Category: Truth

Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg

“That’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

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Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.

Wilder Note:  Normally, Friday posts (for the last 70 or so weeks) have been devoted to health topics.  I figure why not make everyone feel thoughtful right before the weekend, rather than guilty on a Monday for eating a whole cake and two tubs of Betty Crocker® frosting on Saturday night while drinking enough chardonnay to dull the pain from having lost that stupid election to that stupid guy from New York.  Oops, too personal?  Anyway, as the TEOWAWKI series has gone from one post to maybe weeks and weeks of posts (in outline) that I realized I’d put a topic on the back burner that I really want to write about and it really fits the “big ideas” Monday slot that’s now been invaded by the End Of The World, well, Fridays had to give.  So until The End Of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTEOWAWKI – top, that Internet!), Friday posts may or may not be related directly to health for the next few months.  This one isn’t.

Here are the links to the TEOWAKI posts (for now):

Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:

I’ve written before about how it seems that our culture is unraveling around us at an increasing rate.  You can see those posts here:

Is there any data to back up these theories?

Yes.

I originally thought that the Pew Research Center primarily did research into the sounds that kids made while using finger guns.   These are sounds like Pew, Pew, Pew, Bang-Bang, and Rat-a-Tat-Tat.  I was informed that finger guns are now illegal because they can be easily concealed and have far too large of an ammunition capacity, needing to be reloaded only when “making a shotgun loading sound” would be cool.

It turns out Pew does research on social and political trends, which is maybe more important than finger gun noises, but far less fun.  And political trends wasn’t even my second theory, which included fart and skunk smell research.  But Pew put together one report titled “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (LINK)” that’s especially relevant in describing what’s going on in American life today.  The excellent blog Epsilon Theory (LINK) had a post that referenced the Pew Report, which is how I found it, and it fit perfectly with the posts we’ve been doing about the dissolution of the American political scene, though I think we come to different conclusions on what will ultimately happen.

Imagine how happy I was to see yet more proof of my theory that everything is falling straight apart and that millions of Americans will, within my lifetime, be engaged in bloody civil war!

Let’s start with the big graph.  It tells (broadly) the story.

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1994

In 1994, sure we had differences, but mainly we had more in common than divided us.  Going through the numbers, Democrats and Republicans broadly agreed that illegal immigration was, well, illegal and was a thing to be stopped.  Also about this time, Bill Clinton got punched in the teeth when he lost the House of Representatives by trying to go too far left too fast.

Bill’s response was to take the position of the Republicans and the position of the Democrats and steer between them.  Republican points that were really popular, like making welfare recipients work?  Adopt it.  There was a vast overlap in the center – the overlap between Republican and Democrat is significant.  The results of this policy were also pretty significant – this tension actually restrained government spending for the first time since Andrew Jackson made Congress personally count out every expenditure in piles of nickels on the Senate floor.

I remember being at a political rally for Democrats at around this point in time (1994, not during the Jackson administration).  It was a big rally – Carrie Fisher was there with the Democratic candidate in question.  So was I – with a sign for the Republican opposition.  We didn’t go into the rally, but stood on one side of a driveway while a small group of Democrats stood on the other side.  There were 50 to 100 in either group.  We yelled at each other, each making fun of the other’s candidate, but the yelling was light hearted and humorous.  Everyone had fun.  I think I saw Carrie Fisher’s leg.

At that point in time, there was more extremism on the right than on the left, but even that wasn’t pronounced.  With the defeat of Evil Communism, well, life was good.  Heck, a guy named Francis Fukuyama even said that The End of History was at hand.  Western liberal democracy would be the final form of government in a more peaceful world where capitalism was pretty significant feature.

2004

Not too far past 9/11, Americans had something that kept them unified – war.  It appears that several people skipped reading Fukuyama’s book.   At this point, a feeling of cohesion in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was still evident, W reluctantly called legitimate.  Americans are actually politically closer than in 1994, but now more extreme leftists than extreme right wing folks.  When Bush beat Kerry?  Meh.  No protests.  No outrage.  Bush personified the center.  But the far left wing was growing.

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2017

Democrats have all scampered left.  Far left.  Republicans have moved right certainly, but not nearly as far as the Democrats have moved left.

How bad is it?

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97% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.  95% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat.  Yes, there’s still overlap, but rapidly we’re nearing the point where we don’t even recognize the same facts.  Imagine how little regard there is for the opinions of the other side.

And it’s worse with the media.  As a whole, they’ve been leftists since . . . forever.  But now?  Not only do Republicans represent less than 7% of journalists, the places where journalists work and live are in big cities where people wearing Make America Great Again hats are shot on site.  Or they would be if the leftists currently believed in individual, rather than state gun ownership.

