Silly Predictions – Page 19 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Book Review: Civil War Two, Part I

“I’ll give you a winter prediction: it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

There was a dwarf fortune teller that was wanted by police. The news headline was “Small medium at large.”

One of the comments on the very first issue of the Civil War Two Weather Report (You can find all three Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming, Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links, Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) was a link to Thomas W. Chittum’s 1997 book Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America. It is available as a .pdf here. Ordinarily I’d point you towards Amazon® so you could buy the book and put money in the author’s pocket, but it looks like the book has been out of print for some time.

Update: it’s here, Mr. Chittum pointed me in this direction. Please give this one a purchase – it’s good for Mr. Chittum, and I promise I don’t make a dime off of it.

Chittum had an interesting past before writing this book – he fought in Vietnam for the United States. Apparently that wasn’t enough and the United States was all peaceful for the next twenty years, so he fought in Rhodesia and Croatia as a mercenary rifleman. Oh, and he was a computer programmer for most of his life.

The book is now 22 years old, and it makes predictions. How did it do? I won’t spoil the plot too much, but Chittum has probably been better at predicting 2019 while writing about it in 1996 than a lot of people have done living in 2016 and predicting 2019. It was pretty chilling to me to read how much Chittum had gotten right, so I thought I’d review the book.

As the notecards I use for blocking out posts went to three times the number I use for a typical post, I realized that the review would be take (at least) two posts, if not three. So, here’s part one. You’ll see part two next Monday.

Early on, Chittum notes that the United States has moved from the status of a nation to that of an empire. Some might date the beginning of empire to the end of the first Civil War, but I’d say that the United States was, more or less, a single nation up until the 1970’s. Sure there were regional differences, but the idea of kneeling when the national anthem was played wouldn’t have occurred to anyone but revolutionary Leftists.

Make the Empire Great Again™!

The United States had a homogeneous culture for 90% plus of citizens in the 1970’s. The dreams of the civic nationalist were realized in that era that resulted from very low immigration: all that matters was that people were committed to being the idea of integrating and assimilating into being an American, and it would work out fine. As long as we were one group that could sit and watch Cheers® or M*A*S*H™ or baseball, and cheer for our favorite teams, we’d be fine.

In the civic nationalist world it didn’t matter that your great-grandparents were Italian immigrants in 1900. Your grandpa might have been named Enzio, but he went by Ernie and married an Irish gal named Mary. Your dad played baseball. Your name is Robert and your sister’s name is Nancy and the only thing really Italian about you is you like pizza.

I’d guess I’d use the participation in youth soccer as a proxy for demographic change. We all know that soccer was originally invented in Europe so the Germans would have something to do besides invade France and conquer it in an afternoon. It’s not a traditional game that Americans play. Oh, sure, the United States women won the World Cup®. But to be fair, we needed something for our women to do so they didn’t invade France, either.

Let’s face it, our choice is either World Cup® soccer, or panzers streaking through Paris. Is it just me, or do the panzers sound more interesting?

But Chittum points out that stability comes from a single group identity. People being all on the same team makes us stronger, where as many groups make us weaker. In this light, diversity isn’t Our Greatest Strength™, it’s really a weakness.

And his point is clear – ask a Leftist what it means to be an American, and you’ll likely get a vague statement about all you have to do to be an American is want to be one. Asking them to learn English and assimilate and fit into American culture is for some reason now considered racist. From the vantage point of 2019, it’s clear, diversity is our greatest weakness if we want a safe and stable nation.

This is observable in the real world. Chittum fought in the breakup of the Balkans, and witnessed the breakdown of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell, Chittum notes it was about 50% ethnic Russian. The resulting nation that emerged was about 80% ethnic Russian and is much more stable. It’s certainly more Russian.

The trends of a nation in peril are observable. Our police departments don’t look like policemen, they’re now military. Remember, to a cop, the citizens look like citizens. To the military, everyone is a potential enemy.

SWAT teams raided Amish farms because they were selling unpasteurized milk.
Cops get armored personnel carriers like they’re patrolling Syria and not San Francisco.
Even local cops in Modern Mayberry wear gloves with hard plastic knuckles during normal patrols.

When she pulled me over I rolled down the window and said, “What’s wrong?” Her response? “Nothing.”

Chittum spends a lot of time on the American Southwest – he figures it will be the trigger to the Civil War.

The original Reconquista took place in Spain as the Spanish expelled the Muslims who had conquered it over the course of six hundred years. It was slow, but it finished up in 1492. In the same way, Chittum notes that, although Mexico is a failed state, Mexicans are “retaking” the Southwest in a modern Reconquista that has taken place over decades since 1965, but with 1000% less Muslims.

Nothing says practical like that hat!

Likewise, Chittum writes that the only solution is to close the border. Of course he was writing this in 1997 so 22 years have passed. Right now, at least 40% of the population of Los Angeles is foreign born. In no way could Los Angeles be considered to be an American city today. It might even be considered Mexican, as rival Mexican gangs have recently infiltrated the LA County Sheriff’s office (LINK).

Who loves this? Leftists who wish to topple the United States: Leftists need the votes. Ethnic groups like La Raza: La Raza is the intellectual part of the movement that actively wishes to retake the Southwest. Multinational corporations: they like the lower wages.

Worst, though, are the hipster cops who will only arrest you ironically.

Let’s be clear: Mexicans are patriots about Mexico. They love their country – that’s why they proudly carry their flag during protests. Even in 1997, Chittum noted that crime was rampant in Mexico and the border was a mess and it’s even worse in Latin America south of Mexico. Who can blame them for wanting to come to the United States, especially when some groups spin a fable of an ethnic empire, Aztlan, which is theirs for the taking?

The South and Northeast aren’t much better, and Chittum mentions that the Northeast will experience massive, open violence, which will be unorganized, and savage. Some of the urban areas might survive as city-states.

California is his odds-on favorite to be ground zero. Street gangs, as mentioned above, are numerous and founded on ethnicity. They’ve infiltrated public organizations and the police and even allegedly corrupted members of the Marine Corps (LINK). It’s this particular “enemy inside” that is troubling. An external enemy is that can be fought, but when the enemy of the country becomes an internal enemy, it’s much worse – there’s a reason that treason is mentioned in the Constitution.

Ahh, California, the meth laboratory of democracy.

Chittum mentions militias. They seemed to have their peak in the 1990’s, and quickly declined after Oklahoma City. He also mentions “Committees of Correspondence” which were a mechanism for people to communicate with each other because they didn’t have the Internet in the 1760’s to begin to organize against the British, LOL. The Internet serves this purpose now, with large groups getting information from unapproved sources, and even managing to “privately*” share information.

