Silly Predictions – Page 20 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: 56 Days To The Last Election Ever In The United States

“It appears we will be required to ignite the midnight petroleum, sir.” – ST: TNG

It’s all fun and games until it hits midnight. And we’re getting pretty close.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock. Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue: Front Matter – What Is A Civil War? – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 56 Days Until The Last Election – Links

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

What Is A Civil War?

Multiple comments that I’ve had, both in the comment section at the blog, as well as in email and even text message asked the question – what happens to the index this month. The answer is that we’re still at a 9 out of 10. The only thing remaining to take us to a 10 is a body count. That’s because I’m using this (admittedly academic definition by Doyle and Sambanis in 2000) as my definition for the existence of a civil war:

The war has caused more than 1,000 battle deaths. This war hasn’t yet done so. Is 1,000 an aribitrary number? This is the only criteria not yet met.
The war represents a challenge to the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state. I think it’s clear that Antifa® and BLM™ want nothing less than the dismantling of the existing state and construction of a Marxist Utopia©. The fact that they are aided and abetted by fellow travelers in district attorney offices, mayoral offices, and congressional offices doesn’t mean that they aren’t communist revolutionaries fighting against freedom from the inside.
The war occurs within the recognized boundary of that state. This is an easy one.
The war involves the state as one of the principal combatants. One of. Not the only one. Ask a policeman in Portland if they feel that they’re in control.
The rebels are able to mount an organized military opposition to the state and to inflict significant casualties on the state. It states casualties, not deaths. And that also makes this an easy one to check off. Organization discussion is directly below in the Violence And Censorship Update.

I list all of the five criteria for a simple reason – to show that the only thing between us right now and a full blown, internationally recognized definition of civil war is the number of body bags we have yet to fill. When I started this update last year, I was expecting things to move faster than you expected. I did not expect things to move faster than I expected.

They have.

Violence And Censorship Update

Violence this month is obvious. The killings have started. Outside of the increasing violence tied directly to police standing down because they have no support which I talked about last month, bullets are now flying in the “mostly peaceful” protests.

Outside of the CHAZ murders, where two teenagers were killed, much of the violence has been peripheral. I moved the index up to nine out of ten when killings became commonplace. As near as I can tell, the killings directly associated with the Antifa™ and BLM® action is probably somewhere short of 100.

But two of those deaths are deaths that Antifa© cannot abide. In Kenosha, I wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse’s clear self-defense shooting against both a pedophile and a wife beater, and alleged self-defense shooting against a person who was (by the film I saw) drawing down on him. You can read it here – reviews say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’d suggest my signature on my divorce papers from my first wife was better (Have The Kenosha Riots Given The Right Our Rosa Parks?).

From my vantage point, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero. But Antifa™ cannot let that stand. At all. It’s my estimate that out of rage, the killing in Portland as well as the attempted murder by car in Portland were “revenge” hits on people wearing paraphernalia of the Right. If you read reports that break down the killing (HERE) and other experiences (HERE) in Portland, it becomes clear that Antifa® is using military discipline, and is broken up into a military command structure. (H/T to Vox Day (LINK) and Mike at Cold Fury (LINK))

Antifa™ is a dedicated group. They have undergone a brainwashing and are a religious cult – no Jim Jones Kool-Aid® drinking cultist could compete. I wrote about that here (Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?), and stand by it. Antifa® and BLM© stand against everything that has made America wonderful, rich, and prosperous. And they are fanatics.

I’m not sure if you know what they have in mind for people that don’t agree with them. It isn’t pleasant. The idea is that there is a pure society coming, and the way to get to that new society is to eliminate everything that doesn’t fit. Which almost certainly includes you. But don’t worry – they want to torture people to death to show the remaining people how wonderful the future communist utopia will be. See? You serve a purpose in their minds.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II. Let’s go to the graphs. In general, I’ve used bikini graphs in the past. Given where we are, I’m a bit more somber. Here are the graphs, without bikinis.

Violence:

Up is more violent. June pegged the scale of violence. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. It’s lower again this month despite clear assassinations by the Left. Does that mean it’s less violent this month? Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence. Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking. That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is down, slightly. I expect September and October to be down more, since voting generally has a calming effect and all emotions are focused there. After that? All bets are off.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, are down slightly. Again, we’re nowhere near the bottom. I expect that to drop off in October. Maybe to historic levels. But I could be wrong?

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Oops! This metric is now nearly at the highest it’s been in years. As the Wuflu® hits Mexico, the Mexicans are deciding to head north again.

56 Days Until The Last Election

I firmly believe the United States has had stolen elections in the past. But the nice thing about the Electoral College is? It makes it really, really hard to steal an election. Impossible? No. Hard? Yes.

Every single person in every graveyard in Chicago, California, and Queens can vote for a Democrat, and it doesn’t matter. The Electoral College adds legitimacy to an election by breaking corruption at the state lines. That’s one reason the Left hates it. It makes elections hard to steal. In my state, my vote doesn’t really matter – my state will go for Trump even if every person in every grave, ever, votes Democrat.

Mail-in voting changes all of that.

Yes, this was one of my favorite original memes that I created, but a new version. Still valid.

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

It’s hard to cheat in a Red State. You have to steal zillions of counties. It’s easy to cheat in a Blue State – you just have to cheat in the big cities. If everyone in Chicago voted Trump, Illinois would still go 60% for whatever Democrat was opposing him. But with mail-in voting?

Examples I have seen show the party on the outside of the envelope. How hard would it be to casually “lose” a few thousand votes from envelopes that had a big, fat, R on the outside? Or a few thousand from precincts that consistently vote Right? Not hard at all. This is on top of demonstrated voter fraud in Left cities where poll workers were caught on camera dumping ballot after ballot into the box on election day.

If mail-in voting passes? We’ve had our last election day. From now on? It’s selection day – selection of the candidate that the Left wants.

Thanks to the innovation of mail-in voting, you don’t even have to bring the corpses to the polls! What else will modern technology come up with?

In a further, ominous sign, the Media® has been setting up the idea that Trump will win on election night in a convincing manner, but will lose as the mail-in ballots are counted. This is particularly horrific.

If you knew which six counties you needed in close states, could you game the Electoral College? Absolutely. You could have boxes of ballots pre-staged in Philadelphia, or Milwaukee, or Cleveland to flip the results. Simple. Want Florida to turn blue? Just found a box with 25,475 Biden votes in Miami.

