Rome, Yet Again – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Shield Walls And Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responsibility to the group.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 4, 2020

“The time for negotiation is past. The actions of the British army at Lexington and Concord speak plainly enough. If we wish to regain our natural-born rights as Englishmen then we must fight for them.” – John Adams

The FBI arrested my algebra teacher when I was in high school as he was teaching us about graphing. They said they were sure she was plotting something.

Boston, Massachusetts: 122 killed, 211 wounded in a daybreak raid by troops sent to confiscate privately owned weapons and ammunition. “Patriots” claim government troops fired first.

It has been reported that at dawn a group of self-styled “Patriots” engaged a heavily armed troops sent to confiscate guns and ammunition. These “Patriots” though initially outnumbered, stood by the side of the road, fully armed with modern assault weapons at the ready. The “Patriot” leader at the site, John Parker, claims to have been only standing there with the other “Patriots”. It has reported that Parker said, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

According to Parker, the soldiers ordered the “Patriots” to leave, and he ordered his men to “disburse and go home,” but “the soldiers were yelling,” and there was confusion. There was a shot, fired, but both the “Patriots” and the spokesman for the troops claim the other side fired the first shot. Badly outnumbered at first, the “Patriots” were reinforced by the local members of their radical libertarian movement as the firefight wore on. House-to-house fighting was reported.

Sources to this blog have indicated that the “Patriots” had been tipped off to the troop movements and were aware the gun confiscation was coming. The troops were forced to withdraw under fire, although rescue from a larger detachment of troops from Boston was required for their safe evacuation.

Why did Paul Revere ride a horse on his midnight ride? Well, have you ever tried carrying one?

Although no weapons were found at either Lexington or Concord, authorities have indicated that persons of interest in this case are: Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. His Royal Majesty King George III had no comment, but Brigadier General Lord Percy, had this to say:

During the whole affair the Rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance & resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body. Indeed, they knew too well what was proper, to do so. Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers against the Indians & Canadians, & this country being much covered with wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting.

This is a statue of Captain John Parker, Patriot leader who led the Militia at the battle of Lexington. He died five months after the battle, of tuberculosis. Since you don’t know what I look like, you can assume I look exactly like a bald version of this.

A local lawyer, John Adams, viewed the battlefield the next day, “The die was cast. The Rubicon crossed.” Pressed by this blog for an explanation of these cryptic comments, he referred us to our previous post (American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?).

The events listed above happened 245 years ago, except John Adams being snarky to me, yet somehow the concepts behind them are fresh in American life in 2020. The battles of Lexington and Concord, though small by today’s standards, produced the “shot heard ‘round the world” as the American Dream and American Identity were formed.

Lifted straight from Wikipedia, here’s a story from the battle that made me chuckle:

Against the advice of his Master of Ordnance, Percy had left Boston without spare ammunition for his men or for the two artillery pieces they brought with them, thinking the extra wagons would slow him down. Each man in Percy’s brigade had only 36 rounds, and each artillery piece was supplied with only a few rounds carried in side-boxes. After Percy had left the city, Gage directed two ammunition wagons guarded by one officer and thirteen men to follow. This convoy was intercepted by a small party of older, veteran militiamen still on the “alarm list,” who could not join their militia companies because they were well over 60 years of age. These men rose up in ambush and demanded the surrender of the wagons, but the regulars ignored them and drove their horses on. The old men opened fire, shot the lead horses, killed two sergeants, and wounded the officer. The British survivors ran, and six of them threw their weapons into a pond before they surrendered.

This soldier was old enough to experience both mustard gas and pepper spray. He’s well seasoned.

I’ve long thought that our new, modern form of Civil War will feature far more old folks than the past ones. Unlike the Civil War 1.0, Civil War 2.0 will be fought more like the Revolutionary War, with armed Militia on both sides. The little story above is (for me) confirmation that in America, being over 60 doesn’t mean “out of the fight.”

But this is about the Revolution, and I’ll write more about Civil War for Monday. The Battle of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775, and it wasn’t until over a year of fighting skirmishes that the Declaration of Independence was drafted.

Saying and doing are different. Sure, in 1776 we said we were independent and gave a list of reasons, but it took years of war to make it so. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first steps in making it so, and setting the pattern for a nation that has spread more freedom and prosperity than any nation in the history of the world except for Great Britain.

What will be required to keep it free?

Time will tell.

The Day America Died?

“1996 is the past too, listen to me!” – 12 Monkeys

Chuck Norris was dropped twice as a child: once on Hiroshima, once on Nagasaki.

Pugsley and I were off driving to an event today. As we motored down the road, he said, “Hey, what were the 1990’s like? I was on YouTube® and saw some commercials from then.”

I paused. Since he was born after the 1990s, it was absolutely foreign to him, except as he had seen in media and popular culture. But how to describe it? I mean, the Dole/Kemp ’96 website is still up (LINK), which is convenient, since Bob is now 96. But the 1990s was so much more than that.