*Don’t bet your life or liberty on it.

Chittum writes that Civil War Two will be vicious, atrocity filled, and genocidal. Civilian casualties are to be expected, and many will be on purpose. Looting will be common. This is not the usual scenario our military faces in any fashion, so the analyses performed by John Mark (see Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming) or Forward Observer (Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) aren’t valid. Civil War Two has the potential to be far worse than any conflict seen in history, as it combines both ethnic division along with ideological division – it’s like the Russian Revolution times Rwanda to the power of Somalia.

I’ve been stuck in the same phase for . . . oh . . . twenty years now. Maybe one day I’ll grow out of being a 12 year old. I’m not telling you how long it took me to get to that phase!

There are four phases according to Chittum. The first phase of the problem is what he refers to as Foundational. He said in 1997 the Foundational phase was already complete.

Tribalization of society – have different rules for different ethnic groups, push people to identify as something other than “American.”
Power shift to unelected administrators, judges, board, commissions, and public servants.
Since 1972, wages been stagnant, or, when compared to medical care or education, dramatically falling.
The core of many large cities has been abandoned – think Baltimore or Detroit.
Massive and sustained immigration, falling of standards and conditions in some locations to those similar to undeveloped countries.
Racial organizations in police – militarization of police, which are both covered above.
Treaties are more important that state sovereignty.
A consistent and strong drive for gun control.
From Antifa© to MS-13 to the Crips, these are in place.
Mass media participation in the polarization. The mass media has already picked a side – Left.

We can see what Chittum says is behind us. Next Monday we’ll look (from his vantage point in 1997 and ours in 2019) to see what else he’s predicted, and how far along we are.

Sweet dreams!

Social Security Won’t Sink Us. But The Ship is Still Going Down.

“Here comes an overweight cat with dollar signs for eyes and a hat that says “Social Security” pouring a bucket that says “Alternative Minimum Tax” over a sad Statue of Liberty holding a “democracy” umbrella.” – Family Guy

There’s this joke I heard about Social Security, but no one will get it.

When I was in junior high, our history class ended up with a long-term substitute teacher, Miss Vargas, for over a month. Most substitute teachers just handed out word-search puzzles where you tried to pick out names of conquistadors, Thanksgiving foods, conquered Mayans, and famous cats that belonged to the Mayflower Pilgrims. Since Miss Vargas had us for weeks, however, she actually had to teach. Thankfully, she had a lesson plan.

Not an original. I could not resist.

She was a nice substitute teacher so our class didn’t beat up on her that much. We could tell, however, that, whatever her degree was in, it wasn’t history. Given the time and place I was going to school, it seemed like she was likely a chemically-damaged refugee from the 1960’s, and likely a former Leftist hippy. Since we had caught her on some (rather) basic mistakes about American history, we weren’t shy about questioning the things she said.

Not to mention when Abraham Lincoln “freed the penguins, dude” after signing the Treaty of Ghent at Woodstock. At least class was interesting.

The lesson (at some point) took us to the New Deal. The format of the homework should be familiar to anyone who was in school when mimeographs were a thing (look it up). There was a term, and then the student was supposed to write down the definition. It was a fancy way to force eighth graders to learn to skim texts for key words written in bold.

But the smell . . .

One of the terms was Social Security. I dutifully looked through the text until I found the boldface words Social Security. In it was the definition that it was (more or less): An insurance program founded to provide benefits to retired and disabled people.

The teacher, not feeling like grading the homework, decided to go through the definitions with us. After Social Security she wrote on the board, A program created to redistribute wealth in the country.

With all of the righteous indignation an 8^th grader who had fully consumed the Kool-Aid® of the Official Story™ of the Government-Approved© textbook, I proceeded to correct Miss Vargas.

She didn’t back down, and maintained that was the purpose. Obviously, the event was significant enough that I still remember, and as I grew older I realized that, well, the burned-out hippy was right. Social Security is a wealth redistribution scheme. Heck, you can tell the program is socialist – it’s right there in the name.

The program was started in the depths of the Depression and rewarded those who hadn’t paid in with benefits they hadn’t earned. I’d whine more, but that happened 80 years ago, so it’s like Madonna complaining about her virginity – that ship sailed a LONNNNNNNG time ago – nearly as long ago as when the Japanese bombed the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria at Pearl Harbor. I know that you’re expecting that this is some sort of rant about how Social Security needs to be taken down because it’ll wreck the economy. It isn’t a rant, and Social Security won’t wreck the economy.

According to the latest data I could find (there’s probably newer, but 2013 was close enough and I’m travelling) but an average couple, making an average wage paid in about $600,000 in Social Security taxes during their career and would receive roughly $600,000 in benefits – the system was in balance. Of note, it’s kind of cute because the graphic assumed it was a man married to a woman and not an immigrant trans-porpoise which I understand is now required in California, as long as the porpoise signs a pledge to drive a Prius® and not to use straws.

Ahh, nostalgia for simpler times.

Social Security was roughly in balance in 2013, and could be put back into balance fairly easily with minimal effort, even though we’re facing a demographic bulge as the boomers retire. As long as we can convince them all to take up chain smoking and they decide that anti-chemo is the new anti-vax, we’re fine. Theoretically, there are the accumulated savings that Social Security has had during all of those years it was in surplus, but the reality is that all of those funds are just IOUs from Congress sitting in a filing cabinet in West Virginia in a converted National Guard Armory behind Buddy’s Chicken and Black Lung Shack®. Doris has the key.

It might look nice, but it still smells like the DMV and low motivation.

Yeah, the money going out of Social Security has already exceeded the money going in to Social Security, but it’s manageable. A few tweaks to the tax, and a few tweaks to the benefit (two-for-one coupons at Burger King™ instead of money every other month) and it will work out. Social Security, despite being a piggy bank continually raided by Congress for my entire life, won’t hurt us, at least not by itself.

That’s the good news. I fully expect that if the only major obligations that the government had were defense, transgender reassignment surgery, and Social Security, we’d be fine. Heck, even welfare for dachshunds that can’t find a job because of terrier privilege wouldn’t break us. Even if Congress approved the Ocasio Cortez Guided Missile©, which is designed to approach every target from the Left, has a warhead that does nothing but make babbling sounds, and costs a billion dollars a missile, we’d be fine.

What will break us?

Medicare® and Medicaid™.

Those are the M&M®s that will crater our financial system.

From the 2013 data, the average couple could will pay in about $110,000 in taxes during their lifetime for Medicare, but will take out nearly $400,000 in benefits. Where does that benefit come from? I’d say our tax dollars, but let’s you and I be real – not one dime of deficit spending has ever come out of your pocket or mine directly in taxes. It’s all borrowed into existence at this point.

