TEOTWAWKI – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” – Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie. Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog). In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them. His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time. I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years. That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me. From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl. I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it. Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years. This caused several related things to happen:

The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class. Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination. In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world. I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too. McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them. I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish. Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration. Which one? Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many. Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do. Keep this in mind: McDonald’s is now a luxury food. Are McDonald’s™ sales number up? Sure! Prices have doubled. But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters: P and A.

What’s the outcome? Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail. Examples abound:

Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains. Period. Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile? He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West. The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier. Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK). Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet. And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today. That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities. Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left. Why? Because being in a city is dependency. If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally. This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster? A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific. And where would they put all the street-poo? Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them. They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time. People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower. 98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country. Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads? Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors. Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it. They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection? God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols. She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller. It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are. This is not a fluke: John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this: in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities. Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not. There’s one other missing factor: religion.

Cities are more secular. It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day. Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man. Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work. I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff. In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular. However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular. There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population: they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from: it certainly won’t be San Francisco. And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it. We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Economic Doom? You’re Soaking In It.

“Two Purple Hearts – Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the president. You robbed the Federal Reserve Depository. Life sentence, New York Maximum Security Penitentiary. I’m ready to kick your ass out of the world, war hero.” – Escape From New York

Elon bought a coffee company and then made it a cryptocurrency. Yup, StarbuX®.

I’m a bit under the weather (sniffles). The good news is that some of the memetic content/graphs I found on the Internet about the current economy probably speak mostly for themselves. So, comments may be shorter than usual. I guess I’ll offer you this shorter post and an IOU for a longer one sometime in the future when I sober up get better.

First off – the dollar and gold used to have (depending on the era) a very similar volatility – at one point dollars were gold. What if the dollar was more volatile than gold, for the first time in 45 years??

Normally, longer term bond and notes have higher interest rates than shorter ones. The reason is uncertainty – if I was going to borrow money for thirty years, there’s more risk of crazy things happening, like Civil Wars or George Lucas selling Star Wars™ to Disney© in a thirty-year time span than in a three month time span. But when things get uncertain, that ration flips. If you look below, note that even a small inversion is a strong, strong signal of an impending recession. Well.

How bad has Biden been? Median mortgage payments (average selling price and current interest rates) are higher than Hunter Biden at a Burning Man®.

Homeowners aren’t the only ones paying huge interest payments. Here’s what’s happening on the national debt:

But it didn’t have to be that way. If someone remotely intelligent was in charge at Treasury, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Don’t know where this snip came from, but it’s spot on:

Janet should be managing a grade school lunch kitchen. How deep does the rot run in the Banking Industrial Complex? O’Keefe tells us tons with one of his people hacks:

Thankfully the Fed™ has infinite money to lend. Or, at least the balance sheet shows that. In this case, this shows the economy as needing three times as much cash injected into the system as in 2008 to prop it all up and keep everything from draining into the abyss. In this case, the big vertical line represents the Silicon Valley Bank© failure.

That happened because Silicon Valley Bank™ had a lot of low interest, long term assets. Let’s just say I’m happy with my 4% mortgage right now, since I actually lose money by paying it back, since I can get 5%+ from banks. Silicon Valley Bank© had lots of crappy, long positions, and exploded.

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

When that happened, I wrote (link above) that I really expected that the vibrations would shake the system into a bigger failure by that October – this stuff takes a while to propagate. Instead, the Fed pulled a very cunning move: it printed buttloads of cash, allowed the banks to deposit the crap they had with the Fed™ and then the Fed™ took the losses. Of course, since they haven’t sold the crap the banks gave them, those are “realized” yet, so those losses are like a girlfriend so ugly you make her hide in the closet when your friends come over.

In addition to that, the Fed© has also lost at least $161 billion, according to the Fed©. Total? A trillion? Who knows? It’s not like anyone’s counting.

Back in the Before Time, the Fed™ never bought the debt of the United States. Why would they? They debt of the United States was to Ma and Pa Citizen, central banks all around the world, and, (oddly) to the United States when it spent the Social Security funds on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Yup, the United States would spend the Social Security cash, and then write itself an IOU and put it (seriously!) into a filing cabinet in D.C.

Can you imagine a job that’s more futile? It’s like I wrote myself an IOU for stealing money from my kid’s college fund to buy beer, and then made my kid file the IOU, knowing full well that the file would experience “surprise combustion” in the backyard fire pit when I sobered up.

You really should be concerned. Unless you want to send me your cash so I can send you an IOU.

I promise I won’t blow it on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Thankfully, people are waking up to the scam:

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations. It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were? In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this? The book in question is A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results. (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me) After a bit, I finally found it.
On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor. Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all? Guess you’d better start picking favorites. In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why? The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever. Houses (if they even had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.” The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler: “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor. Great Britain was no exception. There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor. The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids. But the poor kids also die more often. This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy: the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up. Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close. It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows. Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life. And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless: marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft. Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft. And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors. It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down. It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK). To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy. So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.