“Well, we had won the Cold War. The 1970’s were about the economic wreckage from the oil shocks and inflation from removing gold backing to the dollar. The 1980’s were the last stage in the Cold War – the idea of nuclear war being 45 minutes away from ending civilization was common.”

I skipped mentioning that we’d come within a single person’s decision to launch nuclear weapons and start a world war more than once. I didn’t want to put him in the mindset of a total war. Heck, let him have his own ex-wife.

“The 1990s saw the end of the Cold War when the Soviet economy collapsed. We had, to a certain extent, defined ourselves by our enemy. In some sense, American mean not a Soviet communist. But then, we won. It was all over.”

Joe Biden knows in his heart that he is the only one who can defeat Ronald Reagan this November.

I paused, thinking about the old Mark Twain line that most people can’t tell a good thing from a bad thing, but kept going.

“We then looked around and wondered who we were, since there weren’t any Soviet communists to not-be. I think the answer we came up with was that we were shoppers. The purpose of America was to be the site of endless suburbs surrounding cool shopping malls. Heck, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Mall of America® opened in 1992.”

Looking back, I am in awe of how innocent we were, how free of strife we were – the First Gulf War took months to prepare for, but only had about 96 hours of actual ground combat with 156 Americans killed in battle. To put that in perspective, 65 troops died in the Gulf from accidents during that same time. The first Gulf War was about as lopsided as a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.

“It was unique, because the United States was sitting alone as a superpower both economically and militarily. The country was prosperous. We were even closer to a balanced budget than we ever have been since Andrew Jackson was president. I think Americans began to miss the struggle. Rock music went from a joyous celebration of freedom and beer and girls in bikinis and Cherry Pie to complaints about teenage angst.”

I didn’t jump into discussions of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.).

Kurt Cobain has now been drug-free for 26 years!

“Somewhere in there, we had a chance to look deep inside ourselves to find our soul as a nation. Religion seemed hard, so we decided the answer was Twizzlers®.”

What I didn’t say was that was the beginning of tearing the nation apart. By the time George W. Bush beat Al Gore in an election that was so close it went to court, the Left felt that they had the presidency stolen from them. That, along with the Clinton Impeachment, rubbed the Left raw so by 2000 they were madder than Dick Cheney on a dove hunt.

I suppose that the 1990s were also the last stage of the innocence in America, and the slide into terminal decline began here. Sure, we’d already gone from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in the 1960s to “I Wanna **** You Like An Animal” in the 1990s, but in 1996 an actual American President, a Democrat, thought that marriage was something for a man and a woman to do.

The Mrs. thinks I’m crazy, forgetting she’s the one that married me.

Wild stock swings, a housing crisis, and wars that kept tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade followed, and the great rift I have written about in numerous posts (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg) widened.

But all of that is prelude to the Day America Died: May 28, 2020. Sure, the time of death is up for debate. And everything looks the same, taxes will be due next month, and the ammunition and bagel shop still accepts United States Federal Reserve currency.

Inertia is like that. The old forms persist, even after the reason that they were invented disappeared. Even after the Greeks took over Egypt, they still used the term Pharaoh. The Senate of Rome ceased to be the Senate, but managed to stay in existence until at least 600 A.D., long after the fall of Rome. I still own a comb.

Like I said, I still own the comb. I just can’t part with it.

On May 28, however, the Third Precinct building in Minneapolis was burned down. The revolution may not be televised, but it certainly is being live streamed. From there, protests, riots, and looting spread to dozens of cities in the United States, and even across the world. Certainly, there were peaceful protests as well, but the vision we’ll remember was burning, looting, and destruction of public and private property.

It was and is obvious that the goal of the Left is simple: they want to burn it all down, every system, so that they can fundamentally transform the country as a whole. Transform into what? The hints aren’t even subtle: the “Green New Deal” combined with a wholesale rewrite of the history and legends that define America and “free” healthcare and money. The old America, the one that named an airport after John Wayne? That’s not “who we are.” Free speech that goes against the narrative of the Left? Also not “who we are.”

The Right seems to be done, too. The systems that should remove illegal aliens, don’t. They Constitution seems to be guided by “emanations and penumbras” that allow the meanings of words to take the exact opposite meaning when used in reality. For some reason, “sex” as written in 1965 was interpreted to include transgenderism which means the exact opposite of natural sex. One thing I’m certain of: in 1965 when they wrote the law, “sex” meant “transgender” to exactly zero lawmakers.

It seems as though the Supreme Court forgot that there is, sitting right near their own building, a whole other building full of people who could easily clear that up: Congress. But that seems unlikely, so the Supreme Court can just make up stuff if they want to. Because of nonsense like that, the Right is also done.

So, I was hopeful the Center hadn’t given up. I have a good friend who is more libertarian (small “L”) and he and I were chatting the other day. “They should vote all of them (Congress, President, all of them) out.” I wasn’t expecting this from him. But the Center is done, too. The Left is mad at Trump. The Right is mad at AOC, and the Center just wants everyone to shut up so they can grill in peace.