I was going to save this graph for Halloween, since it’s scarier than most zombie movies.

From this projection, you can see that by 2024 Medicare plus Social Security will make up 12% or so of the GDP. Add in 2% for Medicaid costs, and you’re up to 14% of the GDP. Add in 4% for the projected interest payments due on the national debt, and that’s 18%, folks. That leaves 2% at most for all of the rest of the spending on the economy before we run out of tax dollars. But the rest of the spending (on things like defense) generally runs about 10% of GDP. Through the magic of math, that means that we’ll need another 10% of GDP. Just raise the taxes, right?

Even during the “90% tax rate” 1950’s, the proportion of the GDP taken in taxes wasn’t any higher than today and resulted in more loopholes than there are bacon-wrapped shrimp at a congressional lobbyist’s party.

That means the Federal government spending alone will consume 30% of the GDP, of which at least 10% will be deficit spending. Given a projected GDP of $26 trillion in 2024, that is an annual deficit of $2.6 trillion. The deficit this year is projected to be $1 trillion or so, which is more money than some people make in their entire lifetime, so imagine one 2.5 times larger.

Through some sort of magical incantation worthy of Houdini’s proctologist, money has been pulled out of somewhere (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) and hasn’t created massive inflation. Yet. I guess that in Zimbabwe they managed to just print money like we’re doing now to get out of the problem.

See, you too can be a trillionaire!

So, in the end, Miss Vargas was right. Social Security was the start of a program that will do a great job of income redistribution, from a wealthy and prosperous society, to a society where everyone can be a trillionaire, and a good nickel cigar only costs a few hundred billion dollars.

Thankfully Lincoln posed for this after getting back from Woodstock and before he retired to Gettysburg to make movies with George Lucas.

Black Holes, Money, Population, and 2050

“Using layman’s terms: Use a retaining magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons. These, in turn, fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large, and you produce a singularity.” – Event Horizon

I tried to explain the budget to my ex-wife, but she couldn’t grasp the gravity of the situation.

Right around the year 2002, I first heard of a geophysicist named Didier Sornette. Sure, you say, with a name like that, he’s French, how smart could he be? Well, let’s get this straight – I still blame the French for cigarettes, Leftism and the metric system, but Sornette is an original and first-rate thinker, even though the actual pronunciation of his name is probably “Dipstick Snort” because the French haven’t in the last 1600 years mastered spelling a word with any relationship to the way it is actually pronounced. In addition to Sornette, the French gave us Sophie Marceau, so there’s something they did right.

Even though Sophie Marceau played a villain, Bond© thought spending time with her was 00heaven.

Sornette is a geophysicist by degree. He initially studied the physics of earthquakes. Earthquakes, Sornette noted, don’t come about due to any single failure, but as a result of the microscope failure under pressure at LOTS of different places that at some point becomes critical. The pressure builds up, and it’s not the first little crack in the rock, but rather the aggregate cracking that eventually releases the stress. It does that all at once.

Sornette thought that he could use math to describe the behavior of rocks, and model it so he could understand earthquakes better. He worked for twenty five years on doing this, and found that there was a mathematical “signal” was present before the earthquake occurred. It wasn’t useful for predicting exactly when the earthquake would occur, but like everybody with a new tool, Sornette looked around and wondered where else it might be applicable.

Sornette looked at the financial system, specifically stock markets. He noticed that stock market crashes looked a lot like earthquakes. And, unlike earthquakes, financial crashes could devastate the world globally. He switched his focus to that, using math to model the financial bubbles that led to the high values that then came crumbling down when the market finally crashed.

In 2001, he decided to take this modelling a step further. What if, he asked (along with fellow researcher Anders Johansen) we try to model not only the financial system, but world population, too?

Okey, I’m betting Anders Johansen-a duesn’t ictuoelly telk leeke-a zees. Prubebly. Bork Bork Bork!

The result was the paper Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic, and financial indices, or FEEnite-a-time-a singuolerity in zee-a dynemeecs ouff zee-a vurld pupuoletiun, icunumeec, und feenuonceel indeeces in Swedish. That’s a really long title that could have been shortened to, Yo, something weird is coming, and I don’t mean your mother. You can find a copy of the paper here (LINK). It shows a May 29, 2018 date, but I don’t think there’s been any changes to it since its initial publication in late 2001. I’ll warn you – there’s a wee bit of math involved.

The paper starts with the statement that for most of the known history of the human race, our growth rate hasn’t been exponential, it’s been far faster than that. It took 1600 years to go from 300 million people in year 0 Anno Domini to 600 million. To get to a billion total only took 204 years. Double to two billion? We did that in 1927. Three billion in 1960, four billion in ’74, five billion in ’87, six billion in ’99, and seven billion in 2011. Now as I write this in 2019? 7.7 billion people. And only forty people are friends with you on Facebook®.

What allowed this population growth? Knowledge. The revolutions in agriculture (the first one, which I wrote about here: Beer, Nuclear Bikinis, and Agriculture: What Made Us Who We Are), industrial, fertilizer, medical, and information have allowed the population growth to accelerate like it has.

Sornette and Johansen studied several data sets. Population was one set, and another was the economic growth rate of the United States, as measured by the stock market. Even though the Dow Jones Industrial Average© (DJIA) didn’t exist before Dow married Jones, several economists have created data on what the data might have looked like. Is that a bit of a guess, like your mother’s weight since there aren’t scales that big? Sure. But, as we will see, it might be close enough.

Math is funny. When you divide something by zero, you get infinity. Several mathematical functions that describe things going to infinity do exist – we call those singularities. The funny thing is that they appear to exist not only mathematically, but in real life as well. They have real properties that we can predict, measure, and see. One popular example of a singularity is the black hole. Some scientist said, “Okay, gravity sucks, like your mom. But what if something had so much gravity that it trapped even light, like your mom?”

That concept blew their minds, but it was there in the math in 1916 when Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equation and divided by zero. A black hole is a singularity based around gravity – where gravity is so intense that we have no real understanding of what happens inside, like God divided by zero, liked what he saw, and said, “Yeah, this is the ultimate practical joke.” But singularities aren’t limited to stuff that would only interest starship crewmembers. Other singularities regularly occur in physical systems. Earthquakes.

Stock market crashes.

A scientific discussion of gravitation inside a black hole.

This wasn’t the first time someone calculated the date of a singularity based on population. In 1960, the prediction was published in the journal Science that the population singularity would hit on (somewhat tongue and cheekily) Friday, November 13, 2026. Didier and Johansen relooked at the data, and came up with an equation that they felt gave a better fit.

