Category: Feed Your Head

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?  Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy.  It was a disaster.  No one would accept the program.  Entire crops were lost.  Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.  But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.  The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.  Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off.  I walked through the room naked.  (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart.  He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects.  One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical.  I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements.  The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal.  (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.)  The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand.  You can read it in Ted’s work.  Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski:  it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy.  People like the struggle.  I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe.  Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days.  Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder:  “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe:  “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge.  Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame.  But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks?  A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key.  And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy.  Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him.  Imagine fighting a kitten.  I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems.  At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized.  Eventually he may become clinically depressed.  History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.  This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power.  But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power.  This shows that power is not enough.  One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals:  they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there.  All the time.  They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them.  Maybe winning an Oscar™.  If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders:  they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this:  the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier.  Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival.  Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again:  the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers.  They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God.  They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me.  Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo.  Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good.  I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone.  We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears.  That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live.  So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not).  One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out.  But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself.  You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House.  The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so.  Men need quests.  Society needs quests.  We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning.  And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry:  it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock.  Grug grab other rock, smash rock.  Rock eventually breaks.  Grug happy.

Another example:  Grug want break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine.  Grug create coal mine.  Grug find tree.  Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer.  Grug smash rock.  Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example:  Grug want to break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur.  Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite.  Grug break rock real fast.  Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot.  The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient.  It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time.  And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well?  A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method.  And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet.  Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine.  Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once.  It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman?  More like Grugman.

Yes.  Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas.  What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea.  Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck.  And they were always digging.  I think they might be part mole.  Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly:  couldn’t buy gas.  At all.  Even with cash.  Credit card usage?  Nope.  And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber.  But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet.  In Alaska.  In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely.  Information used to be hard to move.  Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places.  It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear.  Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China.  Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain.  But books burn.  The ephemeral website?  It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon.  Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today.  I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice.  Why would they?  Their methods, their lives are the most direct.  They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus.  It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike.  The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it.  Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon.  He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why?  There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done.  He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz.  Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct.  How fragile?  Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom.  I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Be Bold. Life Is Too Short For Anything Else.

“That’s a bold statement.” – Pulp Fiction

A lion would never drive drunk.  But a tiger would.

One of the problems with life in Modern Mayberry is that it often moves at a fairly slow pace.  Especially in the time when an adult is focused on raising kids, the days tend to blur one into the next.

If your life is good, this isn’t really a problem.  When I was younger, my life was spent going to weddings.  Now that I’m older, more time is spent going to funerals.  It is important to not get mixed up as to which you’re at, although sometimes “My condolences,” is appropriate at a wedding and I’d almost be willing to bet $20 that at least one person will say “Congratulations!” after my funeral.

However, in the event that I’m wrong, collecting on that bet might be a problem.

Maybe I’ll add bikini girls.  Will that put the “fun” in funeral?

One thing that facilitates this blur is reading stuff on the Internet.  One blogger I read (LINK) is giving up doomscrolling (or reading the unending list of negative stories that are available in the news) for Lent.  I suppose you could leave him a comment, but you’d have to wait a few weeks to get a response.

But when it comes to doomscrolling, there are huge numbers of these stories available.  The business model is simple:  scary stuff attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs means revenue.  As I look at my own past posts, I’m thinking that, even though I talk about a lot of scary stuff, that I’m mostly relentlessly positive.  I can even recall a comment section or two where I’m called a Pollyanna because I’m so positive.

What do we want?  Hearing aids.  When do we want them?  Hearing aids.

I can live with that.  Being positive, being for things and knowing that, in the end it’s all going to work out keeps me positive.  In most cases (most, not all!) the things I write about don’t make me angry, either.

Again, stress on the “mostly”.  And I try not to get worked up about events occurring half-a-world away that I can’t control or even much influence.  Things are what they are.

And, for most of us, things are generally pretty good on a day-to-day basis, even when things aren’t perfect.  Even on a bad day, most parts of the day are good.  The thing that gets us is built into the doomscrolling:  spending time worrying about things that simply have not happened.

My friend wrote me a text that said, “What do you get when you mix a gullible person with an optimistic person?”  I replied, “I don’t know!”  He texted back, “Read it again.”

I write about the coming Civil War 2.0 not in hopes that it comes, rather to make people aware that it’s coming.  Do I sit and worry about it daily?

No!

That would take away from the time I spend thinking about the Roman Empire.

In this moment, there are things that I could let bother me.  However, I realize that letting them bother me gives them power over me when that’s the last thing I want.  “Take not counsel of your fears,” is attributed to George S. Patton, Jr.  I’m sure other people said the same thing in similar ways in the thousands of years that people have been saying things, but when Patton says it, well, it’s been said.

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.” – GSP

If I let my fears fill me up, I live a life of fear regardless of if it’s a perfect 63°F, and I have a wonderful cigar, and a great book beside me while sitting in a comfortable chair.

I think fear comes to people as they age.  I certainly saw Pa Wilder get more and more cautious as he aged.  I could give a few examples, but it doesn’t much matter.  I did notice.  And when I saw the tendency to do it start to crop up in myself, at least I understood what was going on and I could choose to be cautious or choose to be bold.

I think, however, that as I get older it is precisely the time to be bolder.  Life moves in a blur, and days stack up faster, so they should mean something.  If I knew I had only a year?  What would I do?

