart the basis for stability of the atom of society – the family and have created new structures that are actively against every virtue and celebrate their opposites.

All of that is true.  And yet, I still am optimistic.  Why?  Because, when I look back through history, we’ve driven to the cliff, again and again and even tried to jump off.  When the Roman Empire fell because of many of the same things ailing Western Civilization today, the game wasn’t over.  Europe rebounded and eventually (after a lot of struggle) reached heights that had never been seen before in the history of mankind.  The setback of the fall of the Roman Empire had been the catalyst for the rebirth of Europe.

Was everything the same?

No.  But the foundations for a stable society that can create wealth, freedom, and exemplify virtue haven’t changed since civilization itself was formed.  These things are necessary.  Humans have changed since civilization started, but the basic things that motivate us and keep us going when it’s cold and dark out haven’t:  the things that give us hope are family, religion, and the will to create – something far more than just the will to survive – amoeba and Leftists can do that.

These things don’t include so much of what we see being indoctrinated into the culture today, things that are anti-child, anti-family, and anti-life.  These are now being celebrated as virtues, and it’s devastating and causes civilization to unravel.

Surely that burning oil could have created a full tank?

This unravelling, however, will end up being the basis of something new and wonderful:  although all great civilizations rhyme, they don’t have to look exactly the same.  I really believe that, perhaps, the greatest and most golden age of humanity may be before us, rather than behind us.

You really can’t see it now in a world that’s falling apart because of the absolute inversion of values, but I assure you, it’s there.  We will win.  Deep down, Kipling knew it over 100 years ago when he penned The Gods of the Copybook Headings (which I’ll trot out once more, full poem below).

We cannot lose because those values that make civilization worth living have nothing to do with the cultural change being forced down our throats.  The irony is that, by weakening our culture they bring their defeat closer to them, faster.  Hormone treatment of children has not, is not, and will never be a way to create a stable society.  It is, in fact, a way to create a crushed number of people that are so broken and confused inside that there is no way that they can create any sort of civilization.

No, everything is breaking apart, and it will lead, inevitably, to the next stage, which is going to be wonderful, though the route won’t be easy.  Be of good cheer.  I’ll put it in better hands than mine to point out what’s coming:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings, by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Field Guide to NPCs

“I had no idea those beer cans were going to blow like that.” – Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

I’m unique – I can always tell when there are groups of lions around.  That fills me with a sense of pride.

(All memes “as found”)

There was a time, back before the rhetoric was so heated, that I would actually seek out to have political discussions with Leftists I knew.  The idea was to try to understand their position from their point of view.  I see now how wrong I was.  In most cases when they were logically cornered, they would get a funny look like they ate a bad PEZ™ on their face and “reset”.  They’d never admit that they were wrong, and would hold on to the same opinion they started with.

I hadn’t changed their worldview at all (which wasn’t my point in the first place) but I did notice the behavior.  It was repeated, again and again.  When the meme showing Leftists as NPCs hit, it started to click.  Leftists talking about politics are NPCs.

NPCs are “Non Player Characters” in video games.  They’re there for exposition, or to assist in a video game task, or even for comic relief.  What they aren’t capable of, is independent thought.  That’s up to the player.

The Left got very, very angry at the NPC memes.  Their angry reaction is how you can tell it hurt them to the core.  That’s how you can tell that there’s truth in a meme – it pulls an emotional reaction from the target.

I can fix the wage gap.  Wagegap.  See?  That wasn’t hard.

But let’s get at the core of what it means to be an NPC.  I would bet that everyone reading this post is a person that’s grounded pretty well in reality.  We observe reality, then we process around it.  An example:  we observe that illegal aliens are more likely to commit additional crimes when they get here, don’t contribute much (if at all) in taxes, cause more complex public service needs (forms in multiple languages), and make little effort to assimilate.  They’re expensive, make the country less safe, and cause it to be less cohesive.

An NPC, however, will just love illegals because they’ve been told to love them.  They don’t observe the world and then adjust their ideas, they just take their ideas from an approved source.

