Category: Panzers

Happy Thanksgiving 2021, Wilder Style

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

Isn’t it odd the only people who tried to tell you how many people it’s appropriate to have for Thanksgiving dinner are the Centers for Disease Control and Jeffery Dahmer?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

I would say that it has always been my favorite holiday, but that’s not really so.  When I was younger, say between toddler and 12, Christmas was.  The reason that Christmas was so important was, well, the stuff.  The movie A Christmas Story says it all.

But as I grew older, Thanksgiving kept growing in importance.  In part, it grew in importance because it didn’t have the gifts.  It had all of the proper things that, in my mind, a good holiday should have:

  • Time away from the cares of the day,
  • Time focused on being grateful,
  • Free from stress, and,
  • Cold.

The stress of Christmas was from the commercial aspects.  Would I get that thing I wanted?  The gifts overshadowed the holiday.  Of course, each year the presents got less and less important, and the time with loved ones became more important.  That’s when Thanksgiving started to win.

This year is the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving.  The first one was held (according to a letter) in 1621.  It wasn’t held at this time of year, rather, sometime near the end of harvest.  The Pilgrims knew that they were going to make it.

April showers, bring . . .

It wasn’t always so clear.  The original deal that they drew up was socialist.  Everybody worked, and everybody shared equally.  That worked as well as it ever has.  Nobody worked, so nobody shared anything, except starvation.  That was 1620.

Starvation is a tough teacher.

The Pilgrims then came to the good and sensible decision that if you grow it, you own it.  The result?

So much food that they wanted to have a party – a party that lasted three days.  And history teaches us that the Pilgrims weren’t teetotalers.  But this harvest festival was sheer joy:  giving thanks for the good sense to give up socialism and allow people individual freedom.  There’s a big lesson here, yet we keep trying to repeat the same evils that impoverish men.

Oh well.

The holiday being a direct repudiation of the philosophy that’s killed more people than any other philosophy, well, that’s not the main reason I love the holiday.  It’s just whipped cream on the pumpkin pie.

It’s so cold this Thanksgiving I saw a socialist with his hands in his own pockets.

The cold plays into why I love the holiday as well.  The work of planting is done.  The work of growing is done.  The work of the harvest is done.  Now is the time to sit, rest, and be thankful.  The harvest was good.  The food will last us through the winter and spring until the next crops can be grown from a renewed Earth.

It’s that stillness, that preparation.  The great woodpile set and prepared against the winter’s cold.  The food stocks set against the winter’s hunger.  Now is a time of peace.

And that resonates through 400 years.

The life of a man, when faced with 400 years, is but an instant.  But the peace of a single Thanksgiving can seem as an eternity.  The moments created when family gathers together to celebrate is nearly magical.  Overcooked turkey or gravy as lumpy as the Hunter Biden’s thighs?  Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

I’m pretty sober, but even prettier when I’m not.

A drunken uncle who wants to need Mom about something that happened when they were six?  Not a problem.  Your team doesn’t win the football game?  Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

Of course, at this point, the question is, to give thanks to who?  Well, in our folks, the dinner will start out with us giving a prayer.  That is, over those 400 years, the most common way the feast was held.

Giving thanks is part of being human, whether you are religious or not.  Being thankful is a way to be healthier.  The mere attitude of being thankful changes the way that people think.  It moves them from a spirit of greed for what they don’t have, to a spirit of gratitude, for what they do have.

French tanks have rearview mirrors, mainly so they can see the battlefield.

Studies have proven that being happy about the things you have is about a zillion percent better for your health than being unhappy about things you don’t have.

Duh.  This is the equivalent of psychology professors stealing money to do a study, because nothing in the history of humanity has been more obvious since, well, ever.  Yet, they studied this.  You could look it up, but, why?

You already know that it’s true.  To quote it again:

We are here to give thanks.  Not complain.  Not be upset about any of the day-to-day things that always go wrong.  Thanks.