One time when we were backpacking the fire got away from us in camp. It was in-tents.

But belief is really important. We obey laws, at least in part, because we believe that we’ll be punished if we don’t. We trade dollars back and forth with each other for stuff because we believe that the dollars are money. We have a nation because we believe in it.

The math is simple. As soon as we stop believing that we have a nation, as soon as that faith dies away, we no longer have a nation. And by my guess, I’d say we lost that faith on May 28. Are police required for a country? No. We lived until 1834 before the first police force that looked like a modern unit was formed. Before then, it was a hodge-podge of volunteer day and night “watches” that looked for bad guys or danger combined with county sheriffs. Thing Mayberry, but with a lot more booze.

But law enforcement is required. If it doesn’t exist, citizens will protect themselves. The era of the rooftop Korean and the Modern Sporting Lawyer arrives once again. People will very quickly understand that in the absence of police that violence levels, especially in Leftist areas with restrictive gun laws, will skyrocket.

The other day I got bitten by a radioactive lawyer – I now have Power of Attorney.

That lack of belief in government is happening now. Maybe worrying about nuclear war wasn’t so bad after all?

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Your one job? Be a good person.

“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?” – Flight of the Phoenix

Well, at least someone gave this post two thumbs up.

My older brother, John Wilder (our parents were notoriously uncreative), got a job at a motel when he was in college. His duty was to sleep in the apartment above the front desk, and if anyone wanted a room late at night, to get up out of bed and check them in. Technically, he got paid to sleep on the job. When I try to explain that’s what I’m doing to my employer, they seem to think it’s a violation of company rules. They won’t even listen when I explain I won’t be sleepy on the job if I just sleep on the job.

Go figure.

One day the owner of the motel was looking for someone to do an extremely important job: sweep the parking lot every Sunday. As I had heard of a broom, my brother put in a good word for me, and I ended up with my first official job. As I don’t recall quitting, they might be irritated at me because I haven’t been in to work in decades.

This was a job that I was well suited for, since I was willing to work for the one-ish hour a week (on Sunday) sweeping up the parking lot. I even had a time card, and got paid minimum wage. So early each Sunday morning I’d get on my ten speed and bike down to the motel and sweep the parking lot.

My bike kept trying to kill me, though. It was a vicious cycle.

The best part wasn’t the few bucks after tax that I made, but rather sitting down with my older brother and having breakfast in the office. I timed it so that I’d be done sweeping so we could watch a television show on TBS® together: The Wild, Wild West. I’m pretty sure I saw my first episode ever in that motel office.

By the time my brother and I watched it on the 12” screen in the office, The Wild, Wild West was decades old. And yet it was better than anything on prime time television. The Wild, Wild West, if you haven’t seen it, was Robert Conrad starring as secret agent James West in the 1870’s Western United States, complete with science fiction gadgets.

The villains were ludicrous. One episode featured obviously rubber cobras. And in one fight scene, Robert Conrad’s pants split wide open and they just kept filming – they were on a schedule, you know. On top of that, the costumes resembled nothing ever worn by an actual human in any place and during any period in human history.

Silly? Certainly. But why was the show good enough that I planned getting up early to watch it?

It’s because the character James West (and his fellow secret agent, Artemus Gordon) were good. West was a hero. He was smart. He could fight. He had wit. He laughed in the face of death. And if he had a weakness, it was for a lovely lady.

We’ll pretend that Will Smith took 1999 off. There can be only one Jim West.

Why was James West’s contemporary, Captain Kirk so popular? He was a cut from the same mold as West.

A boy needs a hero to look up to, who models virtue and strength. And you could do much, much worse than either James West or Captain Kirk. For some reason, the values of the networks changed, and The Wild, Wild West was cancelled (like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies) in 1970 even though they did great in the ratings. Hmm.

It was like there was a social agenda . . . .

As time has gone on, many of the “heroes” in movies and television are given “depth” cheaply by making them either morally weak or having the system they work for be compromised in some way. When a hero sneaks by like Mal Reynolds on Firefly, well, the system takes care of him pretty quickly.

Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.

Culture is, of course, upstream from politics. Culture is in part created by those heroes we are given to worship. Where do those heroes come from? Well, I mentioned James West, but I recall being pretty psyched about the Founding Fathers when I was a kid. Dad got pretty mad after the third cherry tree.

Our political reality is therefore created in part by media (now a tool of the Left) and academia (also a tool of the Left). And now the Founding Fathers are, instead of being revered for attempting to create a whole new type of country are regularly bashed in schools.

This attempt of the Left to steer culture obscures the real message. As a human, we have one (and only one) job.

That job is to be a good person.