The media are ideologically leftists, and live in cities where they might not even see a Republican in a day.  They work in a bubble (leftist journalists) and live in a bubble (leftist cities and often states) and have no conception that people on the right exist.  This explains why, on election night, the media was stunned that Trump won.  They didn’t even try to hide their bias and dismay.  Rachel Maddow alone cried enough tears to create minor flooding in the basement of the broadcast building.

There is simply very little the median Democrat has to say to the median Republican beyond “give me your stuff”, and little the median Republican has to say to the median Democrat other than “no, there aren’t 621 genders and 627 on Saturday night.”  They don’t even speak the same language and in some cases this is literally true.

Part of the shift has come because the composition of American has changed.  First and second generation immigrants are now roughly 25% of voters, a far higher proportion than at any time in history.  And 70% of immigrants are leftist, compared to 18% that tend toward the right.  This makes sense – most immigrants come to the United States from countries that are far to the left of the United States.  I remember listening to the radio where a left-wing journalist was gushing with enthusiasm that a communist (literally and self-described) woman from India had been elected to the Seattle city council.  When you talk about foreign influence on politics, well, the immigrants that are here legally have distorted politics and added to the overall polarization.  This explains why the right has fought back so strongly – they (correctly) sense that the immigration desired by the left will disenfranchise (forever) their entire political ideology.  If Hispanics voted on for the right, Republicans would have put forth the Everybody’s Really An American plan and the Democrats would have put forth a bill to mine the border with giant radioactive scorpions on either side of the 500 foot deep pit.

It also explains why so many Democrats (and Independents) have (quietly) defected to the Republican side.  The party is moving away from them.

And the extreme left turn of the Democrats explains why Alexwhatshername Occasionally-Cortez, who is running on an actual and explicit socialist platform is the future of the Democratic party, not an outlier – this is the type of person that will win primaries as the Democrats float left.  And I think the Republicans will continue to float farther right, which, in time, will make Trump look like a moderate.

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What happens when/if the next leftist gains the White House?

Whiplash on every conceivable policy, but with a side order of vengeance.  And a system like that will produce, rather inevitably, an economic dislocation, a government crackdown.  A step too far.

This will be the spark.

And there will be war.  If the United States weren’t so divided, the war could be external as politicians looked to focus people against the outside to reunify the country.  But for now, we couldn’t even agree on a common enemy.  So our enemy will be . . . us.

But, hey, cake is out of the oven!  Who wants cake?  I even have some spare tubs of frosting . . .

Read This Blog or I’ll Shoot This Car and You’ll Feel Guilty Forever

“You have learned to bury your guilt with anger.  I will teach you to confront it, and to face the truth.  You know how to fight six men.  We can teach you how to engage six hundred.  You know how to disappear.  We can teach you to become truly invisible.” – Batman Begins (The good 2005 one, not the earlier crap.)

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If you don’t read this blog, I’ll shoot this car.  Then wouldn’t you feel guilty?

I sat staring at the ceiling in the darkened apartment, the lights from the parking lot casting shadows on the walls.  I couldn’t sleep.  I tossed and turned.  Finally, I resorted to reading.  I’d read every night until I literally fell asleep with a book in my hand.  I remembered, in particular, reading a big, heavy hardcover at the time, one that was about 1053 pages long.

I was being eaten alive inside.  I was wracked with guilt.

What was I scared of?

Well, I hadn’t finished my master’s degree yet, but I had moved halfway across the country and started a new job.  No one was asking me about my degree, but I knew that dreaded moment was coming soon.  “So, John Wilder, where’s your degree?  We need to see a copy.”

This was impossible.  My thesis wasn’t even written yet.  And I had moved halfway across the United States and taken a new job.

My torture continued.  Outside of the lack of sleep, the guilt from knowing that I hadn’t finished my degree sent a chill down my spine (or is it up my spine?) every time I thought about it.  At work.  Shopping.  Waxing my moose statue.  Finally, after a week or so of this torture, I went in to my boss, who was only five or so years older than me.  We started off talking about the work I was doing.  At the end I brought up the degree.

John Wilder:  “Oh, and one other thing, I’m not quite done with my master’s yet, I still need to finish and defend my thesis.”

Boss:  “Whatever.  I’m not even sure the company cares.  In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.  We hired you, not a degree.”

And that was that.

In that moment all the fear left me, and I felt silly for worrying about it, and even sillier for keeping it bottled up inside of me, eating away at me like a Kardashian at an all-you-can-eat waffle and cream cheese covered bacon buffet.  Sometimes that horrible truth you have bottle up inside of you . . . is no problem at all.