I seemed to figure that out a little each year as I grew older. When I was six, it was all about the stuff.  I remember ripping through the wrapping paper like a velociraptor in a room full of Leftists who had been raised on soy since birth.  Some of the bits probably reached orbit.

As I got older, the greed waned, and the importance of Thanksgiving increased.    Last year when I cooked the turkey upside down?  I don’t think anyone but me noticed.  But we were together as a family on the 399th Thanksgiving.  Together, in a house filled with the smells of turkey and pumpkin pie and a family that loves each other.

The most frustrated ghost in the world?  The one that tried to haunt Helen Keller.

The things that I am thankful for are so numerous I couldn’t list them if I kept writing for the next eight hours.  I’d put my list down, but I’m going to (as my textbooks always said) leave this as an exercise for the reader.  It’s not what I’m thankful for, it’s what you are thankful for that will help you.

Even in the deepest depths of difficulties, there is a time and a place to stop.  And give thanks.

Every minute I think about those things I give thanks for, I feel better.  And the crazy thing I’ve learned?  I don’t even need a turkey and mashed potatoes to do it.  But the gravy?  I’m especially thankful for my annual gravy bath.  What would Thanksgiving be without it?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it.  Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.  Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals.  The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England.  Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years.  I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears.  The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy.  And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that.  NO!  Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral.  Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime.  Or the lifetime of your child.  Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation.  Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral.  One motivational mistake is to aim too high.  When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners.  Third place isn’t so bad.  Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage.  They did really well.  Were they close to winning it all?  Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal.  But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place.  If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better.  So, third isn’t so bad.  They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him:  what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week?  What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room?  The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night.  Second place is tantalizing.  It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates.  Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist?  It depends.  In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right?  But what happens when the dog finally catches the car?  What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history:  Buzz Aldrin.  It will all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class.  He went to the USMA at West Point.  He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did.  He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing.  What was it?

Oh, yeah.  He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool.  But there appears to be a downside to that.  It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up?  Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up.  That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake.  Imagine:  Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked.  Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes.  Then a month passes.  Then a year passes.  The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew.  How do you move forward?  How do you top yourself?  I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes.  Dang.  That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped.  He had fame.  He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle.  Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars.  Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate?  The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk.  He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars.  He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision.  You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him.  Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars.  A worthy goal for mankind.  A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity.  He had found his cathedral.

Again.  Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers.  Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up.  But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that.  Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building.  You start building something more important than you.  I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching.  Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure.  Neil didn’t really say.  He seemed happy that the attention had passed.  My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong.  And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one:  have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build.  Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through.  Make it something that you can care about.  Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts:  you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

Paranoia, Preparation, and Peace of Mind

“Frankly, your lack of paranoia is insane to me.” – Silicon Valley

In our library, I asked The Mrs. where our books on paranoia were, she said, “They’re right behind you.”

The biggest natural disaster The Wilder Family ever rode out was Hurricane Ike – it passed right over our house when we lived in Houston.  And it was going pretty strong when it hit our place.  We lost power, a tree, siding, and a whole lot of roof.  Thankfully, Led Zeppelin was there to sing that one . . . Whole Lot of Roof . . . .

In review, the hurricane wasn’t so bad.  At one point, I had to do my Captain Dan impression, walking outside in the middle of the hurricane at the strongest winds and yelling into the wind after the power went out and the laptop battery died so we couldn’t watch the John Adams miniseries we were watching on DVD:

“Is that all that you’ve got?”

Since I’ll probably never be able to walk away from an exploding helicopter without looking back as the flames shot up into the sky, it was just something I thought I had to do:  yelling into a hurricane wearing a bathrobe and athletic shorts.

I’ve done a lot of cool things in my life, but I really enjoyed that one.  I’d recommend it, but my lawyer, Lazlo, advises me against advising you to try it.  Maybe you could talk pleasantly into a warm spring breeze?

The reason I did it?  We had hit the toughest part of the storm.  We had ridden it out.  We were prepared.