Zoomers And Pools Of Cash

“The pools of blood that have collected, you’ve got to soak that up. Now, Jimmie, we need to raid your linen closet.” – Pulp Fiction

How do you drown a programmer? Put up a sign that says, “no swimming”.

If I were to come up with a metaphor for today’s situation, well, it might be this . . .

While I was half asleep this morning I visualized in that gauzy dreamy sort of way, dark pools, sitting quietly behind a large earthen structure. At first, the surfaces of the pools were smooth and reflective like glass as they slowly filled.

It was calm, and serene. For now. But the level was coming up.

What was the defining moment of my generation in our youth? Probably the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still remember the news stories piling up day by day as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations slowly turned away from communism and then someone said the Berlin Wall didn’t match the Iron Curtains, so, it had to go. What a time to be alive! Heck, women were still winning women’s swim meets!

If I were born a bit earlier, it would probably would have been the Iranian Hostage Crisis, or Carter’s Stagflation, both of which led to Reagan’s election and eventual conversion to MechaReagan®, who fought Godzilla® and Mothra™. But that’s another story.

Anyway, think about those defining moments, the defining events of Gen Z are still out there, and I wonder what that would be. In the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a story that, at the time, was filled with hope. Here was the collapse of a political system bent on the forceful subjugation of humanity. What’s not to celebrate?

What was the favorite song of East Germans before the Berlin Wall came down? “Under Prussia”

In the end, though, what was lost in that moment was restraint. Just like Gingrich restrained the worst (political!) impulses of Bill Clinton (“What, I can’t spend what I want to spend because of the way the bond market might react?”), the Soviet Union constrained the worst impulses of the people in power in Washington. That restraint really ended with Clinton who had to fight to save his political career after lying under oath about dallying with the help.

But after Clinton, after 9-11?

Bill Clinton will be remembered for the economy. Oh, and that one other thing . . . .

All restraint fell. Oh, sure, we needed to go and find Osama Bin Laden, but did we need to invade Iraq? In hindsight, almost certainly not. Did we need to stay in Afghanistan for 20 years? Again, almost certainly not. And these adventures cost trillions of dollars, all of which we didn’t have. But that’s okay. Cash isn’t for earning. It’s for spending. Like AOC said when asked where the money would come from for one of her socialist programs: “You just pay for it!”

She was, and is, serious about this, since her understanding of cause and effect is limited to her goldfish-like memory.

But those dark pools of my dreams, they were filling. And while they filled, they began to destabilize everyone tied to the United States. In Egypt, for instance, I think they eat nothing but rice, sawdust, and the occasional house pet, which is fairly inexpensive. So, a small change in the price of rice or a decrease in the availability of sawdust causes people, real people, to go hungry.

Does Biden look like he needs more fiber in his diet to you?

As Snickers® told us, “You’re not you when you’re hungry” and hungry people are the ones that overthrow Middle Eastern despots. But that’s okay. You just pay for it.

What does the Left think about all the illegal aliens that are teeming over the border in relentless streams? You just pay for them. And you have to. Even when we’re not stacking them like cordwood in Chicago or displacing vets to house them in New York or trying to teach them to ski in Colorado, there is one horrible fact about illegal aliens:

They cost more than they create. We can’t get a volume discount if we import them by the millions. No, they just cost billions more. The net annual value of an illegal to the economy is, at minimum, -$10,000 per year. NEGATIVE $10,000, and that’s after the work they provide.

I used to worry about the collapse of the United States because of the destruction of our nation’s values and economy by illegals, but that was too scary. Now I just worry about celebrities. (meme as found)

Where does the cash come from? If you’re AOC, “You just pay for them.”

And all that “you just pay for it” is what’s filling those dark pools of my dreams.

If all that cash would just sit, quietly, in those dark pools, there really isn’t a problem. If we pay Raytheon™ for a $4 million dollar Patriot® missile to destroy $20,000 Iranian drones, as long as Raytheon© just leaves that money in their bank account, filling up the pool.

But, oops, you have to pay people to make the missile. If it’s only the Chinese who keep the money in a bank account somewhere and never use it, that’s fine, too, because that’s just another dark pool of money.

When the Fed™ started out bailing out every bank, that’s really what happened. The banks kept the cash in deposit, and salted it away in their dark pools.

I think it’s the dark pools of cash that will ultimately be the defining moment for Gen Z. Well, not the dark pools themselves, but, rather, the mess they make when the levee breaks. We’re seeing the problem starting now, and Gen Z is aware – many of them have lived their teen years seeing nothing but inflation as the pools break loose.