Here’s an example:  The Leftists were told to hate James Comey because he released that the FBI was reviewing Hillary’s email right before the election.  It was programmed into every Leftist that Comey was a bad guy.  Fast forward a few months, and one of the Late Night Funny Joke Men was doing his monologue.  Colbert announced that Comey was fired.

The audience erupted in cheers.

Colbert reprogrammed them, immediately:  “What, are you all Trump fans?”  Within 90 seconds, Colbert switched the old “Comey Bad Man” program into the “Comey Friend” program.

What language is most used in computer programming?  Profanity.

It’s clear – Leftists don’t have the ability to judge between one thing and another.  This is the most basic part of what makes us human – the ability to seek patterns, come to conclusions, and then act on those conclusions.  Leftists can’t tell who is a friend and who is an enemy unless someone tells them.  And who do they trust the most?  Talking heads on television who go out of their way to only send out approved information.

They can’t come to the conclusion that illegals are bad because everyone tells them how good they are and how nice tacos taste and you’re a racist if you don’t want to import absolutely all of Guatemala.

This results in me feeling a bit of epicaricacy every once and a while, when a Leftist fails to see dangers that any person who isn’t spoon fed their ideas would see, yet the first programming put in is that there are things that they’re not supposed to think about.  Their brains shut down when they hit those items where thought is not allowed, and they’ll change the subject as fast as they can – certain inputs are simply not possible.  Certain ideas are forbidden.

Newton’s Third Law of Emotion:  For every male action, there is a female overreaction. 

And a lack of ideas is the problem.  People are reading fewer books, and the Leftists don’t need to burn them (though they censor quite a few) because people aren’t reading them anymore.  Anything challenging or requiring any study is just too hard.

It’s easier to have an emotion, and Facebook™ and CNN® and the rest of the mainstream media are great at popping out emotions and reprogramming and hiding ideas that aren’t approved.  The NPCs can, therefore, not worry about there being any hard thoughts to have or thinking to be done.  They can live their lives never thinking about the news.  They can live their lives aspiring to nothing.  They go to work, eat the things they are told to eat, and feel bad about global warming climate change because they’ve been told to worry about it, even though they only have the vaguest idea what it might be.

Is there a cure?

I once swallowed the cat’s pill.  Don’t ask me-ow.

Only for some, and most don’t want to be cured.  The cure is the Red Pill.  The Red Pill is uncomfortable, but it’s also irreversible.  And when The Narrative is finally questioned in the brain of the NPC, it cascades.  Once the first Big Lie is seen, the process is started.  There’s no going back, if the Red Pill lands with someone who really does want the truth.

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Mental Health

“Who is Poppy Adams? After graduating Harvard Business School, Adams was briefly held for serious mental health issues before disappearing without a trace.” – Kingsman:  The Golden Circle

Every day I tell my family I’m going out for a jog and then I don’t.  It’s my longest running joke.

FYI – minimal humor and memes in today’s post due to subject matter – it just didn’t fit.

We’ve driven the kids nuts.

I don’t necessarily mean you or I, but the change in society has caused a great decline in the mental health of the kids.  It really started showing up in 2009 or so, when the emergency room visits for kids started a sharp uptrend.  The kids (ages 10-19) were going to the hospital due to self-harm spiked by over 60% in a single decade.

For girls it was worse – it spiked nearly 100% – doubling in that time period.  The rates of depression doubled in that time frame as well.

What I’ve seen when I talk to kids is that many, many of them have huge anxiety issues.  Many are on psychoactive drugs.  Many are visiting therapists regularly.

I look back to when I was that age, and I’m not sure I knew even a single Gen X kid who was seeing a shrink.  I’m sure that it wouldn’t have been something they’d have shared, but it was a school, so that would have gotten around.  Also, as far as I know, there was only one girl on any medication, and as I recall there had been some significant family tragedy.

Suicide?  Only one kid tried it in the decade I spent in that age group.  And I knew a lot of kids.  But, to be fair, something like 30% of kids with mental health issues drop out of school so I never would have seen them.  However, the numbers really do show that this is certainly the most mentally ill generation in the history of the country.

What’s changed?