Never smoke weed during a hurricane – lightning always strikes the highest object.

In truth, the preparation had started before we ever bought our house.  We picked a house that was so far outside the flood zone that Wyoming would be underwater before we were.

Yeah, I checked that before we made an offer.  I’m paranoid that way.

In my life, I’ve always tried to go to the idea of, “How bad can it get?”  Then I thought, “Well, how could it get worse than that?”

In the middle of the night when I wake up with yet another scenario, the answer always comes back the same:  “It really can get worse.”

Reality can get really, awfully bad.  And it can do so more quickly than we imagine.

During the hurricane, there wasn’t a lot we could do.  Stores were picked clean of essentials about 24 hours before the storm hit.  Oh, sure, you could get things like diet cookies and soy milk, but the food actual humans wanted to eat was simply gone.  And booze?  Forget about it.  All of that was sold out.

The first big lesson:  Prepare Before Circumstances Force You To Prepare.  If you’re moving out of a disaster zone (cough San Francisco cough) it’s better to be five years too early than one day too late.  Especially if they’re out of beer.

Why did people hoard all the toilet paper?  It’s just how they roll . . . .

But not having the store was okay for us.  I went to visit one mainly to amuse myself and learn – what would be left?  If more people prepared, then systems wouldn’t be overwhelmed when a crisis strikes.

Thankfully, at that point in our life, our pantry had enough food in it to keep us fully fed for weeks or longer.  Water?  We had a swimming pool (they come with every house in Houston, like mailboxes or manservants) so we had thousands of gallons of water.

Don’t want to drink swimming pool water?  Well, if you had the water filter system I had, you could.  But we also had drinking water stored in plastic jugs for weeks of use.  We ended up using the swimming pool water for bathing and toilet flushing and never missed a beat.

The food was good.  Even though power was out, cold cooked corn and cold Hormel Chili™ tasted okay.  It was “camping” bad, but not “a normal Tuesday in Somalia” bad.  The worst part was the second day after the hurricane – temperatures and humidity skyrocketed, so it was uncomfortable to do anything other than sit around and sweat.  Even sleeping was uncomfortable since the still, hot, humid air was like living inside a whale that’s spending spring break in a crockpot.

Don’t sweat the petty things.  And don’t pet the sweaty things.

The hand-crank radio was our link to the outside world.  Cell service was wiped out.  And then, FEMA helpfully came on the radio and told us to go to their website for emergency locations.

Huh?  Website?  We had a hand-crank radio.

But, outside of minor discomfort, we were fine.  I even had beer, though it was warm.

The one (and only one) hole in my preparations at that point was I was out of propane for my grill.  I had to borrow from a neighbor to cook the steaks that were rapidly thawing out.  That was okay, I lent him 20 gallons of gasoline for his generator, so we were very quickly even-stevens.

Yet another lesson:  Every Detail, No Matter How Small, Matters.

I was planning for a much, much bigger catastrophe.  The hurricane that hit us was, due to the preparations The Mrs. and I made, an uncomfortable inconvenience.  It was in this case that my paranoia made our lives (relatively) easy.

The biggest lesson I learned is one that we speak of commonly now:  No One Is Coming To Save You.

If we had any issues that would have resulted in needing help?  We weren’t going to get it.  The “First Responders” had gotten themselves into an emergency operations building and had no food or water.  The radio broadcast a hilarious plea for people to come save the “First” Responders by bringing them food and water.

When seconds count, First Responders will be there in minutes.

The First Responders are almost always Second Responders – you and I, when we have a crisis, are the real First Responders.

No One Is Coming To Save You.  Get that very simple fact through your mind.  It was one we lived with each day of my childhood up on Wilder Mountain.  If you couldn’t save yourself – you were going to die.  If Pa Wilder cut off his left foot with the chainsaw while we were gathering firewood and my brother John (yes, my brother’s name is really John as well) couldn’t save him, he was going to die.