Don’t think the Left wouldn’t try it. They would do anything to win the election, since they’re contemplating electing a person who couldn’t navigate a corn maze with more than two stalks standing.

If mail-in voting is made the law of the land? Expect that this is the final election, ever, that won’t be a simple selection of the candidate that best fits the desire of the Left. Sure, there will be some token people on the Right elected, but they’ll mainly be people who believe in real conservative values, like only allowing 1,000,000 illegals in a year, and only allowing 7,000,000 people a year in on H1B visas, and restricting anything but a muzzle loading black powder rifle, like our founders intended.

Oh, wait, conservatives have conserved nothing! They just pick the values from the Left from ten or twenty years ago, and defend those until the death.

LINKS

That’s a bad ending to a video game . . .

All are from Ricky:

MSM message: alt-Right continues the march to civil war….

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1316052/proud-boys-group-brawl-antifa-protests-kalamazoo-michigan/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1354432/portland-brawl-breaks-out-proud-boys-antifa-fight/

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/09/03/schmidt-trump-supporters-want-to-see-a-second-civil-war-in-this-country/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-incite-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/americans-sense-something-is-wrong-gun-sales-up-72_08272020

…a challenge that must be met with force…

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/08/18/berkeley-columnist-calls-for-violent-resistance/

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/08/12/this-war-cant-be-civil/

http://thesaker.is/will-hillary-and-the-dems-get-the-civil-war-they-are-trying-to-provoke/

…for abstract justice…

https://theweek.com/articles/931090/are-bread-riots-coming-america

https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/black-lives-matter-organizer-calls-chicago-looting-reparation/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

…and with concrete action…

https://summit.news/2020/08/14/black-lives-matter-mob-demands-white-people-give-up-their-homes/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-blm-protesters-shot-homeowners-while-marching-through-rural-pennsylvania-town

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/battle-zones-america/

This revolution WILL be televised, as documentaries…

https://theduran.com/steven-turley-new-civil-war-being-fought-on-three-fronts-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-is-here-part-i-the-combatants-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-part-ii-strategy-of-the-blues-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-civil-war-part-iii-update-dr-steve-turley-largely-confirms-video/

https://theduran.com/the-utopia-of-democrat-activism-video/

…an unending stream of gripping short-attention-span clips from the front lines…

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1300955946521432064

(Scroll here for more video gems:) https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/

….and an explosion of editorials…

https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/02/rowland-civil-war-real-possibility/5690696002/

https://themichiganstar.com/2020/08/28/commentary-in-kenosha-the-seeds-of-civil-war/

https://greensboro.com/rockingham_now/opinion/ending-the-civil-war/article_a2f83f72-eaef-11ea-88b4-e7bcbc8a60ec.html

https://signalscv.com/2020/09/jonathan-kraut-an-undeclared-civil-war-in-america/

https://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/singer-promoting-a-new-civil-war-in-america/article_399450b1-7aee-5a47-abd1-8555b616d0cf.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/portland-killing-trump-caravan-civil-war-20200830.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/kenosha-trump-kyle-rittenhouse-portland-antifa-20200901.html

https://www.newspressnow.com/opinion/editorials/stop-a-civil-war-before-it-starts/article_57576526-e7d3-11ea-a6c0-f31f4893dc90.html

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/08/20/thursdays-headlines-armed-for-the-civil-war-edition/

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://www.independent.com/2020/06/14/an-american-civil-war/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-kenosha-wisconsin-unrest-violence-shooting-20200826-m3e7zcqg7faxxou2xhqywmsobe-story.html

And as one (now-dead) Antifa guard claims to have fired the latest shot heard ’round the world…

https://www.insider.com/portland-shooting-suspect-said-saw-civil-war-coming-2020-9

…a newspaper founded during the last Civil War won’t be around to cover any new one…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/09/04/trump-and-stars-and-stripes-attacking-american-icon-column/5706859002/

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget

I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed. I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.

By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change. Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair. Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light. Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks. The economy was being motorized. Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses. That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved. I mean, too many horses for the barns? That’s un-stable.

But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?

Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?

Produce more. Which drives prices down. Which leads to . . .

Deflationary depression.

It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.

I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers. The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality. The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.

Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches. The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.

The flip side of that is business failure. I originally wrote that was the down side. It’s not. Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail. Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy. 2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19. It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border. No one will cross the Finnish line.

The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.

That’s not normal, of course. Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states. In Modern Mayberry? Not so much. But in San Francisco? You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi. I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people. St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can. Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.

In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy. The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®. Thank Heavens. But in these times of artificial economic crisis? Good, strong businesses fail.

Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us. Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant. The only real question is what happens next.

One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.

I’ve posted about possible good investments in the past – if I were betting, I’d bet that gold in ten years would be a better bet than Netflix® or Tesla™, even if Tesla© starts its own religion, and builds Elon Mosques. But who knows what the economy will even look like after this crisis? I can’t guarantee any of it.

I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars. They call it E-lawn.

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

Time is potentially quite short. How should you invest your time? In yourself.

There are so many skills that are required of a human. PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.

The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental. In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences. Air conditioning when it’s hot. Central heat when it’s cold. Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky. Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.

What happens when you don’t have those things for a day? A week? A month? When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.

But still, these things are possible.

Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened? What would you do? I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?

After the mind, invest in your body. If you’re out of shape, get in better shape. Anything will help. Get out and run. If you can’t run, walk. Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest. I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.

Hmmm. Maybe I need some work, too.

I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year. I had asked for a heavy sweater.

What other ways can you invest in yourself? There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings. Can you do basic medical care? I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound? Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two? Iodine? All of that is cheap and available now. Will it be in six months?

The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day. I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds. What kind of books do you keep?

Can you garden? Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes. I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too. Her gardening knowledge is better than mine. It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes. There’s a whole Internet. Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.

This isn’t a bad time for a hobby. What kind of hobby?

Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
Carpentry, with and without electricity.
Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?

I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them. Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.

Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends. Plus? It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.

Yuri Bezmenov’s 1980’s Prediction of 2020

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

Video games never made me want to hurt people. Working with people did that.

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the West in the 1970’s. Bezmenov told everything he knew to the CIA, and was set up in Canada. He did several interviews which are available on YouTube®, which I’ll link to in a bit. Most recently, Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War™ brought Bezmenov back into the public consciousness by cutting in clips of his interviews in.