Their date for the singularity? 2052, +/- 10 years.

They then looked at the data (keep in mind, this was in 2001) and modeled the behavior of the DJIA©. What did they find? A singularity in 2053.

That was too close for coincidence. Two different data sets show the same predicted end date?

Thankfully, Sornette and Johansen are wrong, right? They certainly didn’t predict that the DJIA™ would be as high as 27,000 in 2019?

In fact, their prediction (in 2001) was that the Dow would hit 36,000-40,000 by 2020. They did leave some weasel space, noting that, “. . . the extrapolation of this growth closer to the singularity becomes unreliable . . .”

It’s say that they were pretty close, and far closer than I was in the year 2001 when I would have predicted the aggregate stock value of the DJIA© in 2020 would be worth a less than a handful of ramen noodles and ten rounds of .22 ammo. So they were far closer than I was.

One thing Sornette and Johansen noted was that the minor ups and downs would be of less consequence the closer we move to the singularity point. What happens each week is less important than the overall trend, so the data errors associated with “creating” a Dow Jones™ index before there was one probably isn’t too much of an error.

Here’s 100 years of stock market data, now with snarky comment.

Another conclusion of the equations is that population, technology and wealth is intertwined. The number of people that the world can hold is very much tied to technology. When modelling prehistoric population, no fewer than three technological ages – have to be mathematically introduced: hunting, followed by farming, followed by primitive technology are required to accurately model the actual population.

But when these intertwine, does the increased population lead to the technology, or do they feed on each other causing an explosion?

They feed on each other, causing an explosion in technology and population and wealth. More people lead to more wealth. More people leads to more technology to feed people which leads to even more people which produces more wealth which leads to . . . more people. The end dates are similar because the functions of wealth and population are related. You can’t have the super-exponential growth without the interactions. Sornette and Johansen came up with approximately 2050 for the end date. Ray Kurzweil (futurist) predicted the technological singularity would hit around 2045, which is pretty close.

Bill Gates gave up lap dancing and stripping after pulling a hamstring at a bachelor party, and he had to settle for his second love – computers.

But what happens next? What happens if and when the singularity hits? The authors indicate we’re probably in it a transitional phase already – the population growth rate peaked in 1973, and so did the world per capita energy use. Sornette and Johansen came up with some silly ideas of what’s next, but let’s be real: no one can predict what happens after a singularity – dividing by zero changes every rule.

We have no idea what happens inside a black hole.

I know that many of you sense the same thing that I do – we are changing at a pace that is already fast but that seems to accelerate: it’s faster every year. This is the case, and I don’t anticipate that things will slow in the next decade or two. Beyond that? It’s anyone’s guess.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Didier Sornette? He runs a group called the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, where they try to observe financial budget growth in real time. It’s here (LINK) and worth a few minutes of review.

So, if they’re right, it’s the best time to be in stocks, at least until the singularity occurs, the population collapses and the robots decide that to get rid of their pets . . .

Dow chart from here: (LINK)

China – What’s the deal?

“What does that mean? ‘China is here.’ I don’t even know what the hell that means.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Had enough Mongols? This is how you avoid Mongols, unless the 9^th Circuit says you have to let them in.

I’ve had my eye on China for quite a while. It knows why.

Anyway, China has in the past 50 years transformed itself from an example of the nation your parents warned you about: “See, eat your peas and study hard, you don’t want to be like China,” to a country competing for prime representation in the International House of Pancakes®. Okay, I made that up. I don’t even know if they have Frosted Flakes™ in China, let alone pancakes©.

For four thousand years, China looked inward. Only conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchu, the 20^th Century was a succession of weak leaders until the communist takeover at the hands of Mao Zedong. Mao seemed content to play with the Chinese people and the Chinese economy like a Doberman’s chew toy until his death in the 1970’s.

AOC will never be a doctor – she’s committing political Mao-practice.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked around at the huge Doberman spit-covered collectivist mess left by communism, and decided that something had to change. After visiting the United States, he decided that China needed way to get convenient chocolate milkshakes like that one Jimmy Carter got him at McDonalds®, and began reforming the economy based around market lines. You know, capitalism.

Capitalism worked amazingly well at saving a communist economy. Shocker!

The collective ingenuity of over a billion Chinese coupled with capitalist incentives and totalitarian controls has led to growth. The economy of China in 2019 is 91 times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng’s reforms began. Some before and after pictures become relevant at this point:

Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

What China has effectively done is make its citizens nearly 100 times richer since Star Wars® first came out. Perhaps more impressive is the amount of expertise that has been imported to China. By making first cheap junk in the 1980’s to radar detectors in the 1990’s to iPods® in the early 00’s to iPhones™ today, China has imported not only the technical know-how of cutting edge technology is design, it understands better than any other country in the world on how to build most things.

See, I told you I wasn’t exaggerating much. Two day shipping really changed their lives.

An engineer in California (who may or may not even be an American) designs the iPhone©. In China, they figure out how to build it. That know-how isn’t in a manual, it’s built up in thousands of mistakes that require solutions to produce a finished product. All of those solutions are known by the workers and engineers in the factory, and used to make production lines that much faster.

In this way, China has traded lots of cell phones for zillions of dollars that we just printed up out of thin air, sure, but it’s also trained itself on how to be an industrial superpower.

Industrial. But what about military?

No. China has seen our military and has no ambition that it can in the near future compete with American military power. Unlike the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Congress, China has no desire to fight World War II again. While the United States has fought in numerous conflicts in the last fifty years, China has fought in exactly one, an incursion into Vietnam back before Reagan was president. The Chinese make the Italians look like Patton with Pizza.

So, rumor is that they also have a tricycle attack brigade, but they were at nap time.

If I were Chinese President Xi Jinping, I would have no illusions about my military. Even if it fielded better tanks and planes than the United States, it still would come up short because outside of games of Call of Duty®, the Chinese military has no experience.

Instead: “China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare. These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare…” (United States Army Special Operations Command, 2014)

In particular, China has focused on trade. In the last five years, China has started an international cooperation scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has led to (so far) agreements with over 68 countries. The stated objective of BRI is that it is meant to produce closer ties and stronger trading arrangements between China and the rest of the world.

See, need some place to keep my stuff – Mom’s basement is full.

BRI consists of at least a trillion dollars of planned Chinese spending, and by spending, I mean loans. China will loan countries money to develop infrastructure – pipelines, roads, harbors, PEZ® mines, railroads, industrial parks, electric power grids, and airports to better move people and goods throughout the world. Certainly China won’t take advantage of the loan conditions if a country has trouble repaying it?