Luxuries are available today that would have boggled the minds of my generation when we were growing up.  Kids today can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time.  Listen to any song.  Watch concerts of their favorite bands.  Yet, with all the information, connection, and amusement available, something is horribly wrong.

My first guess at a major factor is a simple one – the iPhone™ came out in 2007.  Given two years for smart phones to become more or less everywhere among the teen set, that correlates pretty well to the start of the increase in mental issues.

The designers of social media and games aren’t stupid – they absolutely manipulate the way the apps work to make the user addicted.  “Someone read my FaceGram© or InstaSpace® and liked it!  I’ll go check and see who it was!  I Tweeted®, er X’d™.  Did someone repost it?”  The system is designed to make sure there are small, frequent doses of dopamine kicked out by whatever is in the human brain that kicks out dopamine.

This shorter-term focus, the smaller “bite size” ideas make something that was typical decades ago, like reading a book, seem like forever.  Not being able to tune out and relax can’t be good.

Social media also has another insidious function – it is designed so people show off only the glamorous and nice things that happen to them.  Who spends a lot of time posting about their pain, and sorrow?  In the end, it makes a certain segment of the population feel that everyone is doing great except for them.  Me?  With my friends we spend as much time talking about the rough bits in our life as we do the great things.

Online friendships are also shallower, so the real bonding that kids get when they’re on adventures is lost.  Add in that porn of the vilest types is available to most any kid with a phone?  How are they not messed up in ways that no other generation has ever been?

2009 was also the dawn of Obama.  Obama started defending traditional marriage and ended in full Pride® mode.  Gender confusion wasn’t really something that was very big when I was growing up, except for Dee Snider.  Now people are talking about transitioning toddlers, and somehow these people are being taken seriously and not being strung up on telephone poles.

To be sure, not all kids are a mess, but enough are that there’s a very big problem – I’ve seen one statistic that 44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness.   That’s a big number – I do think that, perhaps, the kids see some of the same things coming that we do – I do know they look at the economy and think, perhaps correctly, that they’ll never do as well as their parents.

I’m not sure how to fix those millions of kids that have already passed through their teens and are now in their 20s.  From the outside, the one thing I’ve seen with most psychiatrists/psychologists is that they never really cure their patients, they just keep coming back, week after week to pay for the therapist’s BMW®.  And I’m exceptionally skeptical of many psychoactive drugs.  Yes, I know that some of them work very, very well for certain conditions with a physical cause.

What now?

The solutions to preventing a lot of these issues in the first place are fairly simple, but a big step for many:

  • Religion gives life a greater meaning. I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that as church attendance declines, mental health problems increase.
  • Be involved.
  • Technology control (i.e., limit the damn phones), especially for young girls who seem to be more impacted.
  • Remove the gender confusion – homeschooling or a decent religious school would be good options.
  • Make sure they learn skills that allow them to be useful. Start small, and build up.  Don’t coddle them or walk them through every step.  Make them work for it.
  • Make sure the boys are involved in sports, especially if they don’t want to be. Get girls involved in something like 4-H or the church youth club.

The Zoomers (Gen Z) have had a tough time of it, and this will be another factor (along with their horribly messed up dating and sex lives) that is already impacting the economy.

Let’s not screw up another generation.

Dunbar At The Fall Of Nations

“Dunbar, not Dumb Bear.” – Dances with Wolves

If beer makes you smarter, that didn’t work out for Budweiser®. (meme not mine)

People are funny.  And I’m not talking, “John Wilder after fourteen beers at Chili’s when someone mentions that we’ll have to give up PEZ™ to meet CliMAtE ChAnGE GoALZ” funny.  No, I’m talking about the way that we’re wired to react as people, and yet pretend we’re not.

Out of all of the aspirations of the way that we want to think about ourselves, there are some constants.  Except for Mark Zuckerberg, we all need air to breathe.  We all need food.  We all need something to drink.  I’ve heard some people drink water, but I keep wonder why they do that when mankind made civilization so we could have a nice beer.

The other thing most of us need is . . . people.  Although everyone is slightly different, there seems to be something hardwired into us as to how we deal with people.