You can watch it below. It’s only a minute or so.

During interviews, Bezmenov made the quote that only 15% of the KGB’s activity was tied to James Bond® stuff. Their primary goal wasn’t to find out which parts of an F-15E jet fighter were made out of titanium and which parts were made out of paper-mâché.

Matching the United States in weapons systems was important, but it wasn’t number one. Besides, the KGB generally had a spy class of ideological communists built into numerous classified projects. Bezmenov said that 85% of the KGB’s efforts were spent in destroying culture in the West.

Why fight an actual war, if you can get your enemy to become you?

Bezmenov even set out the mechanisms that they were in the process of using. It wasn’t a complicated process, and it was just four steps. They called this process, “active measures” and it was nothing less than subverting the ideology that made America great.

The first step was Demoralization.

Demoralization is based around removing the moral framework of the country you’re attacking. The easiest way to do this is to co-opt the education system. Bezmenov said that this took 15-20 years, but his number was low. First, the educational institutions needed to be captured. The people who train the teachers, the people who are the “guiding lights” in educational theory must buy into Marxism.

I don’t have a direct measure of the ratio of Leftist to Rightist in those that teach education, but I’d imagine it’s no less than journalism, which is at 20:1. It may exceed history, which is 33.5:1. Regardless, the educational academy is now firmly in the hands of the Left. This leads to the production of teachers in a Leftist pedagogy (fancy word for teaching), with bad Leftist theory sometimes even enshrined into law. No Child Left Behind? Yes, that was bad. Common Core appears to be worse. Here’s one example:

Yes, this is really what they tried to teach little kids. From the Heartland Institute.

I have to wonder if the idea is that such simple things like addition and subtraction can be made so complicated that parents won’t be able to teach them to their children. In essence, it’s a way to further sever the ties between parent and child, while strengthening the ties between child and state educator.

Certainly, not all educators are Leftists. Here in Modern Mayberry, there are a few, but I think we likely have a more healthy balance. But there are those who look at the remote classes from COVID-19® as a potential threat to their attempts to indoctrinate children:

Is Demoralization 100% complete? Not as long as we have those pesky parents standing up for the customs, culture, ideas, and values of the West. Is it complete enough to take over society?

Maybe.

The goal of Demoralization is a lot of what we see now on the streets of Portland or Seattle or any other major Leftist city. Bezmenov described the end product of Demoralization as:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

In other words? Leftist robots.

Destabilization is the next step. This is the destruction of the systems that define the country. The economy. Social relations. Defensive systems.

In the last few months, the economy has been put into the most precarious state within living memory. The United States is more divided politically, ideologically, linguistically and ethnically than at any time in history. Naval vessels ram freighters. Senior officers are fired due to ideology. Women are brought into combat operations despite proof that their inclusion lowers fitness for mission.

Bezmenov said that Destabilization took two to five years.

Destabilization leads to Crisis. Crisis in this system is necessary to get people to accept a new government, new systems, and to give up the old system. There’s been a great deal of experience in creating Crisis by the Left. Think the Color Revolutions that have taken place all over the world, from Georgia to Ukraine to Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

What does Crisis look like in the United States? How about open violence encouraged by receptive District Attorneys that refuse to prosecute? Does it look like the dollar losing 7% of its value in three months?

Crisis leads to promises by the Left. High minimum wages. Free healthcare. Guaranteed basic income from the government. “Equality” in housing, in education, in policing.

Are the promises real? Of course not. The promises are whatever it takes to get enough support for the Left so they can take control.

If we are not in the Crisis, you can certainly see it from here. Ideally, for the Left, Crisis leads to control, or Normalization.

Normalization is the end game. It’s consolidating the country under the Leftists. It’s the creation of new institutions. In the Soviet Union and in China, it consisted of killing farmers and replacing them with people from the cities and expecting these collective farms will feed the nation.

Of course, all of the Leftists burning Kenosha and Portland think that they’ll be the ones in charge. In the new Socialist Utopian States they’ll be the ones who will write poetry and conduct gender reeducation camps, right?

This poetry comes from Seattle, I believe. Plans are now in full view.

No. The reality is that they’ll be most likely to be put up against the wall and shot or sent to the convenient leisure gulags. Why? They will be disillusioned when the actual power structure emerges. The reality of every communist paradise in history is that the intellectuals are shot first, especially the intellectuals that are communist. Why?

Dissent is a thing of the past.

Here are Yuri Bezmenov’s ideas, in his own words:

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Life at Two Minutes To Midnight

“I can’t sugarcoat this. We’re at Threat Level: Midnight!” – The Office

If you eat a clock, know that it’s time consuming, and don’t go back for seconds.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock. Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue: Front Matter – Talking About Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Living Two Minutes To Midnight – Links

Talking About Divorce

I read an article once that said that couples that talk about getting a divorce are much more likely to get a divorce. Heck, when my ex-wife said she wanted a divorce on Valentine’s Day, I was surprised – I wasn’t planning on spending that much. But talking increasing the divorce risk – that made sense to me: every time you talk about an event, you tend to bring the event closer to becoming real.

How?

It’s not magic or a witch’s incantation, or at least I didn’t see my ex-wife doing incantations, though there was a smell of sulfur around midnight. It is simply that when people talk about divorce, they start imagining what it would be like. When divorce fantasy is better than marriage reality, the lawyers get called in.

But they stayed together because of the kid. Nobody wanted custody of him.

In a recent “war game” of different election scenarios, John “Spirit Cooking” Podesta played the role of Joe “stay in the basement until November” Biden. Crucially in the war game scenario where Biden lost, “Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states (California, Washington, Oregon) to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.”

Both sides are talking about divorce.

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence associated with the protests is now so common that stories that would have made national news four months ago are, at most, up for a single news cycle. “Peaceful” protester draws an AK on someone driving by and gets ventilated? Yawn. Two women (I guess) are frolicking on an interstate at night and get (inadvertently) mowed down by someone driving a car?

The Mayor insists that Chicago isn’t violent, noting that they’d only lost three school bus tailgunners this month.