Actually, so far not really. In only one case has China seized assets, and the rest of them it has either renegotiated debt payments or forgiven them entirely.

So what is China doing?

It came to me one night while I was thinking about the blog and just drifting off to sleep. Thinking about this like a banker looking to gain leverage wasn’t the right framework. China isn’t building this trading network to compete with the United States. China is building this framework for life without the United States. BRI replaces our markets, and replaces what we’re shipping to them. But there’s more.

When you look at what China has, it is people, industrial capacity, and ingenuity. China needs raw materials. It’s short on food. It needs oil. By making inroads into Africa, China has started new mines, run by Chinese administrators and Chinese miners. China has built, using Chinese laborers and Chinese steel, new railroads in Kenya.

And all of this BRI stuff isn’t paid for in dollars. China has seen that the United States has managed to pay for debt in dollars it printed. If China can be the dominant country, it can pay for things in Kenya with Chinese money printed by China itself, rather than have to make iPhones® and send them to iNdiana© in exchange for dollars.

Perhaps it’s just the economy of the United States that China expects will be gone?

Beyond that, closer economic ties with a country that could dominate your economy certainly isn’t dangerous, is it? They’d never use their influence to change your laws, or influence your movies, right?

Set from the 2010 remake of Red Dawn before China demanded they not be the villain. Hmmm.

Belt and Road graphic (pre-meme) By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561

Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links

â€œHave you any idea how successfulÂ censorshipÂ is on TV? Don’t know the answer? Hmm. Successful, isn’t it?â€ â€“ Max Headroom

11:45pm â€“ fifteen minutes to midnight.Â Yes, itâ€™s subjective, and itâ€™s based on the countdown, published last month (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming).Â Weâ€™re still at CivCon 6 – People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.Â Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.

In this issue:Â Front Matter â€“ Censorship Updateâ€“ John Markâ€™s Video and Criticism â€“ Updated Civil War II Index â€“ Who Benefits? â€“ Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the second issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.Â These posts will be a bit different than the other posts here at Wilder Wealthy and Wise â€“ they will consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II.Â My intent is to update these on the first Monday of every month.

John Wilkes Paintbooth (Idea via user Miles Long at The Burning Platform)

There has been a pretty significant interest in Civil War II â€“ it has generated more emails to me than any other topic Iâ€™ve written about, with a great number of links to relevant information that youâ€™ll see below.Â Itâ€™s also resulted in about a dozen book suggestions, and Iâ€™ve bought or downloaded every one of your suggestions.Â I havenâ€™t had time to read even 10% of the books yet, but I can tell the suggestions are rock solid.Â Thank you.Â Please feel free to contribute more suggestions of links or books either in the comments below or directly to me at movingnorth@gmail.com â€“ I wonâ€™t use your name (from e-mails) unless explicitly given permission, and I wonâ€™t directly quote your email unless explicitly given permission, but I may quote my answers in a way that doesnâ€™t violate your privacy.

Censorship Update

Why is censorship an issue in Civil War II?Â Censorship is a measure of how those in power (either political or economic) fear an idea and how polarized they have become.Â Most censorship in the past had been based on the sexual content of the book or movie.Â Now itâ€™s based on ideas that are dangerous.Â Which ideas?Â Depends on the day.

I know it says â€œUpdateâ€ but this is really the first version, so technically the first â€œupdateâ€ will be next month.Â There has been more censorship in the United States in the past year than at any point in my adult life.Â This level of censorship is more frightening than anything Iâ€™ve ever seen, except for the latest Democratic presidential debates.

YouTubeÂ© is the real star of censorship in June.Â Comedian/journalist Steven Crowder has been a long-time YouTubeÂ® broadcaster who is generally on the mainstream â€œRightâ€ side of the political world.Â He likes guns.Â Doesnâ€™t like abortion.Â He is not extreme in any real sense of the word.Â But as a comedian, one of the things he does regularly is mock people.Â Which people?Â Everyone.Â I wonâ€™t go into the details (you can look it up) but a group of Leftists decided Crowder should be banned from YouTubeâ„¢ since he made a lispy-Leftist journalist who is an ethnic and sexual minority feel bad.

YouTubeÂ© responded to this contrived moral outrage by making it so Crowder couldnâ€™t get money from YouTubeÂ® ads â€“ oddly this increased Crowderâ€™s income as thousands of people bought merchandise directly from Crowderâ€™s company.

End of story?Â No.

Soon enough, YouTubeâ„¢ will consist of nothing more than makeup videos, BuzzfeedÂ®, and whatever else the New York TimesÂ© says is okay.

Forty other channels were either banned, demonetized, or had videos deleted.Â I wonâ€™t go so far as to say that these channels are all mainstream like Steven Crowder, they arenâ€™t.Â But I am not aware of any content that called for violence or did anything more than spread â€œdangerous ideas.â€Â In a crowning bit of irony, YouTubeÂ® censored a video where a Googleâ„¢ (owner of YouTubeâ„¢) executive talked about how GoogleÂ© wouldnâ€™t allow another â€œTrump situation.â€Â This was presumably via using their ability to manipulate what search results people see when they use Googleâ„¢.

TwitterÂ® had also purged significant figures on the Right, most prominent among them James Woods, who has since given up on the platform after multiple bans despite having over 2,000,000 followers.

Letâ€™s take Amazon, who in 2010 said that â€œAmazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.â€Â This was a fairly absolute position, especially since Amazon was defending selling a pro-pedophilia book.

Not so much now.Â Amazon has now banned dozens of books, and created entire categories of products that cannot be sold.Â Â You canâ€™t get a Confederate flag t-shirt from Amazon, but you can certainly get a Stalin shirt.Â This is despite the fact that Stalin killed (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) more people in one year â€“ 3.9 million â€“ than the total number of slaves in the United States in 1850 â€“ 3 million.Â Sure, it sucked to be a slave.Â But it was certainly worse to be a slave to communism that was starved to death.

With apologies to Arthur (LINK), whose tagline I mangled for this one.

I tried to come up with a list of censored things, but even the censored things seem to be mainly censored.Â Orwell would be proud.

John Markâ€™s Civil War 2 Video and Criticism

This video was suggested by several of you, including Shinmen Takezo who suggests you listen to all of John Markâ€™s videos.Â Iâ€™ve seen this one, and plan to watch the others when I have a spare minute.

I think Mr. Mark is spot on with commentary that Trump is the last Republican president that will be elected.Â I wrote about this back in November of 2018(Trump: The Last President?).Â It has a click-bait-y title, which might explain why it went viral and got over 120,000 pageviews on Zero HedgeÂ©.