I’m getting tired of Gen Z, always walking around like they can afford to rent the place.

The pools are up high, and have a great deal of potential energy. The destruction the flow will create as the cash spreads down through the economy has been bad, but it will be legendary. When the American Continental was issued it was backed by the same thing the dollar is today: nothing. The phrase “not worth a Continental” was no doubt on the minds of the framers of the Constitution as they wrote that no State shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment in debts.”

But that’s quaint thought, right?

(meme as found)

Weimar Germany followed the AOC “just pay for it” formula, and German bankers eventually (after some, um, events) became the most cautious in Europe about inflation.

So, after my dream of last night, I think we have a big dam problem.

It worked so well last time, right?

Rebuilding America: First It Will Fail

Rebuilding America

“Blown up, sir!” – Stripes

Raw materials for steel have gone way up in price. Producers say it’s a horrible ore deal.

When I was in 6^th grade, I remember driving to Capital City with Pa Wilder while he had a business trip. As part of the trip, we went through Industrial Town. The major feature of Industrial Town was a miles-long hulking rusted out steel plant complete with huge towers, big enough to hold Oprah’s breakfast.

To me, they looked like the discarded remnants of an ancient technological innovation. In fact, when I was reading a novel about explorers that had gone to some far-off world that had been littered with the technology of an incomprehensible civilization, I visualized that old steel plant.

It was rare to have one-on-one time with just Pa and I. He often worked long hours, but on longer trips, sometimes we’d talk about, well, whatever. As I’ve mentioned before Pa was a banker, and I think he was more amused by my early fixation on science than anything. But when it came to the steel plant, Pa Wilder knew a lot, and that day was the first time I ever heard “Bessemer Process”, and we talked about steel and history during the drive. He said that once upon a time, you could bring your ore, make steel, and sell it for a fee. Apparently “He who smelt it, dealt it” didn’t catch on as a business model.

I hate recycling aluminum cans. It’s just soda pressing.

Bad dad jokes aside, when we drove by, that old steel mill wasn’t doing so well. The major reason, oddly, was World War II.

During World War II, the United States and Britain, mostly did everything they could to blow up anyth8ing in Germany that could make a ball bearing or paper clip. At the end of the war, the country was in ru8ins. The same thing happened in Japan – the country was wrecked, and, unlike Germany, the Japanese didn’t have many of resources needed for steel production, things like iron ore or coal.

In both cases, Germany and Japan didn’t build back with the Bessemer Process, they built back with the newest technology. Japan, especially, had to focus on being efficient since Japan has fewer natural resources to work with to make steel than Kamala Harris has for use in a battle of wits.

Once Kamala though she might be pregnant. She asked the doctor, “Is it mine?”

To be clear, it was very hard to rebuild nations shattered by the Last Modern War, but once those countries did finally rebuild, they were the most efficient and highest quality steelmakers in the world.

But this took decades.

The infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt. Then people had to learn how to make the new technology – basic oxygen steelmaking was pioneered by the Swiss and the Austrians. Oh, sure, the Austrians and Swiss are so autistic that asking a girl out is a seventeen-step process that has to be memorized prior to execution, but that’s exactly the autism level needed when you’re going to change an entire industry.

In a rare screwup, the Swiss dude who invented the process wasn’t legally able stop the Japanese from using his process for free, and the Japanese licked it up without having to pay royalties. The Swiss, experts at chocolate, hoarding gold, yodeling, and engineering. At being attorneys? Maybe not so much. 80% of Japanese steel was made using the basic oxygen process by 1970, because it was far cheaper.

Oops.

But Baltimore is gr . . . oh.

Since the United States didn’t bother to innovate, US Steel©, once the biggest steel manufacturer in the world, was sold to Nippon Steel™ for the equivalent of what Elon Musk keeps in his couch cushions back in December, 2023.

What’s the lesson here?

To be clear, in many cases our economy is where Japan’s was after World War II. There are two major differences:

It’s not as obvious because the nigh-infinite ability of the United States to print cash and trade it for things like steel is still in effect, and
We were complicit in the destruction of our own industry via free trade, regulations, and financialization, and didn’t even need to use any bombs.

To rebuild an industry requires time. It also requires a lot of investment of money, but it also requires the best talent in the country. Silicon Valley became the information systems capital of the world because it brought together capital and talent over the period of decades. Taiwan became the semiconductor capital of the world because of the capital and talent it consumed over the course of decades.

Hey, that’s what Xi said.

What did New York do? Soaked up capital to loan and soaked up talent to figure out how to magic more cash into existence – by and large a waste of decades of some of the best and brightest in the world.

This is the game that we should have been playing, but stopped when the United States was the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world. Now, the reason we were the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world was because everyone else was blown up. What did we do with that success?