It’s bad. In Chicago, 2,249 people have been shot this year as of July 29 (LINK), which is nearly 700 more than in all of 2019. At this rate, more people will be shot in just Chicago this year than during the entire Falkland Island War between Great Britain and Argentina. This is patent proof that black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter®, since deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of cops in all of 2019 were, according to USA Today™ (LINK) only . . . 25.

Unjustified use of police force is horrible. But . . . cops killing unarmed black people is nearly the smallest problem faced by black people in the United States. BLM©? It’s a lie.

Alcoa® and Planters Peanuts™ secretly rule the world. They call themselves the Aluminutty.

Censorship was up again this month. In focus was Qanon. I wrote about Q a long while back (QAnon, The Chans, and Other Cryptic Stuff), and haven’t kept too much up with that subject. But this month in another set of coordinated censorship Twitter® banned over 7,000 accounts that Tweeted™ about Qanon. YouTube® has deleted “tens of thousands” of videos and “hundreds” of channels that were about Q. Facebook© won’t be left out – they nuked a Qanon group with 200,000 members.

What about Qanon scares the mainstream?

Updated Civil War II Index

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II. Let’s go to the graphs. As is custom at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, the graphs are presented with girls in bikinis, because if civilization is collapsing what better time is there for bikini graphs?

Violence:

Up is more violent. June pegged the scale of violence. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. It’s lower this month. Does that mean it’s less violent this month? Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence. Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking. That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is down only slightly, which might seem weird, but the political system is still stable overall. I expect this to spike in the next two months, and may introduce a new measure based on the election as we get closer to November.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, but this month it’s up. The part of me that hopes, hopes we’re on a real upswing. The part of me that thinks says we’re nowhere near the bottom.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is near a five year low for this time of year.

Living Two Minutes To Midnight

Two minutes to midnight is a tough place for the United States to be sitting, and we’re here. The confluence of great events, economic, political, and social is upon us. It’s in these times of upheaval that systems collapse in complexity from a high level to a lower one. Highly complex society provides us nice things like video games and delivery of eyeglasses made in China in a week.

Societies of low complexity struggle to feed themselves and live in mud huts. Low complexity societies are always on the edge – a famine could mean real death due to starvation, not that the shake machine is broken at McDonalds® again so you have to go to Sonic™ if you want a shake.

In order to grab or consolidate political power, there are politicians that would gladly drop our standard of living to that of starving people in mud huts. Those that would support them imagine a world where they’ll be allowed to be artists and poets and philosophers and the mud huts will be left for those who oppose the new way of doing things.

Living in this time, I have one suggestion: be as prepared as you can be for nearly anything to happen. Understand that things you’ve taken for granted your entire life can change in a day. I never thought I’d live in a society where rioters could stop cars of peaceful citizens with impunity and the tacit approval of local and state governments, but here we are.

Things are moving fast. Be ready.

LINKS

These are from Ricky this month:

CW chatter continues….

https://www.startribune.com/are-we-ready-for-a-civil-war-lite/571920212/?refresh=true

https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/07/29/stephen-kessler-is-trump-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/

…with Republicans promoting a vote for Biden to stop a CW…

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/6568575-Candidates-View-Minnesota-trying-to-prevent-a-civil-war

https://time.com/5870475/never-trumpers-2020-election/

…and the Washington-Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine invoking Godwin’s Law to prevent a descent into Nazi-ism…

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/23/portland-fascism-trump-election/

…while the MSM maintains the threat is all Boogaloo Bois…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/american-boogaloo-meme-or-terrorist-movement/613843/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53269361

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/16/civil-war-20-the-boogaloo-movement-is-a-wake-up-call-for-america/#206ec67b71ab

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/28/conservative-armed-militias-protests-coronavirus/?arc404=true

…and not peaceful Antifa….

https://www.csis.org/analysis/who-are-antifa-and-are-they-threat

https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-329-since-1994-antifa-killed-none-2020-7

https://www.csis.org/analysis/tactics-and-targets-domestic-terrorists

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/30/anarchists-and-antifa-not-according-to-the-data/

…all an example of the ongoing propaganda war…

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2020/07/21/propaganda-rules-america/

https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-the-medias-insane-whitewashing-of-portlands-violence-2083324/

https://fee.org/articles/vandalism-is-violence-destructive-riots-are-not-just-property-damage/

…part of a different kind of civil war, with skirmishes over property lines, not state lines; families, not soldiers….

https://ammo.com/articles/war-on-suburbs-how-hud-housing-policies-became-weapon-for-social-change

https://mises.org/wire/why-marxist-organizations-blm-seek-dismantle-western-nuclear-family

…while real battles heat up….

https://apnews.com/1dd1bb39093a3691f4e78093787ab877

https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/how-seattle-chaz-got-chopped/

https://farleftwatch.com/antifa-militia-group-encourages-facebook-followers-to-shoot-federal-agents-in-the-face/

…as costs mount….

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/george-floyd-protests-expensive-civil-disturbance-us-history

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riots-designated-a-catastrophe-in-multiple-states-a-first-for-pcs/

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riot-losses-said-up-to-1bn-in-u-s-retentions-may-protect-reinsurance/

https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2020/07/06/298012.htm#:~:text=Rioting%20set%20off%20during%20protests,a%20single%20retailer%2C%20he%20said.

https://www.genre.com/knowledge/blog/riots-and-civil-commotion-disquieting-times-ahead-en.html

But What If You’re Wrong?

“What if you’re wrong, Evil? What if Dandridge is a vampire and he thinks you know it? Would you walk down that alley then?” – Fright Night

How many vampires are good at math? Can I count Dracula?

“Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in,” wrote Mark Twain.

Yet, so many people are certain that they can determine what good luck is with great certainty. As I get older, like Twain, I’m not sure that I can tell good luck from bad on any given day. So, I try to take it as it is. Rain? Good. We needed rain. Hot? Well, the air conditioning works. Snow? Great – it will kill the insects. A massive hail of arrows that blots out the Sun? Excellent. We can fight in the shade.

I came to this conclusion after one day when I looked backward at my life around the age of 32 – the things that I had hoped for – recognition, money, and a bountiful supply of PEZ® hadn’t made life better. The things I had tried to avoid – a near zero bank account, 16+ hour days as a single dad with a job, and life without a spouse made me a better man and made me think about the relationships between virtue, money, and meaning.

The time of plenty hadn’t made me better, but the time where I spent six months raising kids by myself before I had a spare $150 to buy a used Fender® and an amp at a pawn shop had. Huh? How could that be, especially when I got cheated on the guitar – “no strings attached” had a different meaning in that pawn shop.