I told the doctor I didn’t trust him to stitch me up.  He said, “Fine, suture self.”

Robin Dunbar (Grad student for Dr. Batman® Von Unterober) is a British Psychologist.  He looked at the various sizes of primate brain, specifically the neo-ocasio-cortex.  Er, just the neocortex.  Sorry.  The neocortex is the most recent delivery to the brain, and allows humans to do complicated things like talking, brewing beer, heating up frozen pizzas in the oven, giving each other chlamydia, and writing columns while drinking beer.

Dunbar sliced up a lot of primate brains, and compared the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate tribe.  There was a correlation.  Dunbar then said, “Hey, humans are primates, even though we are so very sexy, so what size would a human tribe be?”

His result based on math and brain size, and, I’m guessing a few pints of Guiness®?

Stable human tribe sizes should be about 150 based on Dunbar’s math, and this number is called Dunbar’s Number.  I wrote about this before in this post (LINK) where I have the original (as far as I can see) hypothesis that some mental illnesses might have helped small groups survive back when we were killing mammoths to survive, and I write a bit more about Dunbar’s Number in that post.

My friend’s wife is leaving him because of mental illness.  Or at least that’s what his cat told him.

This 150 person (let’s be generous and say it’s somewhere between 100 and 250) group size seems to show up wherever I look.  Huge corporations may have tens of thousands of employees, but each of the actual operational chunks is small.  Most that I’ve seen have been . . . less than 150 people.  Even operating locations I’ve been to that have 500 people or more break down into groups.  Office staff versus day shift versus night shift, or people who forgot their pants versus people who always remember them, or something similar.

Many folks might say, but Wilder, my country has hundreds of millions of people in it.  Dunbar’s Number doesn’t seem to apply.  Dunbar himself theorized that this number would only be exceeded when those groups faced extreme survival pressures, like invading Huns or women wanting to vote.

I’ll toss in a different theory here:  larger groups than Dunbar’s number can exist when there’s a great degree of wealth that requires cooperation to maintain.  My theory was (and is) that civilization was formed so we could make beer (LINK).

So why is it so big now?

How is Alexa® like my ex-wife?  She tried to listen to everything and pretended to know it all.

Wealth, technology, and order allow Dunbar’s Number to get immense.  If every small town in the United States has a McDonald’s®, then life gets simpler.  We have built around an economic “sameness”.  Similarly, people watch the same NFL™ teams or NCAA© college teams based on regions.  This economic homogeneity is based on wealth and technology.

If you’re a fan of {INSERT SPORTS TEAM HERE} then if I’m a fan of the {SAME EXACT TEAM} we’re not so different, we’ve created a commonality.  Dunbar’s Number is short-circuited, and a shallow trust is created.

But what happens when wealth (and the hope of having it) goes down?

I think we’re seeing it.  Trust shrinks.  People we once put inside our group are now put outside our group because the competition for resources increases.  An example is probably in order:  if everyone has a job and all of the PEZ™ and Hot Pockets© they want and big houses with swimming pools, having the odd illegal immigrant doesn’t bother them much.  But when times get tight and jobs are scarce and Hot Pockets® cost $10 each, the “in-group” shrinks.

The Mrs. cringes every time I call them “Squat Pockets®”.

The greater the stress on the people, the smaller the group gets.  Who do I trust?  In my circles, it’s my family first.  That number is small.  Then my close friends – those that I know, based on experience, that I can trust.  That number is bigger, but still pretty small.  Then there are those who I have strong reason to trust.  Then those in the neighborhood.  Then . . .

Well, you can see, the tougher the situation, the smaller the circle.  If we go back to our history, this is what we find – somewhere between 100 to 250 of us in a group trust each other, and can work as a group.  When times are good, technology is in place, and the NFL® is playing that number can certainly be bigger.

I tend to think we’re past the point of Peak Dunbar.  As things get tougher, you can see the friction already started as violence has escalated.  As jobs disappear, and as hope disappears, this will increase.

But at least right now, I can still have fourteen beers at Chili’s™.