That never happened.  But we were prepared for it.

Sometimes events I write about go beyond what will happen.  I assure you, not one of the events that I write about goes beyond what could happen.  The descent of a society into madness and chaos has happened again and again throughout history.  Sure, that descent into madness generally doesn’t happen overnight.

Generally.  But sometimes?  It does.

So, when I look at the world around me, I let my paranoia run.  I encourage it.  “How bad could it get?”

That’s a starting point.  What are the additional things current me can do now to help future me?  How many human needs can I solve?  For how long?

Where I live, there are several amazing advantages.  Great water.  Good soil.  Low-ish population density.  Grain elevators filled to bursting with food that the population could eat in an emergency.  Good neighbors that I’ve known for years who think as I do, mostly.

We didn’t move to a rural area by accident.  From every story that was told to me about the Great Depression – people in the country, surrounded by their neighbors, had a much better time than people in the cities.

Think about preparing not as being about stuff, but as a way to buy time.  Saving money buys time.  Stockpiling food buys time.  Living in a low-pressure area buys time.  Living in a high resource area buys time.

Most preppers suffer from Stock Home syndrome.

If you prepare for something big, and nothing big happens?  Not generally a loss.  I can eat the food in my pantry anytime.  If I prepare by building a pantry when times are good?  I often end up saving money because food prices keep going up.

If you prepare for something big, and something small happens, like (for us) Hurricane Ike?

You can ride it out.  You get a few days off of work.  You might gain weight, having to eat all of that food that is thawing.

And you would definitely get the chance to go out and yell into the winds:

“Is that all you’ve got?”

See?  Paranoia has its advantages.  I’ll simply say this:  paranoia is the only way that our ancestors survived.

Don’t sell it short.  Preparation after paranoia brings peace of mind.  Heck, I nearly have a Ph.D. in that – just call me Dr. Prepper.

I guess anyone can be called Dr. nowadays.

 

The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage

“Is life in bondage better than death?” – The Ten Commandments

I heard Leftists can’t find tasty mushrooms:  someone said they lost their Morel compass.

Henning W. Prentis, Jr., presented a speech at the mid-year graduation of the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.  Mr. Prentis was the President of the Armstrong Cork Company.  Now, you might think that a cork company would only be of interest to the Swiss Army, but Armstrong was a different breed:  during World War II Mr. Prentis had Armstrong Cork making .50 caliber ammo, tips for warplane wings, sound insulation for submarines, and camouflage.

If your wife can fix a car, fix dinner, and then set a broken bone?  You have a Swiss Army Wife.

Eventually, several divisions were spun off, and it’s certain that you’ve walked on Armstrong Flooring and sat on furniture that was made by yet another Armstrong subsidiary underneath ceiling grids and ceiling tiles that were made by yet another Armstrong company.  All of this was started in a little Pennsylvania cork company way before Pennsylvania’s voting fraud made Kim Jong-un consider moving to Philadelphia.

Anyway, Mr. Prentis seemed to have an awful lot to say – his commencement speech clocked in at 4,953 words.  At 125 spoken words a minute, that’s nearly 40 minutes of straight talking, with zero memes or bikini graphs – looks like he didn’t know how to put a cork in it.  And all of those speeches were before the long lines of diplomas.

Graduation must have taken six days back then.  If you want to read the whole address, it’s here (LINK).

Mr. Henning Prentis’ essay has some very relevant content to today – I’ve posted just a few bits of it below.  I’ve fixed some punctuation, but the words are still Henning’s.  But I still haven’t found the answer to the most important question:  Who the heck names their kid Henning?

The historical cycle seems to be: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas.

Usually, so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three millenniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out.

Yet, it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Prentis’ quote can, thankfully, be summed up in a single chart that won’t take you 40 minutes to read:

Let’s not be like Russia circa 1917, okay? (Source for base: Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0, J4lambert)

In the United States, we were (mostly) blessed by abundance for decades at a time.  The Great Depression wasn’t the normal condition for the United States – it was an aberration of a fairly prosperous place.  But the Great Depression really was bad – Bob The Builder® was just called Bob then.