I gave up and sold the guitar to a guy in town who doesn’t have any arms. I asked how he was going to play it, and he said, “By ear.”

It was then I decided that getting everything I wanted would have been the worst possible thing for me. Instead, getting a tougher life made me better. I was in my 20s when I had that revelation, and it has stayed with me. It also has led me to always ask myself:

What if I’m wrong?

Not wrong. But really, really wrong?

In some sense, people might call this indecision, like I don’t know what I want. I mean, indecision was when I couldn’t decide between churros and sopapillas for desert, which caught me off guard – no one expects Spanish Indecision. But this is different. I call this humility. I might have a clear sense of what I want, but have no real idea what is good for me. Call it the Twain Zone.

It leads to some interesting thought experiments – what if the exact opposite of what I’m expecting happens?

Historically, I can give numerous examples of surprises that “no one” was expecting – where nearly everyone was wrong.

The U.S.S.R. looked strong and invulnerable in 1985. Rocky IV and Red Dawn reflected the public mood that the Soviets just might win. By 1987, cracks were showing, by 1989 areas were in open rebellion, and by 1991 the U.S.S.R. voted itself out of existence on December 26. That’s a shame. I heard that Soviet bread was so good that people would wait in line all day for a single piece.
Stock prices have reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Irving Fisher, Yale economist, on October 10, 1929. October 24, 1929 was Black Thursday, where the market lost 11% in a single day. Oops. I will say that COVID-19 makes it feel like 1929 – the stock market is tanked and the bars are closed.
On August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned, less than two years after crushing his opponent George McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College, winning every state but Massachusetts, where the penalty for drunk driving is re-election to the Senate.

Spoiler alert: Nixon’s decorating crimes would not stand. He resigned office and quit eating spaghetti on the same day – it’s all in the pasta now.

In a financial sense, I think everyone reading this post knows that something is horribly wrong with both the currency and the stock market. The old line attributed to Gary Shilling rings true, however: “The market can remain irrational much longer than I can remain solvent.” Just because you or I might have seen that real estate was overvalued in 2006, doesn’t mean that the market did. Irrationality can persist longer than logic, especially when everyone says, “Real estate? It never goes down.”

Okay, John, you’ve convinced me. Now what?

Well, that’s up to you. I can’t judge your situation unless you send me a few goats, some silver, and a throwout bearing for a 1973 GMC pickup. But what I was hoping is that you’d look yourself and ask a few questions:

If you think that we’ll have unending prosperity and no shortages, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that the riots in (INSERT YOUR CITY HERE) won’t reach your neighborhood, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that things can’t get better than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that things can’t get worse than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that the stock market can’t go up, what if you’re wrong?

I was also wrong about my chiropractor. I stand corrected.

The situation that the United States enjoyed from 1945 until recently was the most prosperous in (perhaps) the history of the world so far. A good weather forecaster’s most accurate forecast is to say that tomorrow will be like today, obtuse (as in greater than 90 degrees). Until it isn’t. The hot spring day is followed up by the tornado – the winter storm strikes furiously from the north.

So, not knowing where the wind is coming from, I’m okay with it. Hot today? I’m fine. Cold tomorrow? Great. Hurricanes? Wonderful, let’s get to sea in our shrimp boat.

I guess the reason I’m so agreeable when the conditions of the world would indicate that I should be grumpy is that I’ve seen one thing again and again: when I try to divine the future from my current situation, my track record is horrible, since the returns aren’t yet all in.

Okay, I looked it up and the blue stuff is either water or alcohol. Either way I wouldn’t drink it, since if it’s methanol, you won’t see what hit you.

So, evaluate where you are, ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” and live a life worth living. I don’t get to choose all of the events in my life, but I certainly can choose how I react.

Unless I’m wrong about that.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Year Down The Road

Count de Monet: “It is said that the people are revolting.”
King Louis XVI: “You said it! They stink on ice.”
–History of the World, Part I

When I copy in these big clocks into my posts, it’s a huge paste of time.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight. I didn’t move to step 9. last month because last month, violence was just happening. This month? Violence is being commonly justified by local and state authorities. When protesters a mob tore down a gate to access private property in St. Louis, which set the stage. When the Modern Sporting Lawyer™ and his wife pulled out firearms to protect themselves, the sane world cheered.

Yes, I recycled this one. Couldn’t resist.

That’s why a District Attorney vowed to find something, anything to charge this couple with. The one thing the mob cannot stand is decent, armed people standing up to the mob. The politicians have made the mob and know that it must be fed.

The fact that CHAZ/CHOP was allowed to exist, with the rampant lawlessness of the mob in charge for weeks was another sign. We are very, very close to open warfare.

I stole the clock metaphor from the (Leftist) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists©. It’s a good metaphor, because it creates an immediacy. And I can and will go backwards if events justify it, though at this point it seems like no one wants to go backwards.

In this issue: Front Matter – A Year Down The Road – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

A Year Down The Road

I started the Weather Reports a little over a year ago because I could see the changes coming faster and faster. I’ve been concerned about the economy since I read The Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) back around the year 2000. When you look at all of the trends – social, economic, political – I could see trouble on the horizon. If you want some in-depth thought on how The Fourth Turning is progressing, Jim over at The Burning Platform (LINK) is your man.

The 2007 housing price collapse wasn’t a surprise to me. When I bought my house, I was (fortunately) in the position to negotiate with my employer that they’d cover any loss on sale if I moved for them. As house prices were going up, up, up . . . they agreed. And why not? It wouldn’t cost them a dime.

It did. My house dropped 20% in price between when I bought it and when it finally sold two years after I moved out. I don’t give myself genius points for this, but when they offered me a loan that was nearly ten times my salary? With no income verification?

Yikes.

The tensions we face aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re not anywhere near their peak. Those same social, economic, and political factors have gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years.

Is anything out of the question?

Will one more year down the road have as much change as we have seen in the last year?

Why wouldn’t it?

Are you ready for that?

Violence and Censorship Update

In the previous posts, it has been either violence or censorship that’s shown up in a month. This month? We get both. I’ll start with censorship.