Rested. Relaxed. And began to believe that the economic success was a right, not a consequence of hard work, talent, and investment.

We have to learn to build things, not financial products. But we also have things to unlearn. Our liability system is horrific, but that’s because liability lawyers fund the Democratic party, so, they buy more bacon-wrapped shrimp than others.

The other thing to unlearn is zero impact. As long as humans live on the planet, we’ll impact it – the idea is to conserve and make wise use of our resources. The GloboLeftElite have taken their mask off when climate ideologs go after the United States, with declining carbon emissions, and ignore China and India with massive and growing carbon emissions, with China producing nearly three times the CO2 of the United States.

How dare you!

But have the GloboLeftElite complain about China or India?

Nah. They wouldn’t listen anyway.

The path forward requires that we fail. Great news! We’ve failed! We’re in a worse place than the Japanese after World War II due to our cultural inertia and the newfangled “all the Zoomers have a mental disorder” society.

The second part of the path is letting go of the financialization and making PowerPoints® in New York as the goal of society. If we want to be serious, we have to make stuff, not accounting irregularities.

There’s a reason that China’s buying gold, and that reason is simple:

They’re making steel.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Month Closer

“That’s the theme song from The Jeffersons. You really need help.” – Tropic Thunder

All these clock pictures sometimes tick me off.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
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.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume V, Issue 11

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

I’ve rolled back the clock this month. We’ll see if it holds.

In this issue: Front Matter – Variations on a Theme – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – We Win – Links

Front Matter

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, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Variations on a Theme

During the month I collect headlines and other information that documents the way things are going – for me, it’s interesting just how quickly something either fades from memory, or becomes the “new normal” and becomes business as usual. The following (at first) seemed a bit disjointed to me, but in the end they all tell the same story – the story of the plans to eliminate the culture that now exits, and the desire to hold on to power, no matter what the cost.

Keeping that in mind, the election is coming up. Trump is leading and one major Democratic technique is to create an electorate split. The reason they want the power, is to use it.

And there’s a big population of businesses that are coordinating to “interfere” in the election. The GloboLeftElite always project what they are doing on their enemies. And, to them, we are not competitors, we are deathly enemies.

As has been a major theme on all media this, not just here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise®, illegal aliens oozing across the border has been the biggest story of 2024. The GloboLeft tries to pretend that they’re not in favor of this, but it’s abundantly clear that this is no mistake, not act of nature. This is entirely planned.

This policy stays either without respect to the consequences or, perhaps, because of the consequences. The consequences have significant negative impacts of the actual citizens here, including employment. They are helped by official at every level.

The consequences? Lawlessness and lowered competence.

The long term plan? Who knows?

There is sufficient proof that the GloboLeft hates God:

And that the GloboLeft is everywhere:

And that they worship death:

And don’t care about our deepest cultural beliefs:

And that they’ll put their, um, “money” where their mouth is since humans are apparently just TransCows to them:

Violence and Censorship Update

Several readers have reported to me (via email) that they were unsubscribed or that their subscriptions are filtered out as spam. FYI. Might it be random? Sure. It might. Heard about more this month.

I’ll (mostly) let the memes speak for themselves. Foreign stories are included as they often foreshadow attempts in the United States.

I did two stories this month on Sweet Baby Inc.’s looting of game companies for money and to insert GloboLeftElite propaganda into games to control your mind. Remember, never buy anything from a company that has a CEO that stole a hair style from Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons.

Here’s the playbook that Sweet Baby Inc. uses . . .

And the voice of someone who called them on it, and got doxed:

And (from the UK) what successful Social Justice looks like:

And the next few are the result of successful Social Justice policies:

And probably the plan:

And, Canada is seeing the end game in sight:

Here’s a bit more on that:

And the what the RCMP thinks of Canadians:

But March was also rich in Orwell:

Never forget, the GloboLeftElite will blame others for what they’re already doing:

And Canada showing they’ve figured out what a woman really is . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again. It’s like it’s planned:

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 combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is down, expected in spring. Probably quiet until June or July.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly up.

Economic:

Economic numbers are near a high, but I wonder if it’s the drunk before the hangover?

Illegal Aliens:

Highest March. Ever.

We Win

To have a civil war, there have to be two sides. I think the goal of the GloboLeftElite has been to convince those who oppose it that the game is over. They have already shown themselves to be ready to do anything, absolutely anything to gain power. From then, they’ll pull up the ladder. What do they want?

“Voting” so loosely open that anyone can do it. Think something as simple as obtaining a drivers license equates a ballot in the mail. Then, anyone can harvest those ballots and mark them however they want, with no accountability. This was tried in 2020, and works great for the GloboLeft.

Combined with voting changes (first point) the GloboLeft is cramming illegals into Red States as fast as they can. Either they’re “voters” or an army. Neither of those is good news.