Inertia has a quality all of its own, but luck always helps.  After World War II, Europe was mostly devastated by the war.  Half of a decade of bombs and artillery shells and tanks and armies had killed millions, but also destroyed a majority of European and Asian governments plus much of the productive infrastructure.

America, meanwhile, had been untouched.  It had the oil, the steel mills, the agriculture, and the workforce.  It created consumer goods for itself and products for the world.  There was little competition.

Last time I bought land it was in Egypt.  Turns out I fell for a Pyramid scheme.

Oh, sure you could buy the Soviet version of Chevy Camaro® called the Lada Latitude©.  The Latitude™ was modeled on the Soviet T-34 Tank (500 horsepower diesel engine) that went zero to 32 mph in 45 seconds, and sported a stunning 1.17 miles per gallon in the base model.   It was also available with optional dual jet engines from a MiG-21.  Sadly those engines didn’t allow the tank to move, but did allow the wolf to blow down that pesky brick house, along with those capitalist swine.

There are many things you can call Soviet engineering.  Subtle is not one of them.

But post World War II gave the United States, and then, gradually the world, abundance, leading to selfishness.  Selfishness was probably best showcased in the 1970s and 1980s.  Tom Wolfe even titled the 1970s “The Me Decade.”  The 1980s followed suit – the pursuit of wealth was seen by many as the goal.  Morality?  The market (and leisure suits) were the definition of morality.

The 1980s bled into complacency, and finally into apathy.  The Grunge movement was a reaction to materialism.  What did it all mean?  What does any of this matter?  Pure apathy, so let’s not bathe and get a bunch of piercings and tattoos.

Now we are in a nation where citizens aren’t seeking freedom – they’re actively seeking dependence on the government – free money (guaranteed basic income), free healthcare (Medicare for all), and all manner of other support systems.  To quote one Mr. Harvard McClain (1950s?):  “If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away from you everything you have.”

Sure, I want everything for nothing from the State, but in every single time that’s been tried in human society, it always ends the same way – with the people becoming the enemy of the State.

And that’s how you get to Mr. Prentis’ last stage: bondage.

For a guy dealing with cork, Mr. Prentis has some pretty good vision.

Oh, and I don’t have to yell to get The Mrs. to come downstairs – she can hear a cork pop all the way across the house . . . .

Fragility, Resilience, Or Antifragility?

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense.  Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords.  I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day.  In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile.  The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not?  Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II.  Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me.  After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile.  Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance.  But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up.  In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions.  It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points.  A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too.  More than once.  Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score?  Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles.  The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone.  My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away.  I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend.  And he was there for me when I got divorced.  The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile.  In fact, you move toward the next stage:  Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union.  Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery.  But the Soviet people fought.  And fought.  And fought.  Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure.  The Soviet Union had redundancy.  Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up.  And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union.  People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked.  The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender.  If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient?  That’s the focus on values.  Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile.  Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher.  It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger.  Vases don’t do that.  But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system.  When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger.  Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people.  Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men.  But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting.  The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth.  No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941.  The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile?  Well, start by being resilient.  Then?  Add learning.  If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them?  That’s a good start.  Capacity?  Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure.  Efficient systems are prone to failure.  The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn.  When one income goes away?  They system fails.  Unused money (savings) is redundancy.  It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks.  Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you.  This blog is one of mine.  And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little.  I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required.  One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe.  Nope.  My soul is in this.  Do I agree with everything I’ve written?  Of course not.  I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years.  I’ve learned.  Some of my views have changed as I have changed.  I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more.  But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me.  I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode.  It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode.  Resiliency is about persevering.  It’s not bad.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life?  Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.

Victory and Sacrifice

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

VICTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTPANZ

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

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

Yet.

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

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

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

TIGER

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

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

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

At least the British were highly trained, right?