What’s out? Statues. Toppling statues is censorship – censorship of the past. George Orwell described it well in his book, 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”

No bit of American history is safe, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt to “American Pioneers”, Spanish explorers, and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yup. All have to go. And not by vote, not by decision, but by the raw power of the mob.

An episode of the British television classic Fawlty Towers has been removed because of offensive language, and the wind has done gone with Gone With The Wind, which had to be shuttered “temporarily” so that (pulls answer from hat) people won’t be offended.

So, history has been judged to be insufficiently woke.

Right now the media is so woke, it’s like they took NoDoze® with coffee and meth to get ready for their Gender Studies final.

YouTube® just concluded its next round of purges. Dozens of large channels with millions of views are now gone. The biggest personality banned was Stefan Molyneaux, philosopher and badthinker. His crime? Not sure. People think it’s because he has had guests (scientists) on in the past that indicate that there might be group differences in cognitive ability. Oops – can’t discuss that idea in 2020.

Among other channels that YouTube® suggested for me and that I listened to from time to time was The Iconoclast, a British guy on the Right who advocated for lower immigration into Great Britain. Now? Gone. Plus? A major newspaper published a story on The Iconoclast’s identity. In 2020, having the wrong views means going without a job.

But that’s not violence, right?

On Reddit®, I heard that over 2000 subreddits were banned. I had been to several of the banned subreddits in the past, and was a bit surprised. One of them, r/consoomers was specifically set up for self-improvement and rejection of globalist commercialism. A little politically incorrect?

Yup.

Now gone. Another dead subreddit is r/The_Donald. It’s crime? Can’t be sure. I think it was too popular, with over a million subscribers. And a group of a million people who like Donald Trump? Triggered!

Reddit™ made rule changes as well. They initially rolled out this new rule for commenting:

“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority….”

After someone got on Wikipedia and figured out that, for instance, men are in the minority since there are more women in the world, the rule on protecting people from hate wouldn’t apply to people who were misogynist. Oops. They changed that rule.

But it sure showed what they were intending.

This is the biggest month of censorship against the Right in, well, ever. I expect it to get worse. The idea that Donald Trump could be re-elected is mind poison for the Left. Leftist fetishize politics as a religion – Trump is the ultimate demon. They will do everything and anything so that he isn’t re-elected.

Share this meme and help a Leftist lose sleep so they can stay woke.

I’d spend more time updating you on the violence of the past month, but it’s probably easier to update you on the places that weren’t violent. Modern Mayberry was one. Here, we watch the news and see the world falling apart, and it’s like there’s another country out there.

There is. It’s just waiting to be born.

Updated Civil War II Index

June has been the worst month so far – economic, violence, and political instability are all in bad shape. It’s so bad that even the illegals don’t want to sneak across the border.

Violence:

Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement. I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June. I was almost right, and now June has pegged the scale. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. Yes, the Y-axis label shows 350, but that’s because I didn’t notice until I’d put the graph together and it’s 3AM.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall. I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December. I expect more instability heading into November, and may make some changes to the inputs next month.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again. I’m hoping this is the worst that we’ll see, but I expect a market crash this month (July) or next.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is at a five year low for this time of year.

LINKS

These are from Ricky this month:

Although the US Government has FINALLY stopped paying for the First Civil War…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/last-person-receive-civil-war-pension-dies-180975049/

…worries about the Second Civil War continue to build….

https://www.theday.com/article/20200616/OP04/200619472

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-avoid-second-american-civil-war-163096

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/345640-darren-aquino-says-its-time-to-pick-a-side-in-coming-civil-war

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/07/gun-background-checks-june-record/

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/boogaloo-gun-ammunition-marketing-facebook-instagram/

…which many think can be stopped just by not talking about it…

https://www.omaha.com/opinion/clarence-page-the-current-civil-war-is-fought-on-cultural-territory/article_1661faef-ef9d-5622-88d6-d3308d9fbb88.html

https://www.ocregister.com/2020/06/05/lets-knock-off-the-blithe-talk-of-a-coming-civil-war/

https://goducks.com/news/2020/6/26/general-uo-osu-series-no-longer-to-reference-civil-war.aspx

MSM says Antifa is not a national problem….

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/google-top-stories-featured-false-news-rumored-antifa-civil-war

https://prospect.org/civil-rights/antifa-all-around-trump-media-fox-news-fear-protests/

https://time.com/5008829/antifa-november-4-rumors/

…it’s the Boogaloo Bois that are the threat…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/style/boogaloo-hawaiian-shirt.html

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/boogaloo-boys-george-floyd-protests/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/boogaloo-movement-recent-violent-attacks/story?id=71295536

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/boogaloo-extremist-protests-invs/index.html

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/04/armed-white-men-milwaukee-protests-could-far-right-boogaloo/3147128001/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/19/what-is-boogaloo-movement/3204899001/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/16/civil-war-20-the-boogaloo-movement-is-a-wake-up-call-for-america/#3d9f1cb071ab

https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-america/boogaloo-boys-aim-provoke-2nd-us-civil-war

…but Facebook will save us….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53244339

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-profit-boogaloo-ads

https://www.inventiva.co.in/stories/priyadharshini/facebooks-boogaloo-ban-is-it-too-late/

…meanwhile, Small Town America simmers….

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/07/01/three-groups-plan-gather/

https://www.gazettenet.com/Sanger-letter-34596978

…and maybe there are investing strategies for the Civil War?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-07-03/trading-and-investing-americas-second-civil-war

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?

Deflation, Inflation, Collapse – Now With Muppet Jokes

“Well those are whole pennies, right? I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.” – Office Space

If being in the Federal Reserve® offices give you a cold, what should you do? Sudafed.

The Federal Reserve© is scared. And inflation is currently not on their list of Halloween boogiemen –the monster they fear is deflation. Well, deflation and accidentally mixing up Pride Month and Bulgarian History Month. I think the main reason that the Fed™ is worried about deflation is that then people become like me in 2000 when I was looking to buy a computer.

Every six months I waited, the computer I could buy for the same amount of money was much faster with more memory. Computers were really a deflationary item at the time as advances kept making them better and better on a nearly monthly basis. It made sense to wait, because I could get a better deal later.

For computers, that was okay – there was a solid market for them at the time, and Intel® wasn’t going to go out of business because its next chip was going to be faster next year. But if you apply that to the entire economy, then people would have been steering clear of the toilet paper aisle in February. Live and learn.