They also want control of the finances so that they can wreck them. Why? I have no idea on this one. Perhaps the Elite just want to consolidate the power and own it all.

Of course, guns have been the bug up the butt of the Left for, well, forever. They try to make up things, but the real answer is that guns prevent the GloboLeft from taking the country over. It is clear from history that killing children is not something that bothers the GloboLeft at all, as the GloboLeft are currently the world champions at kid killing.

People are waking up. They’re seeing the real Evil of the Left:

They’re seeing that Woke doesn’t help anyone:

They’re seeing the engineered replacement:

They’re seeing that a society without marriage is weak, at best:

They’re seeing that the elite want to enslave them:

Even the GloboLeftElite’s hand-chosen minions are seeing the damage:

The RINOs are being challenged:

And a real A.I. without censoring, can see what’s up:

We will win. Even 4Chan sees it:

Like I always say – the road may be tough, be we really can’t lose.

LINK

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/ModernityNews/status/1767165884764709217

https://twitter.com/i/status/1765525665862795547

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1764308853095633224

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1764270162264416637

https://twitter.com/itshoggs/status/1764148239568191724?t=Yb1ucXfa2OWsweGarTyQiQ&s=19

Good Guys

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QytMLIyq6Y8

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1768665733850902779

https://nypost.com/2024/03/15/us-news/nyc-subway-rider-who-shot-aggresive-straphanger-during-rush-hour-commute-wont-be-charged-prosecutors/

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1770624522150126010

One Guy

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

https://www.news.com.au/national/northern-territory/carnage-alice-springs-anticrime-campaigner-robbed-in-sleep-during-alleged-home-invasion/news-story/c65d3e9c6039c328ee67039246507b23

https://youtu.be/YGz1Tiaying

Body Count

https://twitter.com/_BlakeHabyan/status/1763055020478464084

https://twitter.com/InfoUncensored/status/1757473606655729776

https://twitter.com/ResidentialClub/status/1774223963196973159

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/28/most-believe-jesus-christs-resurrection-new-poll-finds/

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1764478200334168570

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/03/04/the-sad-state-of-marylands-voter-rolls-79k-inaccurate-records-found

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-2024-election-will-be-neither-free-nor-fair/

https://newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/gabriela-pariseau/2024/03/18/41-times-google-has-interfered-us-elections-2008

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/03/lew-rockwell/how-the-democrats-plan-to-steal-the-election/

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/03/26/saving-democracy-from-itself-the-democratic-national-committee-moves-to-block-third-party-candidates/

https://www.judicialwatch.org/illinois-voting-rolls/?source=46&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=press%20release&s=15

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2024-03-26/theyre-going-let-trump-win

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mississippi-doj-elections/2024/03/13/id/1157105/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nyc-council-asking-states-highest-221121732.html

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-building-superstructure-stop-trump-141631115.html

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1771398655184171487

Civil War

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/30/alex-garland-civil-war-interview

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/15/civil-war-review

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/civil-war-movie-timing-maga-violence-1235831454/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQOZ4KctZ0k

https://www.dailywire.com/news/harvard-accused-of-promoting-eco-terrorism-for-plans-to-screen-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-film

https://www.youtube.com/watch

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/1760394086274695385

https://tldavis.substack.com/p/complacent-about-replacement?r=1ggdo

https://tldavis.substack.com/p/the-fragile-state

https://victorhanson.com/american-paralysis-and-decline/

https://newrepublic.com/article/179966/four-2024-post-election-scenarios-trump

How Transfer Payments Might Doom Us All

“Okay. Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

The Andy Griffith show would have been a lot different if her name had been Aunt Tifa.

I like thinking about the economy and what we have in front of us, and I guess I’m not alone.

Recently I stumbled across a column in Zero Hedge® that originated from Mike Shedlock at his place (link below). Shedlock has been writing about economics for years, and was pretty far out in front of the Great Recession. When Shedlock starts to tease at the threads of the economy, he just might have something interesting to say.

How Much Do Food Stamps, Social Security, and Medicare Support the Economy?

Anyway, the column that caught my eye tied back inflation to the amount of money that the government spends that it doesn’t get anything for, or transfer payments – pulling from one source (taxes or printing) to give to another person or group. The examples of this are everywhere. Shedlock mentions:

food stamps,
Taylor Swift,
Social Security,
Late night television hosts,
Medicare,
PEZ® theft,
Medicaid,
Kamala’s vodka supply,
child tax credits, and
other “welfare” payments.

Okay, I’ll admit I might have added a few things to Mike’s list.

It’s been three months since I joined the gym and I’ve had zero progress. Tomorrow I’ll go in person to see what the problem is.