This has been the norm in my life:  if I confronted the problem, or was honest about it upfront, the problem (most times) went away.  And when the problem didn’t go away, fixing it because I was honest and upfront was easier than the times (in the past) that I’d waited to confront the issue.

Guilt is a cousin to Worry, and not the good kind of cousin that brings a twelve-pack to your backyard barbeque and then offers to watch your kids so you and the wife can go have a dinner out.  No.  Guilt is a bad cousin that shows up at 3am, kicks your dog, and eats that steak leftover you have in the fridge while talking with its mouth full and smelling vaguely like a wooden barroom floor near a Marine base.  But Guilt and Worry are related.

Worry is paying for the future problems you might have, whereas Guilt is worrying about the repercussions from past actions.  Let’s be real:  I wasn’t worried so much about not having the degree (I did finish it a year later) but was really worried about having moved halfway across the country only to be fired and become economically destitute – a warning sign for future people to say, “don’t be like that idiot.”  I had done the deed.  Or in this case not done it.  My question was what would happen once I’d been found out.

And most of the time your imagination can create future consequences far scarier than they ever would be in normal reality.  Unfortunately, I’m an imaginative guy.  I can go from getting a “C” in a college class to getting kicked out of school to living in a squalid drug den and smelling like Johnny Depp in about three steps.

The choices (if you don’t want to eat yourself up alive inside) are simple:  confront the guilt, or, better yet?

Don’t do things that make you feel guilty.

Duh.

Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?

“We might find the abandoned furnace room, or the old Civil War amputorium!” – Malcom in the Middle

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No problems in this map.  None at all.  Everything is as right as rain . . .

The following is (more or less) a discussion that occurred over several days as we sat in the hot tub.  I’ll note that our speculation reflects things that we as observers and students of history and current events think are might happen, not what we want to happen.  It’s edited for clarity and readability – it’s not a transcript, it’s a blog post.  In some cases a half an hour of conversation is only a sentence or two.

Honestly, this speculation is chilling enough to use as an air conditioner on a hot day . . . .  Previous posts similar to this can be found here at The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths, The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar,and Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps.

The other day when we were in the hot tub, I rudely interrupted The Mrs.

John Wilder:  “That’s enough of what you want to talk about.  I have something to discuss.”

The Mrs.:  “Well that was rude!”

John Wilder:  “And that’s exactly how I’ll describe it in my post.”

And yes, Internet, this was pretty close to the real conversation, but The Mrs. is used to it after being married to me for what she calls “an eternity.”  I guess time flies when you’re having fun, right?  Wait a minute . . . that eternity comment might not be a complement?

Anyway, as we luxuriated in the warm swirling waters of the tub, I threw out my discussion topic.

John Wilder:  “As we look at parallels from today’s developments to the last Civil War, I know that events, places and people won’t be exact matches, but they seem to rhyme.  If you look at the contentiousness of, say, the presidential elections, that’s a pretty big parallel.  Lincoln got only 40% of the popular vote, and that was against the first female candidate for president, John C. Breckenridge.”

1860_Electoral_Map

I think this map was influenced by the Russians since they wanted to sell us Alaska and knew only Lincoln was stupid enough to buy it.  Thankfully the Russians seem to want it back.

“If you look back in the past, Abraham Lincoln was elected president by a party that was only six years old after an election that was so divided that one side actually refused to acknowledge the results.  If that’s not a hallmark of a society unravelling, I’m not sure what is.”

“But,” I continued, “the people didn’t just drop everything one morning and yell at their neighbor and say ‘THAT’S IT!’  There were a series of escalations that society went through that made it seem like it would be a good idea to blow up Virginia.  And one of those events was Bleeding Kansas.”

Bleeding Kansas was that period when violent groups (on both sides) ended up fighting each other over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free state where slavery would be illegal or not.  Things got heated.  On the floor of the United States Senate:

“Sumner ridiculed the honor of elderly South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, portraying Butler’s pro-slavery agenda towards Kansas with the raping of a virgin and characterizing his affection for it in sexual and revolting terms.” (Wikipedia)

The next day, Butler’s cousin (A congressman named Preston Brooks) showed up and nearly killed Sumner by beating him with a cane.

So, if you’ve never been “beating a guy nearly to death with a cane mad,” maybe Congress wasn’t the place for you in the 1850’s.

preston

This was originally published by CNN – the Cane News Network – all canes, all the time.

Eventually Bleeding Kansas ended up as a big mess, with multiple battles (death toll total of 56, per Wikipedia), with there being multiple elections, crazy vote manipulation, and at least four territorial constitutions sent to the United States Senate for approval.  And it gave us the album cover for the debut album of the prog-rock band Kansas®, which might make up for the death toll?