Deflation is great for consumers – they get more stuff for less money. Deflation also discourages debt – why borrow money when the dollar you’re borrowing will be worth less than the dollar you have to pay it back with?

But deflation in an economy slows everything down worse than a Kardashian trying to take a college entrance exam. Most economies in the world are built on endless growth. Part of the economic growth is required because more people enter the labor force every year. The other part is the system is built on growing income, growing revenues, growing the bottom line – stock prices are built (mostly) not on the intrinsic value of a company here and now, but on the value of the company in the future.

I hate stonks. Gentlemen prefer bonds.

I’ve written about deflation before, but it’s probably a good time to mention some of the clues coming from the financial system. But first, I have to explain that when a loan is paid back to the bank, money is actually destroyed. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’m a trained professional, and we’ll get there. And by trained, I mean trained as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. Okay, not trained – it was more of a wok-through.

Let’s start with a bank. In this case, my bank.

If I were to deposit $100 in my account, I have $100 in my account, right?

Kinda.

The bank now thinks it’s their money. It turns out that when you open a checking or savings account with a bank, you’re actually lending them money. The banks in the United States are actually what’s known as “fractional reserve banks” in that they only have to keep a portion (or fraction) of the money that I deposited on hand for people who come in and want cash.

Traditionally, that fraction has been around 10%. So, if I open an account with that $100 in it, the bank can lend $90 of that money out. The theory is that not everyone wants to come in and get their money back all at once, so you only have to keep that 10% on hand for people who want their money back on any given day for whatever purpose. It’s like stealing, but totally legal.

If too many people come in, the idea of the Federal Reserve™ (the Fed®) is that they’ll send the bank some cash if needed because tons of people borrow money all at once from the bank. That way if Lady Gaga is coming to Modern Mayberry and everyone decides to fork over $1000 a seat for VIP tickets to listen to her sing about her her her Poker Face, the Fed will give us extra cash. That’s why it’s called the Federal Reserve® – it’s a reserve for banks if they need cash because Lady Gaga is coming to town.

When you microwave a Muppet®, it will even countdown with the timer!

I didn’t want to go see Lady Gaga, so I still have my $100 in the bank. Therefore, my bank has loaned out $90 to Johnny Depp who was a little short for the show after buying some killer weed.

But I still think I have $100.

But the bank lent out $90.

And Johnny Depp puts his money in his account in another bank until it’s time to pay for the ticket. So, that bank now has Johnny Depp’s $90, and can immediately lend out $81 to someone else, who deposits it back in my bank.

Thus, my original $100 deposit now accounts for $171 in the economy.

As soon as the loans are paid back, the transaction unwinds and the actual amount of “money” in the system disappears. There’s a theoretical limit to the amount of money that can be created with a certain reserve rate.

But I said the Fed was scared. And I said it was scared of deflation.

My bank used to have to keep $10 in the vault in case I come back looking for my $100. Used to. As of March 15, 2020, that reserve that banks are required to keep is – drumroll please – zero. Yes. I’m not making that up. It’s right here on the Fed’s own website (LINK). The press release is here (LINK).

What this means is that banks have to keep enough cash around so if yokels like me want to withdraw $23.73 for a trip to buy some really nice earplugs the night of the Lady Gaga concert, the bank had to have that much actual cash. But now, the banks are free to loan all of it out. They could loan not $90 to Johnny Depp, but the full $100. And when he put it in his bank, they could loan out $100 as well.

In the 10% reserve, there was at least some limit to the money that the banks could create by lending the same $100. But at zero reserve? The number of times that $100 could be lent is only constrained by the number of people who want to borrow it. My original $100 could (in theory) create infinite dollars. That’s Congress level math!

My-my-my-Joker® face . . .

This means the Fed is worried about keeping banks lending, so they can keep the money supply up. The Fed also wants to keep the money moving – they want me to buy my Lady Gaga earplugs and the person I bought them from to buy some PEZ® from Wal-Mart® and Wal-Mart™ to pay that money to an employee who buys ice cream sandwiches. If people save their money, it’s nearly the same as there being less money in the economy.

That’s where the Plunge Protection Team comes in. People with 401k investments get scared when the stock market goes down. Stock market plunges are deflationary. Plus, they really hurt the investment banks, so the one thing we know about both Democrat and Republican? They both really want to make the investment bankers happy.

Wall Street crashing? Let’s have a series of well-timed purchases of stock to turn it around. Since you can look at the Fed’s balance sheet yourself, and compare it with the stock market, perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)® going up 500 points on a day when multiple large American cities are actively on fire. The Plunge Protection Team, it is rumored, buys (or has groups like Goldman-Sachs™ buy) stocks on multiple markets to keep a crash from happening.

I hate it when the Plunge Protection Team kneads my back while I’m sleeping.

The idea is that by keeping the stock market from crashing, the economy is saved. In one sense, that’s a logical conclusion. Falling stock markets have panic as the main feature – people literally are scared to death, so they sell even solid stocks at bargain prices. As a strategy, it’s a lot like buying a drunk guy another dozen shots of whiskey. The problem’s gone. At least for now.

But you can only game a system for so long. Eventually, the game playing will come back to haunt you. And the Fed may be scared of deflation right now, but all of the injection of money via loans and balance sheet inflation and stock market propping up? The system failures get bigger, and bigger. The old tools don’t work. And the system fails. This time for good in a spasm of deflation followed by inflation followed by currency collapse.

I know you’re worried about the investment bankers getting caught up in the deflation-inflation-collapse. Don’t be! Right now, they’re selling their stock after the plunge protection team bumps up the price and buying bunkers in Montana or old missile silos in Nebraska. Yay, free market capitalism!

I’m sure that it’s a coincidence.

I’m not saying that we’ve reached the point where we’ll see the financial systems fail with this cycle. It may not be this leg down. But like the Fed®, keep one eye open.

Deflation might be hiding under the bed.

Scott Adams, Debt, and Economic CPR

“Could be worse. Could be raining.” – Young Frankenstein

I heard Joe Biden was thinking of having a horse for a vice president, to make the economy stable.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert® and a close personal friend who I bonded with during the Olympic trials for rhythmic gymnastics. Okay, that’s not quite true. Scott’s a long-time acquaintance and we go to some of the same parties. Okay, that’s not quite true, either. Probably a more accurate statement is that I have quite a few of his books and he liked exactly two of my Tweets® back when I Twittered™ on a more regular basis.