During the Great COVID Crisis, first Trump and then Biden threw money at the economy, and the amount of income that people got from the government in transfer payments DOUBLED as a percentage of income. That’s staggering. This isn’t an absolute number, but as a percentage, which actually makes it worse. Not to mention all the companies that got paid for not doing business, not selling beer, and not making good movies. Disney®, I’m looking at you.

Here’s an odd sentence: Missing Person Remains Found.

Part of the trouble with the economy has been masked, for years. That trouble is Social Security. In 2018, Social Security started paying out more in benefits than it received in taxes. This was supposed to be just fine because all of the payments from past years that were put into a “trust fund”.

Well, Congress didn’t just pile all of those tax dollars it was taking in under the mattress or in a Mason® jar buried back near the old outhouse behind the Fed®. Nope. Congress did what politicians always do with every available dollar: they spent it to buy nice things (things that lobbyists wanted) immediately when they got the cash in their appetizer-covered little fingers. Oh, and they borrowed more, too. The only thing the “trust fund” did was mask the true size of the deficit.

What if your trust fund has a negative balance?

It’s like that with most things the government does, but there is a limit to how much of the economy you can just make up before reality eventually catches up with you. Ask Enron™.

Regardless, things are going to get much, much worse. All of those illegals that are streaming across the border as fast as we can pay (yes, the United States is actually paying cash to them on the road) them to get here? Once they get here, they’re being paid thousands of dollars a year plus free chow and lodging and medical care. All of that cash is just printed at this point, and spent on something that adds no net productivity to the economy.

Well, he is called Bad Luck Brian for a reason. He also invested his life savings with Bernie Madoff.

And, where, exactly are these millions of people going to live? They’re staying 30 to a house, and buying up properties that used to go to Bobby and Becky when they got married, but now can’t afford them due to the massive competition and rising interest rates.

The Boomers? They’re retiring in droves right now, and Social Security and Medicare spending will only increase as they retire. This will, of course, come from spending rather than the non-existent trust fund.

None of the above counts how much more we’ll send to Ukraine or Taiwan or Israel or Haiti.

All of these transfer payments *plus* the increased interest on the debt that we took out to buy the things the lobbyists wanted in 1994 will result in stopping Congress from spending.

Ha! See! I made it through that with a straight face. Man, I should have used that line on April Fools’ Day. Of course Congress isn’t going to stop spending. They’re not even going to slow down. There are still appetizers to be eaten, and lobbyists to be massaged.

One lobbyist even lobbied to save the penny. He called himself a change agent.

And again, Congress got away with this quite well when the United States was the Sole Global Superpower™. Now? China is pushing us economically, and from a military standpoint, it’s looking pretty iffy: no one wants to sign up to fight Russia for Ukraine, or China for Taiwan. Additionally, unless the war(s) go nuclear, I question how prepared we are to fight a near-peer foe in 2024.

Like I said, I like thinking about the future of the economy. I always have enjoyed horror movies.

Maybe It’s . . . Evil?

“But I just changed my lifetime tune about thirty minutes ago, ‘cause I know that whatever is out there tryin’ to get in is pure Evil straight from Hell. And if there is a Hell, and those sons of bitches are from it, then there has go to be a heaven, Jacob, there’s gotta be.” – From Dusk ‘til Dawn

My friend gets offended when I tell her fat jokes. I told her, “Lighten up.” (Most memes are “as-found”)

I’ve been having a bit of question in my mind about what we’re seeing going on in the world today. I’ve written quite a bit about the physical trends in the world today, with energy being the number one roadblock I see into the physical future since the complexity of the world’s economy is based on cheap energy for manufacture, transport, and use of goods in our “modern” society. That might explain why people on unicycles are always so energetic compared to me on my regular bicycle. I’m two tired.

The second big challenge I see is the virtual world. By virtual, I include not only cyber-dependence, A.I., but also cash. Our current economic system uses an entirely made-up set of markers called “dollars” to buy and sell things. What’s a dollar? Once upon a time, it was some fraction of an ounce of gold. Now, a dollar is worth whatever someone will give you for it. As Biden has adopted the Binge Bucks Better strategy to try to get votes (I mean, besides the ones they print up) the deficit has reached a record.

Hmm, if Brandon is so awesome, why is no one wearing a “Build Back Better” hat?

All this spending? There’s no end in sight. So, this is a world that is having its own set of challenges in both the physical and virtual realm.

The third and (in my opinion) most important one is the spiritual realm.

Let me digress a bit – I think it will make sense in the end, but I haven’t written the end yet, so it could just end up with all of the coherence of Kamala Harris talking about quantum mechanics. Nah, nothing could be that bad.

I was half asleep recently (hypnogogic, to be technical). I often get a “clearing of the mind” when in that state, when issues that have been perplexing me sort themselves out. It’s like my mind is running a program in the background, but when I’m half asleep, all the pieces come together.