John Mark reviews an article purportedly written by a â€œRed Teamâ€ (bad guy) member of a war game where the Right revolts against the government and the Left.Â My response is in italics, or braille if you donâ€™t clean your screen very often.

First Vulnerability:Â The electrical grid is dispersed and easy to take down into most cities because it is impossible to guard.Â The front wonâ€™t be against just the Right, it will also be against their own (Leftist) cities.

I agree.Â The United States is built as a free society, and so is all of our infrastructure.Â It is devastatingly vulnerable.Â In one of the links below, youâ€™ll see how a $0.02 match took down a $20,000,000 bridge.Â And that was on accident.

Second Vulnerability:Â 30% will revolt.Â Most on the Right have guns.Â There are 400 million guns, 8 trillion bullets in the United States â€“ most in the hand of the Right.Â Ten million strongly on the Right.Â Tanks and airplanes donâ€™t matter as much as the Left thinks. Â Â There might be 2 million in the United States military, and over 60% voted for the Right.Â There are 20 million former military.

Total would be about 2 million available forces for revolutionary suppression (including civilian police), if the active military did not revolt.

I agree.Â The people, especially former military, on the Right can do whatever they want.Â Tanks and airplanes didnâ€™t win World War II on the Eastern Front â€“ the winning weapon was the mortar and the rifle â€“ anti-personnel weapons.Â The Soviets also accomplished it only by throwing millions of bodies into combat.Â Bodies that will be tough for the Left to get outside of conscription.

I think thereâ€™s an Uber joke in here somewhere.

Third Vulnerability:Â The Left lives in consuming cities, the Right lives in the land that produces food and stuff.Â The concentrated cities of the Left produce a lot of porn and girls with daddy-issues, but not much food.

I agree.Â They are vulnerable, though the porn and Facebookâ„¢ drought might be tough on some.

Where do I disagree?Â

The Ultra-Violent and Nukes.

Sure, we know the StarbucksÂ® Socialists and Latte Lenins wonâ€™t fight.Â Why wouldnâ€™t the government take MS-13 and arm them and turn them loose to â€œmake examplesâ€ of small downs, one after another?Â If they were losing, they would certainly do that.Â And they could scrape together a pilot and a nuke or two to take down a rebel capital city.Â If they were losing, they would.Â Â Â Â

The Right could make a reasonable partisan force, especially when you look that probably 50% to 75% of the military would defect and train people on the Right, bringing along a nice batch of weapons (think grenades, C4, etcetera) to the farm to teach the rest of the football team.Â I donâ€™t think Jed would need to teach the boys to shoot, and I think theyâ€™d learn to use that mortar and grenade launcher that he â€œliberatedâ€ from the Marines very quickly. Â

Logistics and Geography

The Left can be resupplied via air and ship.Â â€œEmergencyâ€ supplies would head into coastal cities and sustain them forever, though Denver would fall soon enough.Â Would Russia supply the heartland while the Chinese supplied the West Coast?Â I have no idea â€“ I think theyâ€™d do what.Â Regardless, France would soon surrender.

Also, I think there would be a nearly immediate media clamp down.Â Â The media supports the Left, no matter what.Â They would parrot the Leftist line until the studios were taken from them by force.

I think that this is far too optimistic, but I also think the odds are lower the more time passes.

Civil War Index:

Hereâ€™s the state for this month.

Economic:Â +10.42.Â Unemployment is the same â€“ interest rates took a huge drop, and the Dow was (slightly) up.Â Increasing economic is good.

Political Instability:Â -46%.Â I think that the start of the debates and the poor poll numbers of â€œany democratic candidateâ€ against Trump has calmed the Left politically by a lot.Â Lower instability is good.

Censorship:Â Originally this was going to be a candidate index.Â Sadly, thereâ€™s no data.Â How scary is it that you canâ€™t find good data on censorship?

Interest in Violence:Â Up 7% this month.Â Not horrible, but not good.

Illegal Aliens:Â Up 24% last month to 144,000.Â 144,000 is more than have been deported since Trump got into office.Â This shows increasing instability south of the border, or lower fear of deportation.Â Both are bad.

Eventually these will be graphs, but a graph with one point is . . . boring.Â Maybe in August.

Quote From a Failed Candidate to be The One:Â â€œIs the Red Pill gluten free?Â Also, is it vegan?â€

One measure I thought was pretty good was from Anonymousse over at The Burning Platform:Â â€œOne good metric may be the spread between political poll projections and reality/results. Iâ€™m thinking that gauges just how â€œfreeâ€ people feel about saying versus what they do. Something Iâ€™ve noticed widening over the years.â€

Iâ€™d like to do this one, but the data points are just too far apart.Â This would be useful information over the course of a decade, but wonâ€™t be much use monthly.Â I think Anonymousse is right â€“ people donâ€™t feel good about sharing if theyâ€™re going to vote for an â€œunpopularâ€ candidate on the Right, severely skewing the polls.

What do I mean by unpopular?

We were on vacation two years ago, and decided to stop at a national monument.Â We got out.Â The plates on our car are from a very red state – my county went 85% for Trump.Â As we got out of the car to stretch our legs and see the monument, we spied a guy birdwatching.Â He put his binoculars on our car.Â He was about 150 feet away.

Birdwatch Bill, yelling:Â “Who’d you vote for?”

John Wilder, being sassy, yelling back:Â “Starts with a T!”

Birdwatch Bill, muffled:Â “Ashshof.”

John Wilder:Â “What?”

Birdwatch Bill, with anger, yelling:Â “You heard me, A****le.”Â It rhymes with tadpole.

I was stunned, I mean, I donâ€™t deny being a tadpole, but I didnâ€™t think you could see it from 150 feet away.Â The Mrs. was in theÂ bathroom, and I’m thankful that she didn’t hear him, since she would have broken him like a twig – she handles my light work.

After saying that, Birdwatch Bill scurried and jumped in his car, and sped off.

After hearing that story, The Mrs. was adamant that we not move to that state, even when I had a job offer there, even though I think sheâ€™d like to hear Birdwatch Billâ€™s yelp as she gave him a nuclear wedgie.

Who Benefits?

Whenever I see something that doesnâ€™t make sense, I try to understand what could possibly be causing it.Â When conditions are better for minority racial and ethnic groups than ever in the history of the country, and the agitation increases, I have to ask, who benefits?Â When the push for segregation comes from, not the Right but the Left, I ask, who benefits?

When I see us moving on a seemingly certain path towards war, I have to ask, who benefits?Â Probably more on this in a future post.