The last one is actually true.

Anyway, Mr. Adams used to be a blogger, and had some interesting written posts over the years. Now, he spends more time doing a YouTube® show rather than blog (LINK). I listen to him a couple of times a month as I drive to work. I’d watch him, but the people on the sidewalk seem to mind. I guess I’m not as bad a driver as Helen Keller. But she had a real excuse, being a woman and all.

One comment I’ve heard Scott make at least twice during the COVIDanomic® crisis is that he’s optimistic about the economy restarting and taking right off. More or less he has said, “Unlike a war or some other catastrophe, everything we need for a successful economy is still sitting there. All we have to do is restart it.”

One thing I’ve enjoyed about Mr. Adams is that he’s incredibly perceptive, and the reason I listen to him is he’s a constant source of unique opinions. He was one of the first to pick Trump winning in 2016. Adams noticed the way Trump uses the language of persuasion and thought it would be the difference in the election. Me, I generally vote based on lawn signs, which is why I voted for my realtor last election.

Jeb was a pallbearer at his dad’s funeral, so he could let him down one final time.

Trump’s persuasion immediately frames and freezes the way people think about public figures. “Low energy Jeb (Bush),” and “Little Mike (Bloomberg)” were the verbal equivalents of public political homicide. Once Trump Tweeted® those phrases, ¡Jeb! and Little Mike could still campaign, but their chances of winning were the same as a belt made of watches – a waist of time.

So, when Mr. Adams speaks, I pay attention. New ideas are fairly rare and I like to steal mine while they’re fresh. As noted, many times he’s very perceptive in ways the news media forgot about being when they first caught Trump Derangement Syndrome. In this case, I think Scott is wrong. Everything may still be there, but you can no longer restart the economy to the previous levels than you could resuscitate Grover Cleveland by giving his corpse CPR. I mean, I can give CPR to a steak, but it still won’t moo.

Just like Grover Cleveland, everything is there, but putting him in a lawn chair and propping him up with a tropical cocktail (with umbrella) won’t really help. Everything’s there.

But it’s really not.

If only Grover Cleveland had Twitter®, I’m sure we’d still be laughing at the dank Benjamin Harrison memes.

Just like you can’t restart a heart after a few weeks of it sitting on the bedside table, you can’t restart an economy after months of it sitting dead in Coronapause©.

Let’s take the human body analogy a bit farther. A business is an organism. It consumes money and raw materials and produces goods and services as a byproduct. You could even call that byproduct a waste if it had anything to do with Kardashians. Companies eat metal and energy and use employee labor to pop out automobiles and beer and knee braces and fruitcake bloomers. And where would we be without fruitcake bloomers???

A lack of oxygen makes cells in your body die. No oxygen, no cells.

In business, a lack of money causes employees to die. Oops. They don’t die, they just don’t come in anymore, unless your business was in the Soviet Union, where ‘being terminated’ had an entirely different and completely Schwarzenegger-free meaning.

That lack of money for a business is called debt, and debt is what kills an economy. Just as weak people like The Mrs. complains that she needs a constant supply of oxygen after being stuck in the car with me after a week-long backpacking trip, debt is a mechanism to make sure that people and companies require a constant flow of money.

Why would a company be in debt?

Well, for small ones, the same reason that you or I would go into debt, namely because they don’t have the money to pay for everything up front. Debt can also provide money for the business to grow.

And moderate sized companies that you can buy on the stock market nearly have to be in debt. Without debt, a guy from New York would buy them out using the cash that the company had hanging around for a rainy day. They even have a name for this – a leveraged buyout (LBO). In an LBO, the person buying the company buys it with money that he borrowed against company he’s buying.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. An LBO is the same thing that happens when you sell your house. The person buying the house uses the house as the basis of the loan to buy the house from the owners.

And good news, it’s already several trillion higher than this!

But in the case of the company being bought out, the resulting company after the LBO is actually weaker and more likely to fail since it’s now saddled with debt. Just because you can borrow the money doesn’t mean you should borrow the money.

Giant sized companies don’t face this problem nobody but Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy his stake in Amazon®, plus he’d send his android double to come kill you if you tried to buy the company or made fun of his girlfriend. Apple® is similarly large, so they can have billions of dollars in cash on the books, too, but Apple™ doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yet.

The chain of death of a business in after WuFlu looks something like this:

Lockdowns stop businesses from being open, which
Stops the money coming to Employees so,
Employees stop buying, therefore
Businesses don’t have money.

Keep this cycle up for two months and in some cases you’ve used up more reserves than the business has. The result is either more debt, which the business still can’t pay because debt is the problem in the first place, or bankruptcy.

Well, TP is one problem that’s been wiped out.

The same cycle can be seen with landlords.

A dollar owed for rent isn’t owed to a random person,
It’s often owed to a person who has a mortgage against the property, and
If the rent isn’t paid, many times the landlord can’t pay his
But when the landlord can’t pay the mortgage, the bank isn’t paid.

If you’re worried about the bank, don’t. The old saying is that “Debt is always paid, either by the borrower, or the lender.” In the case of banks, there’s the three Fed Amigos: the Federal government, the Federal Reserve™, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The reason the FDIC was created was that banks failed faster and more frequently than FUNNY during the Great Depression. If people keep their money in Mason© jars in the backyard, it’s pretty hard for the other two Feds to track it, so they had to convince people the banks were safe.

They idea behind the FDIC is that if a bank goes bankrupt, the insurance will pay off the depositors. I was going to look up the total assets of the FDIC to see how big a crisis it could cover, but decided it was irrelevant. The Federal government (Treasury) or the Federal Reserve© or some group will simply print all of the money required to pay off the depositors.

I knew there was a reason that clowns scared me.

If my bank runs out of money? Well, the Fed will just lend them some. The FDIC is for amateur problems.

But lending money into a system where the primary problem is debt isn’t the solution, and it explains why things won’t just “start right up” after months where car sales are at 50% of last year, and airline flights are at 10% or less. The debt is the reason that the economy was able to fall so far, so fast. And you can’t loan more money to solve what is, at the core, a debt problem.

I do hope my close, personal friend Scott Adams is right. But I fear he’s wrong. But hey, we’ll always have those Olympic™ medals we won for rhythmic gymnastics.

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.