It’s that easy. We waste a lot of time and effort wondering what it is we should be doing, when the answer is laughingly simple. You can’t control your height. You can’t control your intelligence. You can’t even control society. What can you control? Your actions and attitudes.

So, be a good person. That’s it.

The Left tries to obscure that simple truth because it has to. The Left doesn’t want you to be a good person. The Left wants you to be a Leftist. When I look at the memes from the Left, I’m astonished by two things:

They’re horribly unfunny, and
They’re based on a big wall of text.

No editing required.

The Lefty memes aren’t funny because funny requires truth. I wrote about that recently in The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition. When truth is strangled, humor disappears which is why tyrants will kill comedians before they kill dissidents. Humor is one of the most potent weapons of truth.

The Lefty memes have to rely on a large blocks of text because half of the meme is required to try to refute reality and re-define it. If you’ve ever heard an actual Leftist talk, half of it is redefining terms: boy used to mean boy, but now it’s an entire spectrum which might indicate that boy means boy on Monday, but when it’s time for the state track meet, boy means girl. Sometimes.

If you want to watch real Olympic®-level verbal gymnastics, watch a Leftist try to define “racism” – it’s a hoot. For bonus points, see if you can get them to read the dictionary definition.

That’s the good news. Your job, being a good person, is so simple it’s hard for even the Left to mess up. But I bet they could come up with a 600 word meme to describe that “good” is only “good” if it results in more Leftist votes and the abolition of private property.

I wish that I could promise to you that if you were a good person, you’d be rewarded. That would be a lie. Being good doesn’t guarantee a tangible reward, or even that you will succeed, or even be liked and admired in your time.

I’m not sure I can promise a leprechaun will deliver them, though.

Likewise, being bad doesn’t guarantee punishment. Heck, some research indicates that 4% of Chief Executive Officers of companies are psychopaths. If you think long enough, you can come up with several names of people who are downright evil, but seem to be thriving.

The other bad news is that being good is hard work. First, you have to figure out what good is. Society isn’t necessarily a help here. As I write this, The Boy is watching livestreaming rioting and property destruction across multiple cities. When I try to calibrate the whole good/bad thing, I’m not sure that looting a Target® or burning a Hyundai© serves much of a purpose.

Being good isn’t about being good for today, either. I could easily ruin a child by making life too easy, or not holding them to high standards. Would it result in a happy child now? Sure. But every parent knows that short term success builds children into monsters who end up burning a Target™ or a Hyundai®.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.

To be good, a moral code and the courage to follow it is required. Christianity is the one that built the West, and you could do worse – you rarely hear of Amish drive-by shootings, since everyone can hear the clip clop of the horses from pretty far away.

The Romans (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) had a well-developed system of virtue thousands of years ago and spent a lot of time working to figure out how to be good – that’s pretty close to the basis of the Stoics. Making it up your own individual code as you go can lead to rationalization and relativism. If it feels good, it may not be good – a lot of bad things feel very good at the time.

But generally, if it feels bad, it nearly always is.

Be a good person. Ask yourself: WW(JW)D? No, not John Wilder.

Jim West.

But make sure you get your sweeping done first.

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet. Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang. Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist. I don’t really think I am. I am certain that I am going to die. I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind. Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead. And the last six weeks our lives? Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters? Not me. Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up. The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned. Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient. For he that is so wants nothing.

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets. I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant. Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college. Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service. Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either. Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work. I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work. I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans. In winter. After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. How bad was that particular plague? It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died. Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too. But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder. Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. There’s virtue in neither of these. There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death. All of us will fail. Suffering? Yeah, that’s going to happen, too. To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live. You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around. There is no particular way your life “should” turn out. Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad. Was there luck in there, both good and bad? Sure, but not as much as you might think.

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad.

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for? Deal with it. And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering. You have electricity. You have Internet. You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating. And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too. You know, while you’re up.

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca. Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses. Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
I’m too busy. Good news! After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
I don’t know how to do ______. Unless it’s differential equations. Then just do what the book says. Nobody really understands differential equations.
Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today. What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

“Because there’s no crying in baseball! No crying!” – A League of Their Own

Wash this.

As we contemplate the wreckage of the economy and the cracks in our culture, I return to that question that many of us have been thinking of:

What happens next?

By next as in next week, well those patterns are short term. Just like the stock market has spent most of the last ten years going up, some weeks were down. The overall aggregate of those weeks was up. Until it wasn’t. The short term direction of the market varied, but like China’s expanding sea claims or my expanding waistline, the long term trend did not.

That’s what I see with the United States as a whole. Over the short term, things go up and down, but the long term stresses in the system keep building up. A brick building having foundation problems will build stress, until the bricks and mortar both snap in a line under tension, just like Joe Biden snaps when people move too quickly around him because of Crimean War flashbacks.