Links From Readers:

Obviously I only stand by 100% of my own writing.Â Here is some interesting stuff sent in by readers.Â Feel free to take some of the burden off of Ricky, and send me more.Â And if you send it in an email, please let me know if I may credit you.

See, a chain link photo in the â€œLinksâ€ page.Â Iâ€™m witty that way.

Thomas Chittumâ€™s Civil War TwoÂ – Iâ€™m not finished with this one yet, but very interesting.Â A 178 page .pdf file â€“ this was listed by “Mark” at The Burning Platform.

Photos of Bosnia during and after their civil war from â€œMygirlâ€¦maybeâ€ over at The Burning Platform.

Update on the State of Jefferson vs. New California from user â€œMartelâ€™s Hammerâ€ at The Burning Platform.

Who is behind Antifa?, via AC at The Burning Platform.

From Ricky:

Pentagon prepping for civil unrest?

Review of the risk of civil unrest (presentation).

Peter Turchin predicts violence in 2020.

France and Social Unrest â€“ Tied to Loss of Family and Religion

Perhaps my favorite link from Ricky â€“ the Partisan Conflict Index â€“ worth watching.Â

Brazos reminds us that there is precedence for using the troops against American civilians.Â

User â€œMN Steelâ€ reminds us that the damage a single match can do.

From my E-mail:

First is a blog I often read, Metallicman on what liberals have in store for conservatives.Â Not pretty.Â

And more from Ricky!

This one from an Australian perspective.

NY Magazine â€“ wondering if it isnâ€™t time to split up.Â My add (from HBOÂ®) was for the series Divorce.Â Hmmm.

From the Federalist, again about â€œdivorceâ€ of the United States.

From other emails . . .

A great article from Mary Christine over at The Burning Platform, looking at Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War and how partisans will form â€“ will Civil War Two look more like the personal fights along the Kansas and Missouri borders?

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

“You’re the one that’s collapsing. Been sitting at that contraption for twenty-two years. It’s time you tried a girl.” – The Addams Family

It is related to the post. I promise. That makes it literature, so you have to like it. It’s sophisticated and swanky.

This series of posts was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky. This is Part Two. Part One can be found here (Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I).

Let’s – again – state the basic thesis in Ricky’s words:

“I’m right there with you that collapse is coming to our house of cards because of the way they were dealt. But after all of the individual survival dramas play out, survival ultimately depends on a community rising from the ashes. And the glue of a community is ultimately the deals made between its individuals. And money is the encapsulation of those deals.

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money. On what it is, and how it works.”

Last time we looked at the financial history of the United States up until the Civil War. The first Civil War, not the next one (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), I mean.

Just a few generations after the Revolutionary War, in the 1860’s, both halves of the United States defaulted on currency during the Civil War. The North defaulted on gold redemption in 1863, and the South printed Confederate currency like they were trying to make the Founding Fathers look like that one sailor that stayed in his bunk reading the Bible when the Seventh Fleet hit Sydney. My father-in-law swears that’s what he did, and no one with an Australian accent has shown up claiming to be The Mrs.’ long-lost sister.

Okay, after the Civil War, the United States is at least done with defaulting, right? I mean, we started up the Federal Reserve Bank™ in 1913 to stop these sorts of shenanigans, so that must have worked?

No. If the Federal Reserve ever pretended to have the mission of maintaining the stability of the dollar, it failed like one of Oprah’s diets.

Ricky sent this one. It’s perfect, with the exception that it doesn’t contain girls wearing bikinis. I think . . . we can do better. I think . . . we can Make Economics Sexy Again!

See, fixed that for you, Ricky. Graph is now 1000% better, unlike our currency. You can see her toes are pointed down into the sand, which shows that the value of the dollar is lower. Also, if I can point your attention to the years between 1950 and 1965 you can see what an amazing, um, time span that was.

In 1933, the United States had $4 billion in gold. Sadly, it owed $22 billion in gold that it would have to pay off in just a four years.

Solution?

Make owning gold by your own citizens illegal, and make them hand it in on penalty of going to jail if they don’t. After you’ve got those dollars, redefine the dollar so that it’s worth a lot less. Presto! You’ve stolen all the gold and then made the resulting “dollars” that your citizens have worth a lot less. Then you can give your cheaper dollars to other governments in payment. It’s like being Enron®, but with 100% less jail time, so it’s exactly like being a Kennedy.

So, yeah, I’d call that a default, too.

Finally in the 1970’s, the French decided that they could wake up from their wine and cigarette haze long enough to see that the United States was way short on the amount of gold necessary to pay all the debts that Johnson and Nixon created to get elected.

Defaulting on your currency is like a divorce: once is a mistake, twice is a trend, and by the third time….maybe, just maybe, it’s you. The French decided to be sneaky, and took all of their dollars, showed up at the bank, probably with a baguette under each arm, and requested gold. The United States essentially said, “Umm, we didn’t think that you thought we were serious about that. OMG, LOL!” and stopped giving anyone gold in exchange for their dollar. My scoring: yet another default.

Since August 15, 1971, the United States dollar is backed by our sterling record of fiscal responsibility, along with thousands of nuclear warheads. As Pop Wilder always used to say, “You get farther with a kind word and a sophisticated professional military and thousands of nuclear warheads than you do with just a kind word.”

I would my own discovery, the John Wilder Rule of Sexy Economics™: “You get more attention with bikini girl economics graphs than with just economics graphs.”

As careful study of this graph will show, the glorious years of 1970 led to the bare times to follow and a sensitive employment time in the early 1980’s. Unemployment never looked so good.

So, that’s a little bit about money along with some recent history. Looking at all of history, though, I’d say what happens with money depends upon the kind of collapse we expect to see. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll break collapses into three sizes. Why these three sizes? As of the time of writing I’m a bit thirsty, and the local convenience store only has three drink sizes. Here they are:

Medium: The definition of a Medium failure includes monetary easing. It could also include a default that may cause economic hardship, but doesn’t impact the government of the country or the ability of a country to issue its own currency. This describes all of the defaults of the United States.
Large: This involves the complete destruction of a currency. Common examples are Weimar Germany or modern-day Wakanda© In both cases, the currency imploded as the major engineering problem of the day was how to print more money, faster (hint: the Germans only printed on one side to double press production). In Germany, the change led complete dissolution of society and a rebuilding under . . . well, Literally That One Guy Nobody Can Mention. In Zimbabwe, it led to complete destruction of the currency and eventual loss of power for the guy who had been President for as long as Zimbabwe had been Zimbabwe.
Big Gulp®: This is the complete destruction of the economic as well as political system. Rome, long laboring under a fiat currency, finally imploded and left behind a smoking crater that took hundreds of years to fill. Thankfully, refills are only $0.29 with purchase of the official mug!