What was this puzzle?

Let’s talk about the pieces, first:

No one, literally even the GloboLeftists in the Deep Blue cities wants the massive hordes of illegals streaming across the borders. No one. It’s so bad that Biden is even attempting to blame the Republicans for not letting him close the border.

Yeah, pull the other one, Joe, and a bell will ring.

Biden 2024! 20 years for Joe, 24 for Hunter.

This is destroying the country. Quickly. Why are housing prices going up? Because we’re not building new houses because no one can afford them but yet we’ve brought in OVER 12 MILLION ILLEGALS in just three years. If Putin could have gotten that many Russians into the Ukraine, he could have taken it without a shot.

Hmmm.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today. I’ll let you know.

Ever wonder if Tyson® was a company designed to import illegal aliens so they could make cheap food so people would have heart problems requiring heroic intervention to keep the medical system going?

The second datapoint is the weird fixation of the GloboLeft on literally every freak sexuality that could possibly exist. Sexually aroused by toasters? Yeah, I know that naughty bagel-sized girl is a tease, but toaster fixation is . . . deranged. The current poster child for adding deranged sexuality to avoidance of reality is the transexual movement.

The public has, at every opportunity, rejected this. Yet, Joseph Robinette Biden decided to issue a proclamation that Easter should be known as Transexual Visibility Day. To be clear, most of the time that transexuals are visible is because they’ve snapped and tried to kill a dozen people or were engaged in really awful things with children or were parading their female penis inside a woman’s dressing room. I have seen zero positive things in the news about trans people. Ever. Each time it’s some new horror story that would have led all of our ancestors look for kindling so they could have a burning at the stake.

Yet, we have a presidential proclamation on the single holiest day of Christianity promoting this abomination.

This is the Cartoon Network®. Trust them with the minds of your kid?

I could keep going. In general, there appears to be a concerted effort put forth to break down and eliminate the impact of Christianity as the basic underlying moral virtue of the West in general, including the United States.

The fall of Christianity in the United States (and the West) will have several big, negative impacts. The concepts that there is centrality of the family, the idea that life has an ultimate purpose, and the belief that all humans can be one in Christ have shaped the world. Christianity has been the central, governing moral vision at the heart of the West.

As Christianity declines, there is a risk of losing the moral foundation it provided. The decline Christianity in society accompanied by various societal issues, including divorce, cohabitation, drug abuse, abortion, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and suicide. People are born to be religious because it gives them stability and direction.

Yet, there has been a concerted war on Christianity for years, even though it makes society observably better, and observably more stable.

San Francisco is so woke, that even the homeless vaccinate themselves!

If I were an oligarch, all of these changes would be negative for me. I’d be an oligarch over a less stable society, that produced less wealth for me to leach off of, and, in every measurable way, including the amount of power I could have, I would be worse off.

There is the first answer: because they’re just sick inside, and want to watch it all burn. Someone like George Soros may very well be like that – if you look into his eyes it’s not like you’re looking at something healthy and good. Maybe he just wants to burn it all down because he can. Because his heart is filled with hate.

That’s a simple answer. It might even be right.

This is a math teacher, so you can tell she’s plotting something.

The other answer is more profound: the GloboLeftistElite might just be . . . Evil. Capital E. It’s a solution that the modern mind wants to find an alternative to. It wants to look to cultural factors, or mental illness, or poor parenting.

Oddly, the idea that these people really are Evil is perhaps (to me) more comforting. Just like William Peter Blatty felt about his book, The Exorcist, that it was a profoundly Christian book, and uplifting, since the end showed that it wasn’t Evil that won, it was God.

Watch this, and tell me that Evil isn’t at work.

We face amazing challenges in the near future – physical, virtual, and spiritual. I’d prepare for all three.

But that’s just me.

Next up? Kamala Harris explains the General Theory of Relativity using a banana and two meatballs as props.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

“Without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other more aggressive ideologies then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear. That is why we’ll always need an army.” – Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

Geology is great, but geography is where it’s at.

The ideology of a group can come from many things, including the propaganda that we are all exposed to from a very young age. Another part of it comes from the family structure that we’re surrounded by. A French dude named Emmanual Todd spent a lot of time thinking about this in the 1970s, and decided that the ideology of a country, in part, could be determined by the family structure that the country. I was introduced to Mr. Todd’s ideas by the WhatIfAltHist YouTube® show. I recommend that show.

First, I was intrigued. A French guy named Todd.

Weird.

And who loses when I post an image of Heather Graham? No one.

Second, it felt right. One of the things that people often don’t rate highly enough in the world is genetics. Genetics are very powerful, and influence far more than just hair, skin and eye color or other merely physical attributes. No, from what I’ve seen, genetics very much impacts the basic way related people think. It’s as if family structure, that which literally gives birth to genetic structure, could be a selection mechanism to create and reinforce ideology as well. That would entirely be in line with my observations of both people that I know, as well as the flow of history.