One major tension: people have been concerned about the national debt since before I’ve been alive. Why? The silly idea seems to be that “having an unpayable mountain of debt” might be a bad thing since you have to pay all of that back just to be broke. It’s only money, right? But the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now larger than at any time since the end of World War II. At that time the United States had mobilized to spending nearly 90% of Federal dollars on military spending items. That level of debt, 110% of the GDP, existed before COVID-19 gave us a gut shot. What will it be after all of the Chinese Virus spending? 120%? 150%?

At least with World War II we got cool tanks and games like Axis and Allies®. In the last bailout all we got was a bigger penthouse for CEOs like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase. You might remember Dimon’s tone-deaf Christmas cards like the one he sent out below in 2013. Sure, people are allowed to send out glaringly condescending tennis-ball filled Christmas cards while they spend enough money to pay off your mortgage on a lunch trip to Switzerland for their dog. But to celebrate their wealth after having been the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008? That’s just tacky.

I guess Dimon’s Christmas card is nearly as neat as 49,324 Sherman tanks, plus twenty-three aircraft carriers, and a zillion movies, at least some of which had Clint Eastwood. Okay, I’ll take that back. Having Clint Eastwood World War II movies is even more important than the ultimate comfort of a billionaire banker. There. I said it. Go ahead and judge me.

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

At some point, there’s a mathematical limit where debt actually matters. After World War II, the United States dealt with debt through a crazy plan: paying it back, while growing the economy. As we stand right now, with the exception of spending enough on defense to cause the Soviets to collapse, we’ve gotten very little out of that debt. It’s like the nation has since 1990 gone on a spending binge like a six year old with addled on sugar with Mom’s credit card, ending up with a pile of Amazon® packages and next-day Prime® diabetes.

Outside of the economic mess which would have gone off at some point with our without the WuFlu, we’re a nation divided politically. The split has been getting worse and worse through time. People have cut off relations with relatives because of political differences that would have made for amusing table discussions even a decade ago. The creeping socialism that’s been winding its way through society since FDR’s New Deal used the Great Depression to introduce sweeping social changes that wrapped themselves around the national brainstem is now fresh again, back like Nic Cage on a bad sequel.

The idea of infinite benefits from a magical printing press is as old as any fairy tale, and we share it with our children every year – he’s called Santa Claus. But lots of people don’t believe in Santa Claus. Why?

Because Santa’s not real.

Santa can’t exist as he violates a fundamental law of the universe – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL, as Pournelle and Niven would have said. Heck, the one thing the Soviets in a gulag and hard-core libertarians agree on is: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. No wonder my kids came back so tough after a week at Ayn Rand Preschool – you had to have the will to take the bottle.

People in socialist countries are the only ones who envy the high tech that the Amish have.

These tensions – the financial system collapse tension plus the political division tension – don’t lead to a good outcome. It’s been noted by commenters here and elsewhere that as long as things are good and bellies are full, people won’t revolt. But if you were saving for a rainy day, look outside: it’s pouring.

As I see it, there are three major ways this situation plays out – and none of them end up with 2030 being “business as usual” anymore.

First alternative: the Left takes over. Just like in Virginia, the Left will spend about 20 minutes before they decide to implement their entire basket of changes. I don’t think that this is likely. The reason is that at this point I don’t think the Right will go gently onto that goodnight. They have realized that gun rights “compromises” include only taking rights away. The Right is not keen to compromise on any rights, which is why the recent push-back came against the Coronavirus-related state shutdowns. If the Left tries this, there will be some level of anarchy. And we all know how many anarchists it takes to change a lightbulb: none. Anarchists have never changed anything.

Second alternative: the states Balkanize. The entire experiment breaks up. The Right isn’t interested, for the most part, in controlling what goes on outside of their state, and would be quite amused to watch New York and Los Angeles figure out that the things that make their lives good, like food and gasoline, all come from places they don’t like made by people who don’t like them. Pretty soon they’d be trading Netflix® subscriptions for potatoes. The reason this is a solution of the Right is because Red State people want their freedoms and to be left alone to grill. This is a difficult outcome – splitting up the states seems to fall along party lines, but lots of Blue states have a Red ring around them, and lots of Red states are covered in Blue dots.

The Third, and in my mind an increasingly likely alternative is an American Caesar.

The Roman Republic officially started in 509 B.C., but at the beginning wasn’t much more than a high school audio-visual club with dominion of around six neighborhood blocks until about 282 B.C. It was at that point when the Romans finally took over most of the other tribes in the local area and began to vie for domination of the Mediterranean against Carthage for Blockbuster® franchise rights.

“I hate it when they price just one dollar over. Seems so, disloyal, right Brutus?”

The Roman Republic was fed by expansion. At the time when Caesar became a de facto emperor, Rome controlled not only modern day Italy, but most of Spain, Portugal, Greece, a lot of the northern coast of Africa, France, Belgium, and the Balkan area. Does a republic or a democracy expand? Yes – whoever thought a democracies don’t start wars was as deluded as Joe Biden when he recently denounced President Lincoln for the way he’s handling the polio epidemic.