So what happens to an individual in one of these failures?

In a Medium Failure, you can keep your currency, if you like it, but what cost $100 a few years ago probably costs $1000 now. Everybody adapts and you can generally go about your business, but you’re poorer and not at all happy, and it looks a lot like the Housing Bubble of the 2000’s. Another analogy: it’s like you were forced to spend way too much time with my ex-wife.

The Housing Bubble can be seen pretty clearly here. Somewhere. Keep looking. You have my permission.

In a Large Failure, ultimately the currency is toast. Your money is gone. But the country will restart the economy using either a new currency, or just by adopting an outside currency that’s moderated by someone marginally more adult than you. Zimbabwe’s unofficial currency is the United States dollar, but there aren’t enough of them to go around, so many people use mobile currency that’s (more or less) run by cell phone companies. When your cell phone company has a much better record of fiscal restraint than your government? Yikes.

A Big Gulp© Failure is social collapse. The biggest one in recent Western history is Rome. The Roman Big Gulp® was so big that it spawned collapse after collapse in nation after nation as Rome shrank away from areas it could no longer afford to protect or govern. Great Britain is an example of the collapse. After the last Roman Legion left people buried their money . . . and never dug it up. Why?

The silver content of Roman coins in the late Empire consisted of waving a bit of silver over the top of the molten metal before a coin was made. Rome had gone full fiat. Roman coins, in the absence of Roman troops, were worthless. Money itself was abandoned, and barter was the key, when local bandits and warlords didn’t just take what they wanted.

You want a worthless currency? This is how you get a worthless currency..

How do we get to these collapses, and how likely are they?

Medium Failure: I think that there may be as high as a 70%-90% chance of a Medium Failure hitting the United States in the lifetime of the average reader. The challenges we will face with medical care (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck) and the possibility that the politicians won’t resist the lure of free money promised by Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Read the articles at the link. They were written by a cool guy I know, but before he really focused on getting better.

As a reminder of how close this might be to happening, a penny costs about $0.02 to make, so to get your two cents worth only costs a penny now, and that’s after they took out all the copper. The copper alone in an old (pre-1979) penny is nearly $0.02. It would cost about $0.04 to make a copper penny today. A nickel costs $0.06 to $0.08 to make. A dollar in pre-1964 silver coins is worth $10.60 at the time of this writing, which tells you that we’ve really already failed at keeping the value of our money up.

Ricky points out some interesting alternatives to currency in some of the supporting links he sent. Just like Zimbabwe leaned on cell phone providers to be less insane and more trustworthy than the government, Facebook® is betting that its new currency, named the libra (LINK) will be less insane than the dollar, and has the added bonus of having the word “bra” as part of its name. Honestly, I would have thought that Facebook™ would have denominated its currency in selfies and named it the lookatme.

Student loan debt makes you feel like you can’t afford much clothing, and you’re between a rock and a hard place. And very fit and tan and covered with oil.

Large Failure: Large failures are big. I mean, it’s in the name “Large.” It generally comes after really horrible financial malfeasance for years. Our current medical payment system (which is really bad) will, if not fixed, lead to a large failure. Other notable large failures? The start and end of the Soviet Union. North Korea. Nationalist China. The country is still a country, and, with outside help and a new government, can, after a generation emerge from chaos.

I think there’s as high as a 40-50% chance this will happen within the lives of the average reader.

Big Gulp© Failure: What would lead to a modern Big Gulp™-Level, end of Rome type event? Nuclear war. Running out of hydrocarbons. Meteor impact on George Clooney’s ego. Catastrophic disease. Reuniting the Spice Girls®. Regardless of the cause, I could easily see a failure of this magnitude ending 90% of the human lives on the planet.

Big Gulp® failures might last 1,000 years, since the last one lasted 500 years. That means, since the time of Christ, Western Civilization was in a Big Gulp™ failure for 25% of the time. Still – it only happened once. I’d give a likelihood of 5-10% of this occurring within the lifespan of the average reader. Pray some of the Spice Girls© have bad tickers.

Okay, these aren’t the Spice Girls™, but their ascending height from left to right is the perfect way to show that whatever lines are on this graph are going up from left to right. I assume the thing going up is bad.

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

Gasoline is priced in goats.
Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
$100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

So, Ricky, there it is, Part I and Part II. See you in Stockholm to pick up our Nobel Prize™!

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.” – Anchorman

With apologies to Gary Larson, in my defense there are only so many John Brown jokes out there.

Way back in 1998, I ended up with one of the neatest jobs that I had – assessing risks to a major corporation. The Internet was new at work, and I was being paid to research potential disasters. It was so interesting and so much fun I felt guilty. In researching disasters and risk, I came across Y2K. For those that don’t remember, there was a concern that, as a result of programmers only using two digits to store year information in computers, that many computers and computer programs would cease to function when the calendar flipped over to 00.

There were multiple websites and personalities that were writing about Y2K, and one that I went to from time to time was Cory Hamasaki’s Y2K Weather Report. Hamasaki was a programmer (he has since passed away) and he had an inside perspective of the ongoing work that was required to keep the systems working. As a result of his insider knowledge he bought an AR, a lot of food, and spent New Year’s Eve at his remote cabin.

Obviously, the systems kept working.

Not my original. And I’m sorry.

We live, however, in spicy times, with the potential for them becoming even spicier (I got the Spicy Time meme from Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), which really should be on your daily reading list). I’ve written several articles about the potential for Civil War, and studied and thought quite a bit about it. As such, this is the inaugural edition of John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report. I anticipate putting it out monthly. This first issue will probably be a bit longer than later issues, since I’m putting the framework together and explaining the background.

I’m attempting to put together a framework that measures where we are on the continuum between peace and war. I’ll even try to develop some sort of measures that show if the level of danger is increasing or decreasing. Civil wars don’t happen all at once, and like a strong storm, they require the atmosphere to be right. A weather report is probably a good metaphor.

If you haven’t seen it, the guy with the trident was the weatherman in Anchorman. And when he has a trident? People die.

So, to review the future, let’s start by looking at Civil War I so we understand what happened, and what the potential differences are.

Civil War I was:

Based on philosophical differences – the views of the people, North and South were pretty similar, except that the Northerners were descended from Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and the Southerners were descended from the Norman conquerors that took England in 1066 but got booted out after having lost a war in England. Although the North and South were the same people, more or less, with the same heritage, there were enough differences to lead to a war. And it was a doozy.