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

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

MMORTAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25POUND

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

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

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

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

Not so much.

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

. . . –

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

. . . – is the letter V.

For Victory.

Your effort matters.

Your Economy, Featuring: Romans, Rothschilds, and Rioters

“You have two settings-no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery!” – Veep

DOLPHIN

I had made a mistake and bought too many art supplies.  That was my excess stencil crisis.

Cui bono.  That’s Latin for “who benefits,” and in this case doesn’t have anything to do with the singer for the band U2©, who have been benefiting from everything.  Even my GPS is branded by U2™, and it sucks.  The streets have no name, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Cui bono.

That quote being in Latin is especially appropriate for today’s post.   Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 B.C. – 53 B.C. – they aged backwards then) goes down in history for creating the first fire department that Rome had.  At his own expense, he recruited and trained a brigade of 500 men who, at the first sign of a fire, would speed toward the smoke and flames.

Crassus would rush to the fire with them.  Once the fire department was on site, Crassus would find the building owner and offer to buy the burning building at an obvious discount.  I am not making this up.  Obviously, the longer the fire went on, the lower Crassus’ offer would go.  Once the property owner had sold, Crassus would give the signal and his fire department would save his newly purchased building.

I’m sure that sometimes the fire got away from him, but most of the time Crassus profited from the deal.  It was a fire sale, right?

ARSON

When I was working as a firefighter, in one building all that was left was the bottom of a shoe – it must have been the sole survivor.

Often, Crassus would then rebuild the building using his army of slave architects and artisans (not making that up, either), and then lease the building back to the original owner.  So, Crassus even had a way to get his money back.  Crassus was wealthy not only by ancient standards, but by any standards.  He’d be worth at least $11 billion in today’s money.

Cui bono?  Crassus.  I looked for a name I could call Crassus, but it was hard to find one, this being a family-friendly blog.  I’ll settle on cullion.

This is an early example of economic plunder.  Legal, yes.  Honorable?  No.

It didn’t stop with Crassus.

UBER

I once paid $20 to meet the Prince, but I partied like it was only $19.99.

When you search the Internet for tales of Nathan Rothschild back in 1815, you’ll find a host of stories that from the scholarship of 2020, don’t seem to be supported.  But what generally seems to be agreed with (even by the Rothschild Archives – LINK) is that during the Napoleonic Era, Rothschild and his brothers across the European continent had a fairly sophisticated system to transfer news and information to each other.

Information is just like a building fire in Rome:  the sooner you catch it, the more it is worth.

What had been vexing everyone in London during June of 1815 was the return of Napoleon from exile and his resumption of power in France.  Since Europe had been fighting alongside Napoleon or with Napoleon for nearly 20 years, people in the United Kingdom were scared to death that a victory by Napoleon could lead to another 20 years of war.  And just like today, no one wanted to watch a re-run.

NAPOLEON

Napoleon broke out of exile because he needed more Elba room.

Lord Wellington had been put in charge of a coalition of armies from across Europe, 68,000 total troops.  Joined by 50,000 Prussians under Blücher (cue obligatory whinny), Wellington met Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo.  Napoleon wasn’t alone.  He had 73,000 French soldiers, and Wellington had left his panzers in his other coat, so the French fought back like they’d have to shower and give up cigarettes if they lost.

Spoiler alert:  Napoleon lost, but barely.  I think it had to go into at least one overtime, and there were some controversial instant replays.

The story goes that with the Rothschild information network, Nathan was notified about Wellington’s victory before anyone in London.  By knowing that, Nathan could make a killing in the stock market.  How well did he do?  We don’t know.  His courier wrote him:  “I am informed by Commissary White that you have done well by the early information which you had of the Victory gained at Waterloo.”  It is reported (LINK) that the Rothschild fortunes went from £500,000 to £1,000,000 in that year.  So probably pretty well, since I assume a £ is a metric $ or something.