The Roman Republic lasted until Julius Caesar created and took the throne as dictator after political intrigue. He stepped into a situation where his political enemies were out to get him, and had passed a law to strip him of his troops. Politically and popularly, Caesar was already famous – he had written Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was a bestseller that described his military exploits. It was popular in Rome, and meant at least partially as propaganda to the common people to sidestep the Senate and official media. Sound familiar?

Caesar knew that his political enemies had a trap set for him when he returned – he was certain they’d strip his titles and wealth from him, but, he had an army that was more loyal to him than it was to Rome. When he led Legio XIII (the 13^th Legion) across the Rubicon River, Caesar legendarily said, “The die is cast.” By law, Roman Consuls gave up command at the Rubicon, some 200 miles north of Rome, which was probably about a hard 10-day march over the good roads at Rome. The Senate heard that “Julius is coming,” and got out of there faster than your Leftist friends when it comes time to split the bill for lunch.

Although things were politically precarious at that point, this was the big step. Rome tipped into a civil war. Caesar won, and the people were, generally, pleased, mainly because salads were popular back then. That’s why a few years after Caesar was assassinated, Augustus Caesar was able to take the title – the people were wanting to end the political nonsense, even if it meant a kind of tyranny: this wasn’t the first nor the last time this deal would be made. The people of Rome at that point didn’t want to elect a leader – they wanted an end to the chaos. If the result was an Emperor? So be it.

Spoiler, Caesar died. It would have been much worse if he had continued as a vegetable – let us mourn him.

So far, the leader of the United States has been (more or less) elected through legal means. The Electoral College itself is a great bulwark against fraud – it’s hard to fake enough votes because the dead voting in Chicago alone won’t do it. You’d have to have recounts in cemeteries in dozens of states.

With the jobless increasing 22 million in four weeks, chaos is on the way once people can leave their basements. Unless COVID-19 interrupts, I expect actual riots at the Democratic Convention, especially if they forget the Tupperware® they keep Biden in. Given how much economic activity has already cratered in the United States – total credit card spending is down nearly 30% since last year, but the rent for the store is the same. Businesses won’t be hiring anytime soon, and there’s no way that this will be a sharp recovery.

That economic and political turmoil that we’ll see in the next few years is ripe for a hero, a savior to come forward. Will this new leader look like the old Caesar? No, certainly not. Certainly this savior will be someone that many people know, and look up to.

Tom Hanks?

Maybe President-for-life Tom Hanks? Nah, I hear he eats baby kittens.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.

The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

â€œYou had aÂ dishwasher box to sleep in?Â I didn’t even know sleep. Â It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.â€ â€“ Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.Â I replied, â€œDunno, depends on if you are trying to kill BatmanÂ®â€

â€œGreat, now itâ€™s the end of the world and we canâ€™t get a new dishwasher,â€ The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.Â Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.Â I call that a win-win.Â Besides, AmazonÂ® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?Â You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.Â When it was lunchtime, I wasnâ€™t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.Â Good times.Â I do have a concern â€“ The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, â€œnice buttâ€ so Iâ€™m thinking of bringing this up with HR.Â I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.Â I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriÃ¨re, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.Â While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people donâ€™t change all that much, even though circumstances do.Â Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, Iâ€™ll stop.Â Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.Â I donâ€™t want you to think Iâ€™m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?Â Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisisâ„¢, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other â€“ this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.Â This is like the KÃ¼bler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.Â Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?Â Itâ€™s so nice and cheery.Â The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a KlondikeÂ® bar?Â Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.Â

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.Â It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.Â Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say â€œno.â€Â The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.Â With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?Â We donâ€™t trust the media very much.Â Why?Â They donâ€™t seem trustworthy.Â Example: Â when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNNÂ® says itâ€™s racist.Â When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNNâ„¢ says itâ€™s a wise and prudent move by Chinaâ€™s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNNâ„¢ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:Â in the end, wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.Â Itâ€™s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.Â The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.Â Itâ€™s the spark that lights the fire.Â When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards â€“ The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.Â It is disruptive.Â It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.Â In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.Â COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.Â Was it poised for a fall anyway?Â Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:Â what if we havenâ€™t seen The Event yet?

Iâ€™m not sure heâ€™s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.Â When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.Â Why?Â Habit, partially.Â But thereâ€™s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesnâ€™t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isnâ€™t a coping strategy, and itâ€™s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.Â Itâ€™s more inertia.Â Youâ€™re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isnâ€™t, part of your mind isnâ€™t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction â€“ COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.Â But that isnâ€™t explained by the reactions weâ€™ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.Â Italy is locked down.Â In two weeks, we will know more.Â In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.Â But the rules are new, and unknown.Â What to do?Â One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?Â One could Panic.Â Panic is easier, and doesnâ€™t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.Â So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile youâ€™ve accumulated over time?Â Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain DewÂ®?Â Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you donâ€™t know what to do or have any independent thought?Â Â Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk.Â I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.Â Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.Â Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism â€“ realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.Â Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because itâ€™s the right thing to do.