Something to make that year worthwhile.  If a month?  A day?

The shorter the time left, the more that boldness matters and the less caution should.  If I only had an hour of my life left, you can damn sure bet I’d do something with it, as much as I could.

Oh, that’s Samuel L. Jackson, not the famous English dude Samuel Johnson.  I guess that’s the Netflix® version of the quote.

But life is built on compound interest.  The more I try to write, the better I get.  The more I lift, the stronger I get.  The time to start is now.

The actions should be bold.  While my days may pass fast, the more I can do with them, the more I will do.

When I pass, what will be left are the lives I’ve touched, the children that I’ve raised, the ways I’ve made the world better, and the words that I have written.  Since the restraining order dictates who I can touch, and the lessons to the children are mainly done, that leaves making the world better and writing.

Even a full human lifetime isn’t enough, because they are so very short.  But I’ll make do.  With the remaining decades (hopefully) of my life, how big a dent can I kick in the Universe?

I guess I’ll see.  And I’ll smile some, every day.  And enjoy that cigar, and book, and chair when I’m not being bold.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

Friday’s Musings, Including LEGO, Seinfeld, And A Ted Talk

“Clarice, doesn’t this random scattering of sites seem desperately random, like the elaboration of a bad liar?” – The Silence of the Lambs

LEGO® just put in a hospital near my house, but they only do plastic surgery.  It’s busy though, people are lining up for blocks.

Fridays are generally the more relaxed post of the week, so this one won’t be an exception.  Here are some random musings:

Joe Biden won’t be the nominee – the cliff of performance we’re seeing from him is too stark.  Kamala Harris has the charisma of chlamydia, so she’s out.  That leaves two players for the Democratic nomination, Mike Michelle Obama and Grabbin Nuisance, governor of California.

My prediction?  Biden will bow out at the Democratic convention.  He’ll very emotionally note that “for the good of the country” he’ll bow out in favor of Obama or Nuisance.  The big networks will already have this in the books, and the new candidate will get hours of free advertising from every network so they won’t be stained with Kamala’s chlamydia.

What does syphilis and chlamydia have in common?  Kamala.

It’s funny to watch the Leftists try to blame cold winters on Global Warming®.  Yup, they did that.  Global Warming© is the best thing that every happened to the Left:  it’s an excuse to solve weather fluctuations with global governmental control and communism.  Everything is about Global Warming™, and finally Leftists have figured out how to blame it getting cold on everything getting “warmer”.

Sigh.

To the Elite, every single event will be used to increase control.  Stayed up too late and tired at work?  Mandatory bedtimes, unless you’re protesting or at a BIPOC LGBT+ riot, in which case you get a guaranteed minimum income.

If Global Warming© doesn’t happen, it will be anti-climatic.

Whenever I feel far from God, it’s not because He moved.  Duh.  Most (90%?) of the problems I have in life are the ones that I created.  Wonder who is going to fix those?

Things happen when they happen, and not when they’d be easiest.  The proper time to install machine gun nests and to mine the southern border with Mexico was 1960.  Life would have been pretty simple if that happened.

But it didn’t.  Life is what it is, and not what we’d like it to be.  The solution to the border problem is obvious to any thinking person.  It will be taken, or the United States will Balkanize into a collection of warring states, or a Caesar will arise.  Regardless, we’ll get snacks.  Or unending low-level conflict.  To-may-to, to-mah-to.

The Swatch© in Switzerland, thank heavens it wasn’t made in Croatia – then people would have been staring at their Crotch™.

Peak racial amity in the United States was in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Barack Obama was (for race issues) the absolute worst president in the history of the nation, erasing decades worth of propaganda poured into virtually everyone from the 1960s on led to my generation being the least racist generation of white kids in the history of the United States.

Race issues will continue to go downhill as all of that is undone by the racial animus currently on display against white folks.  But, hey, we’ll always have Seinfeld.

As found.

I thought I was getting too old to enjoy books, since the recent ones I read sucked.  I then re-read older books that I had, and discovered the truth:  Older books were better.  It’s not because people were better writers back then, but editors and the people who pick the books that are published pick crap.

Yes, I think people are getting stupider on average, but there are a lot more of them, so there still are a bunch of smart writers, even more than before.  But people who can write books that don’t suck aren’t getting them published as much.  Regardless, it’s time to read more than I have in the last few years.  Books are the best way to understand the thoughts of someone from years or decades or centuries ago.

I wonder if my memes will be studied 2,000 years from now?

Speaking of reading, several years ago, I started reading books with a pen in my hand.  If I see something I like, I underline it.  If want to make a note, I make a note.  It makes it easier to summarize books for this blog, but it also will allow a future reader to see what I thought at the time.

The Mrs. noted that, as laudable as this habit may be, it’s still going to cause people to talk if they see me reading Ted Kaczynski’s book with a highlighter.

TED:  Ideas worth spreading.  (As found, and as if I weren’t on enough lists.)

I’m superstitious.  In high school I had a great football game (multiple sacks, multiple tackles, performed CPR on a child that choked on a Hubba Bubba®).  I used a particular roll of athletic tape before the game, so I used it the rest of the season.  There are dozens of things like that.  Humans have a pattern-seeking brain, and I have a good memory.  That’s not necessarily a great combination.

Sure, rationally, I know that these random coincidences are just random coincidences.

But you never know.

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.