Yes, I know that there are other stories about Nathan’s Big Day Out® that are much more exaggerated, but this one does fine in proving my point:  the best time to make money is in an uncertain market.  Or, as has been attributed to Nathan:  “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”  Especially if, like Nathan and Marcus, you can remove the uncertainty and make your bet a sure thing.

ELMO

 I did invest in an Asian/Middle East fusion restaurant called, “Wok Like an Egyptian.”

This went on during Roman times, and it went on during Napoleonic times.  Is it going on today?

It certainly is.  I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other week, and he works for a company that was funded by a private equity firm.  Per my conversation, they deals that just his company is looking at are in the range of one hundred million to one billion dollars.  Sure, that’s a pretty big range.  But the kicker was this:

“There are pools of billions of dollars waiting for deals.”

What kind of deals?  Deals on great assets in a collapsing economy.

As we look at the wreck that we’re seeing in the economy due to the WuFlu and now the great #BLM (Burning Looting Marxists), what sort of reaction are we seeing?  Does it surprise anyone that 269 companies (LINK, H/T to CA at Western Rifle Shooters) are supporting the (actual, really founded by Marxists, look it up) BLM?

Does it surprise anyone that hundreds of millions of dollars are flooding in to BLM and affiliated organizations?  And I’m not exaggerating the amount – the fund just for bailing out rioters and looters in Minneapolis was over $90 million dollars.  Some people can loot a whole week and not make that much!

The support for BLM could be from one of the following sources, and I suspect that one or more is in play depending on the company donating:

  • Genuine support for civil rights. Sure, I believe that from companies that import goods made by overseas labor treated more poorly than the Wilder family treats our outdoor cat.
  • A cynical ploy signaling corporate virtue to get people to buy burgers. Think of it like an advertisement, but instead of featuring the social justice flavor of the week, it’s BLM this week.
  • Coordinated donations with full knowledge that the money will go toward a Marxist transformation of the United States.
  • Selected by the CEO’s secretary executive assistant at random.

SJW

I never let BLM members into my basement – I don’t want a whine cellar.

Amazon® has really been impacted by COVID-19.  I’m betting that every facet of Bezos’ business has been helped, from their online shopping to their web infrastructure to their movie rental business.  Coronachan has been good to Jeff.  But I don’t blame Bezos for that – I don’t think it was his plan to infect the United States with a virus and convince everyone to stay in the basement for three months and then have seven pages of BLM merch to sell.

Because if he did?  That’s some real Bond villain stuff and I’ve got to say, that’s the most anyone has ever done to try to convince me to buy a Prime® subscription.

Cui bono?  I mean, besides Bezos?

Someone is going to profit from BLM, even beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars donated recently to it, and even beyond the billions of dollars that will go to purchase assets during the crisis.  And it may not be money, or burger sales.  It might be measured in raw power, the power to turn a society towards the Marxist goals of the founders of BLM.

But even Crassus knew that once a fire got started, it just might get away from you.

Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

JOBICIDE

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©):  Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people.  That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine.  However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position.  I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule.  Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad.  At least, any evacuation of people.  The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad.  At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right?  I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

JETSKI

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad:  Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality.  Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer.  When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured.  So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent.  And he was consistent throughout decades.  Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people.  All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

VALENTINE

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old.  It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up:  government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem.  Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do.  From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980.  Those farmers had grown up in a different world:  when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends.  City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

WACO

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason.  Want to build a dam on your own property?  Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t.  Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land?  It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you.  Endangered species?  Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules.  In 2020?  There are roughly 180,000 pages.  Of rules.  That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States.  My two are promulgate and trout.  And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages.  Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules?  I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

  • required to do or
  • prohibited from doing or
  • free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government:  everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time.  Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said:  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”  Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time?  That’s how amateurs operate.

REGULATE

Government regulations:  keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government.  That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period.  More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century.  It’s almost governments could use a warning label.  Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

WARNING

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology.  The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place?  Generally, four things.