There was a family story â€“ Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.Â She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.Â Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Why ration needles and sugar?Â To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.Â To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasnâ€™t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we arenâ€™t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch NetflixÂ® unless weâ€™re keeping vital industries going.Â Hereâ€™s a link to Aesopâ€™s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).Â Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.Â My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.Â Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.Â In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didnâ€™t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.Â Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, thereâ€™s The Cliff.Â I wrote about it here: Senecaâ€™s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.Â Is it certain that there is one?Â No.Â But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like itâ€™s there.Â I believe we will see it.Â The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.Â Already at Wilder Redoubt, weâ€™ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that weâ€™ll see The Cliff soon enough.Â How deep will it go?Â As Iâ€™ve mentioned before, no one knows.Â The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.Â Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.Â 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.Â The average monthly car payment is $800.Â Me?Â Iâ€™d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.Â But the businesses that employ those people arenâ€™t much better off.Â The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.Â The second best restaurant didnâ€™t survive.Â There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this wonâ€™t just be for small businesses.Â I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.Â Overall loss to the economy?Â 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?Â Sure.Â We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.Â We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.Â Thatâ€™s the best case.Â And thatâ€™s just in the United States.

Iâ€™m not kidding, thatâ€™s how deep The Cliff is.Â If weâ€™re lucky.

Something, something, Dark SideÂ®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.Â We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.Â Disillusionment sets in when things donâ€™t snap back to normal.Â Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.Â The more government â€œhelpsâ€ during this phase, the worse recovery will be.Â Roosevelt â€œhelpedâ€ so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they canâ€™t help themselves.Â The length of time Disillusionment lasts?Â Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.Â Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.Â Rebuilding the economy will take years.Â If we do it right, weâ€™ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?Â The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.Â Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.Â Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess Iâ€™ll get a jump start on rebuilding.Â Dishwashers on the Internet.Â Amazing.Â My only problem is that thereâ€™s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.Â Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!Â They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

Complacency, An English King, Elon Musk, and Bikinis

“Well, perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency to prepare us for what lies ahead.” – Star Trek, TNG

Q: Why can’t dinosaurs clap? A: They’re all dead.

Once upon a time The Mrs. and I bought a piece of bare land to build a house on, and not a Lego® one like they make in California. The land was in a county that had (eye roll) rules about that sort of thing. In order to get a permit to build the house, we had to have our land approved as a subdivision. We did it the old fashioned way – we did it ourselves. We prepared the relevant paperwork, hired the surveyor, and worked with the county zoning staff to present it to the Zoning Commission. After discussing it at the meeting, and observing the property, the chairman of the commission stated:

“Mr. Wilder, the commission would like to reserve a 40’ foot strip of land along the north boundary to put in a road at some future point. In your zoning packet, we’re going to add that you will deed us this land at no cost if we ever decide to build said road.”

That was over an acre.

The Commission Chairman must have seen the expression on my face. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t pleased. I felt, based on my law degree of “reading the Constitution” that this was a clear violation. It was, I felt, a “taking” of my land with no compensation. Even though I didn’t say a word, and wasn’t wearing a Gadsden Flag t-shirt, I think he knew right where my head was.

Snek no lyke step.

“Now, Mr. Wilder, you understand that we as a Commission have a duty, a duty not only to those living here for today, but for those not living yet. Why, this subdivision will be recorded and be in force for the next thousand years.” I don’t recall the next sentence, because I really couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

The next thousand years? Was he taking the same kind of drugs that Bernie does?

The Mrs. and I finished our turn at the podium for the meeting. We left and went outside. The Mrs. beat me to the punch.

“The next thousand years? Was he serious??? What an idiot.” We actually still joke about it to this day. You would have been proud of her scoff when I read it to her tonight. It was perfect.

We had both focused on the same sentence. It was pompous. It was self-important. It was delusional. It was . . . complacent.

The idea that the governance, the structure, or even a culture that respected property rights would follow a continuous path for a thousand years was deluded. 1,000 years ago, the Danes ruled Norway and England as well as Denmark under King Cnut (yes, that’s spelled right) the Great. Ever hear of him? Well let me tell you if you misspell his name just one time in an e-mail to Karen, you’ll have to spend an hour explaining old English history to HR so you can prove you really meant that Karen was displaying the wisdom that old King Cnut was cnown for.

Yeah, just like Karen, the Commission Chairman was a Cnut.

That more or less proves my point. I doubt that the records of that subdivision named the “Free Autonomous Reserve Tract” will even exist in a thousand years. It could be that whatever emerges from the nearly certain Musk Cat Girls on Mars© Uprising of 2257 or the Amazon™ slave rebellion of 2856 against Bezosclone4651 don’t destroy the records, but don’t bet on it.

Elon apparently has a different version of Cat Scratch Fever.