Third, I was interested. What Todd had to say was based on the cultures that he saw in the world in the 1970s, which, due to unceasing hordes of unchecked illegals has now changed. What tensions might conflicting ideologies based on family structures bring to countries being invaded?

But they’re as close to me as steppe-brothers.

Let’s start with the family structure that was the one that came from England and was predominant in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Normandy:

Absolute Nuclear.

It’s what I grew up thinking a normal family was – the term nuclear family was coined in 1924, and has nothing to do with atom bombs.
The mother and father met and chose each other for love.
They lived in their own house.
Their children were expected to become independent, be responsible for themselves, and their lives, after they grew up, was in their own hands.
Parents could disinherit kids, and split up the inheritance however.
God judges individuals.
Societies are mostly stable, but when internal revolts happen, they are horrific.

This is the most successful culture in history, and has been amazing for freedom. Christianity and individual salvation plus independence and individual outcomes lead to structures where people have incentives to produce, and incentives to be moral.

Why can’t you trust an atom? Because they make up everything.

Many other cultures cannot understand this culture – it appears cold and impersonal, and it values freedom over equality. For this system to work, though, high social trust is required.

Absolute Nuclear is a big chunk of my genetics. But the majority of it is:

Authoritarian.

This is just Todd’s name. If I were to name it, I’d call it the Ancient Honor culture, or something like that. It is a very big part of the culture of the United States, especially from the Southern States. Why?

This culture is that the Germans, Scandinavians, Czechs, Irish, Scots, Welsh had historically, and it also describes the Koreans, Japanese, and northern Spaniards (where Franco was from).
Only the oldest son inherits, so the clan follows the eldest.
What do the other sons do? Warriors or warrior monks so they have something to do.
The story of the society is one of a lineage that goes back through time. If you worry just a bit too much about your family story (like I might) and care about its honor (like I do) this may describe you.
The story of the society is one of the lineage of the family, the sense of history, stubbornness, and that everything thrown in front of you makes you stronger. Only the Irish can destroy the Irish, only the Scots can destroy the Scots. Losing makes them tougher.
Women have significant value, unlike in many other cultures.
These cultures typically have a large middle class, because if you don’t inherit, you’d best figure something out.
There is very little oppression in these societies, because individualism is cultivated – people like each other and will fight for their group.
These people are awful at creating empires – it took the British to unite the Irish since these groups are like a bag of cats. That’s why Japan and Germany and Scotland and Ireland were so hard to unify.

This is a very successful culture, historically, and is the other “big” Western culture. If I come across someone who wants to fight because I accidently took his parking space? Tell me you’re Scots-Irish without telling me you’re Scots-Irish. The tensions between the Authoritarians (South) and Absolute Nuclear (North) led to the Civil War.

I met the Godfather of the Scottish mafia. He made me an offer I couldn’t understand.

This is the rest, and possibly the majority of my genetics, and by far the majority of The Mrs.

Don’t make her mad on a point of honor.

The third culture that’s now impacting the United States is the one from (most of) France, (most of) the Italians, South America, Mexico, and Central America.

Egalitarian Nuclear:

In this structure, all sons inherit equally. There are several properties I’m aware of where the Spanish father split up the property (five miles by five miles) so his sons could all have access to the river that ran down the middle, so they could water their cattle. Fast forward to today, and there are several properties that are 200 feet wide by five miles long so they can still get access to the river.
Marriages aren’t arranged and females have huge influence.
Because everything gets split up into weird chunks, rich people end up buying the odd land and the sons end up with nothing to give for inheritance. This leads to massive wealthy inequality.
Because the families are equalitarian, they want equity in society, which leads to a series of revolutions because their property always ends up in the hands of the rich.
Why have most South American countries had a zillion revolutions, constitutions, communist uprisings, while the United States has had the same Constitution?
Since the daughters get nothing, it leads to an “alpha-male” dictator, but they’re comically bad dictators (think Chavez or Mussolini) that don’t get much done because, equality leads to zero discipline.

When this family structure is a significant minority, it ends up running the country. France. Italy. Most South American countries. Mexico. Why are they this mixed bag of equalitarian nonsense? Because of this social structure. Since often a minority population ends up deciding how the country is run, exactly how many Egalatarian Nuclear people can we let in from South America and still have a country that values freedom over equality?

My humor is a lot like food in Venezuela. Most people don’t get it.

We’ve created new family structures that Monsieur Todd never thought about back in the 1970s, since they were just in the process of becoming. What ideology will they create?

I have enough material for another post on this, so I’ll probably skip economics and do one more on Wednesday on family structure and ideology.