  • An Economic Crisis
  • A Governmental Power Vacuum
  • A Civil War
  • The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising.  Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason.  They were also the reason a word was invented:  Democide.

GULAG

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen.  It doesn’t matter why.  It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you.  It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers.  It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not.  It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians.  It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa.  So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing.  And Mao?  Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK).  It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned:  abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies.  The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around.  Did I say hanging?  Sorry, poor choice of words.

EQUALITY

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000.  But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942.  A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle.  These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew.  I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now?  Hmm.  No reason.

None at all.

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on.  There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played.  Yes . . . no.  You have to tell her before.  He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday.  She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein!  Now he . . . he was nuts!  He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

AOC

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body.  Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.”  I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.” 

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement.  On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil.  Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies.  Crude oil, that is.  Black gold.  Texas tea.  The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative.  How negative?  Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes.  You read that right.  People were being paid to take crude oil.  How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™.  The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning.  You UFO abductees know what I mean.

CARTM

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™.  But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank.  Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit.  Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline.  Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom.  Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

PHELPS

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it.  You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles.  I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO2 back into the atmosphere.  After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.”  No, I really haven’t.  I still have a very positive outlook about the future.  But one think I don’t have is illusions.  For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past.  I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again.  Besides, who would want to?  You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too.  I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry.  Those are jobs that typically pay well, too.  At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday.  Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

TIGERKING

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface?  It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes.  It’s not a static thing.  A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job.  That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden.  You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea.  Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years.  “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t.  Learn to live with it,” was my answer.  I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid.  Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better.  No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life:  seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes.  These were one-way events.  The future seemed to be a one way street.  People got older.  Paint on the house faded.  Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this:  entropy.  Entropy means that things age and wear down.  It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix.  When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection.  For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better.  It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better.  I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect.  Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

BULG

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity.  Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions:  the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time.  It would never be more perfect than that moment in time.  The second that I finished, it would start aging.  Dust and time would take their toll.  They’d be dropped.  Or things would drop on them.  Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it.  Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time.  But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power.  But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower.  It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day.  For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®.  The Sun.  Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

GRETA

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies.  In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone.  Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus.  That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change.  A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose.  Like my back hair, they just happened.  That doesn’t make me a victim, though.  I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes.  Sometimes, changes just are.  I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them.  For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into:  it can never be undone.  Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life.  But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up.  There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®.  We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better.  And it will be ours.  We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

PEPPARD

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning.  The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday.  Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius.  As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind.  In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things.  I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties.  Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Livy

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition.  The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle.  Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired.  The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

APPIUS

Appius rallying the troops.  Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up.  Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?”  Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?”  Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough.  That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there:  of the remaining men, they drew lots.  One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit.  Why not ten out of ten?  There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.”  But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43.  If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

COLLAPSE

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million.  In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed.  For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%.  And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news.  Instead?  “Could have been worse.  At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks.  Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic.  And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.”  Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

BIDEN

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important.  Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down.  At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create.  Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt.  In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up.  Now!”

That won’t work, either.  You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy.  People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®.  Zero?  Nope.  But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

FIRED

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place.  Here’s a representative post.  The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK).  As you can see, Aesop has a plan.  The plan?  Probably not.  But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning.  We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left.  Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it.  Oops.  The Mrs. messed up.  She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction.  Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well.  There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery.  Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media?  Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

MISERY

You dirty birds.  I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®.  Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this.  I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies?  And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler:  fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy.  It won’t last until August.  I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same.  Small businesses are in really bad shape.  Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street?  Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners?  They don’t have anyone looking out for them.  They’ll get loans, sure.  But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant?  Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in?  Yeah.

That’ll help.  Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am.  Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat.  I’m not.  I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die.  That part will probably suck.  Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend.  Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have.  If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket.  Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

HOPE

Don’t hope.  Do.  And live.  Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead.  There.  You have it.  Deal with it and plan your life.  You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her.  She is there, waiting for us.