Expecting a county commission’s decisions to be relevant 1,000 years into the future was an outrageous example, but it proves the point I’m trying to make. Often, we get so complacent in our day-to-day lives that we’re willing to believe incredible things that we normally would scoff at, like, oh, Joe Biden doesn’t have dementia. I mean, it’s normal to answer the question, “What is your vision for health care?” with “I remember when it was polite for a man to call a woman a ham-handed yellow-teethed hammer soaker before you made sweet love to them in the back of your tree fort, I mean if you had a dozen or more. Pinecones, right? Those were the days when you could rub my legs and watch the hair spring back up and the wood elves would play music for hours on their nose harp. Ever have a nose harp? We did, but you could call women broads then, because they liked to get you coffee, what with the skirts and pantyhose and all. Canada. And if you don’t like it, you can damn well vote for that Reagan fellow.”

One way I choose topics to write about is I want to look at a subject I know something about, and then dig deeper. My idea is that often one of the biggest dangers was well defined by Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s a shame Twain never learned to write properly and not use “ain’t” – maybe if he had his career would have gone somewhere like mine has. Anyway, when I find a disconnect like Twain described, or new information that’s something that I like to write about.

But when I can find that same situation and tie it directly to a problem or situation in society today?

That’s perfect.

Okay, nearly perfect. It has to be interesting, too. The relative changes in the combustibility of dryer lint throughout the twentieth century might be not what you expected, but it’s probably not particularly interesting, unless you like to burn dryer lint as a hobby, which I hear is what Jeb Bush is into now, at least when it’s group craft time.

Okay, that’s actually “lightning and lightning bug.”

I really like learning new things, and I learned something new today: One thing I like writing about, and keep returning to as a nearly constant theme here is: complacency. It’s evident when I write about the economic system (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse), or prepping (Be Prep-ared) or really nearly any topic I write about. And I try to live by my advice.

In my life, I try not to be complacent about:

Relationships: Love is a voluntary choice. Being complacent about those around you is a good way to lose a relationship, and that can be expensive. But, for certain people, it’s worth it. (That’s an ex-wife joke.)
Jobs: Jobs come and go, even within companies. I have seen entire departments disappear as technology made people irrelevant. Always be learning new skills, or at least be learning more about the “niece” of your boss.
Value of Money: When I was a boy, Bernie Sanders would shine a shinbone for a nickel. Now? I think he wants to expand Medicare to do that.
Economic Future: The stock market will always go up, right? Well, no. Sometimes
Limits of Human Knowledge: Much of what is science is a fad, to be replaced by new science in a few years. Not so much with math. Mostly not with physics. Medicine? 75% of it is washing your hands and eating right. 20% is antibiotics. 5% is not step on snek. And Aesop will change all of these percentages if he gets this far.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise is absolutely against complacency. I don’t like complacency. I like finding places where it has snuck into my life or I see it sneaking into the lives of others. I especially like sharing things that help people see complacency in their own lives, because then I don’t have to change anything about me.

That moment when I’ve written something, and I imagine that someone’s entire world view changed?

That moment is why I write, though some of you might say that for a writer, I’m a fairly competent typist. Regardless, that’s the enjoyment I get from this, besides the jokes and the bikinis. I want to create discomfort in me. And in you. And also be able to explain to The Mrs. why I spend so much time looking at bikini pictures.

“Research, dear. It’s for my readers.” Oh, the things I put myself through for you.

At least it’s not another Kardashian. But I think the dog has less hair.

Back to complacency. When it comes to life and health, how often do you step back and question your basic, underlying assumptions? If never, you should. How often are they wrong? If never, then you’re not testing them hard enough.

Assumptions change because circumstances change. A forty year old metabolism isn’t the same as a twenty year old metabolism. If you eat like you’re twenty when you’re forty and fifty, you’ll end up weighing 657 pounds and being buried in a piano box. I guess the good part about that is “all the Oreos®,” and being able to dress convincingly as Jabba the Hut® at Halloween, but the downside is attractive slave girls cost more than you think.

Assumptions change because knowledge changes – we were wrong. All of us. Sugar used to be great for you, it was a carbohydrate, and those were good. But fat? Fat was bad, as bad as John Travolta acting in a movie that requires his character to be able to use words of more than one syllable bad. Everyone knew that, and they were right. But only about Travolta. Companies even made fat-free cookies in special green packages so you could know that you were safe eating them. But in 2020, we know that’s insanity.

But I hear Darth Braider did her hair.

What circumstances have changed in your life that you need to account for? What will be changing?

As for knowledge, what does “everyone know” that’s wrong today? That’s tougher. I think that the news about sugar (for instance) started to show up in more than “fad” levels about the year 2000, a good 20 years after the war on fat in food began. Pay attention. And if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Complacency. Heck, I’ve made mistakes.

Probably enough for 1,000 years. Just ask Karen. She’s quite a Cnut.

(FCUK™, of course is the British clothing brand “French Connection, UK®.”)

Silly.