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Tragic Prelude, by John Stewart Curry – John Brown is the crazy looking dude with the ZZ Top beard and Eraserhead hair in the middle.  True fact:  John Brown was really 12 feet tall, and the reason that basketball was invented in Kansas was so he could have a sport to play.

So, back to the hot tub.

John Wilder:  “I’m thinking that Ferguson® and Black Lives Matter™ is the Bleeding Kansas of today?”

The Mrs.:  “I don’t know.”

John Wilder:  “Maybe Antifa©?

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  Antifa©.  The level of violence that they initiate is amazing, and they think that their violence is justified.  Their violence isn’t real violence because they think they have a good reason to be violent.  Just as Antifa’s® racism isn’t real racism because they have a good reason to be racist.”

I nodded.

The Mrs. continued, “But I wonder if a civil war is possible at all.  There isn’t the same geographic concentration that there was during the 1850’s.  You don’t have a group of industrialists in the north competing against the agricultural south.”

John Wilder:  “But you do have the rural-urban divide.  Heck, our county here went 80% for Trump.”

The Mrs.:  “And our county has all of the guns.”

John Wilder:  “We do now.  But groups like Anitfa™ have shown that they’re not afraid to use violence.  In our county we don’t even lock our doors because either we’re too nice to steal much or the thieves know that behind every door is a 12 gauge shotgun or an AR-15.”

The Mrs.:  “True.”

John Wilder:  “Guns aren’t that hard to get, or hard to learn how to use.  Oh, sure, you have to really work at being able to do a 500 yard shot with a 20 mph crosswind (15 kilometers with a 20 liter crosswind for the metric-impaired) but half of Africa was conquered by revolutionaries who couldn’t even read with AK-47s that were built in factories in Bulgaria whose idea of a precision tool was a sledgehammer.”

The Mrs.:  “I can see that.  But we’re not as concentrated as we were back then.”

John Wilder:  “Have you seen this map?  We are divided geographically – and one side lives in a really small area, while the other side lives in the country.  Coincidentally, that’s where all the soldiers come from – rural places like where we live.  And we make all of the food and most of the energy.”

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The Mrs.:  “Yeah.  Non-Trump counties make television shows and Teslas®.  Oh, and they lead the country in corruption, poverty, and crime.  So I guess it could happen, but it would be a lot more chaotic than the first Civil War.”

John Wilder:  “Sure, I think the chaos is pretty much a given.  No way to predict where will be safe.  So, what’s our Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that was instrumental in setting the stage for the Civil War was the most popular book in the United States (besides the Bible) in the 1800’s.  However, not long after it was published, it was strictly censored across the many Southern states.  One man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for owning a copy of the book, and that was before the Civil War started.  The book would be wholly censored across the Confederate States during the Civil War.

John Wilder:  “Is it Alex Jones?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes, that feels right.”

Alex Jones is a radio talk show host that specializes in fringe news stories – news stories the regular media doesn’t cover, and news stories that are at times thinly checked (at best) and at times far in advance of “mainstream” news.  And Jones has been an equal opportunity political poo-flinger.  He’s gone after Clinton, Bush, and Obama.  Republican or Democrat?  He doesn’t seem to care.  To be fair, Jones has been a fairly consistent proponent of Trump.

Free speech is important, it’s written in Silicon Valley’s DNA, right?  No.  On a single day, Jones was banned or punished in some fashion from Facebook®, YouTube©, Spotify®, Amazon™, and Pinterest©.  Soon enough LinkedIn™, YouPorn® (huh?) and MailChimp® (whatever that is) followed.

No one in the hot tub felt that Alex Jones represented the gold standard for journalism, but his silence was a sign that ideas outside of those of the gatekeepers could simply not be tolerated.  I spent some time looking for examples of “hate speech” that was supposedly the cause of his being banned.  I found nothing worse than the usual hyperbole of the left, and certainly nothing as personally threatening as many things celebrities and journalists said in the heat of the moment following Trump’s victory in November of 2016.

The concept that he was censored amazed me.  Bombastic?  Yes.  Over the top?  Sure.  The WWE™ of news?  Absolutely.

Something to be suppressed and censored?  Wow.  Speech an entire party (nearly) agrees should be banned?  Double wow.  But free speech seems to have few fans on the left now. alex jones

Now I know where my wallet went . . . George Soros has it!

But back to the hot tub.  By this time, The Boy had joined us.  I think Pugsley was inside napping, or maybe working on connecting his brain directly to the Internet through a device he was making based on a YouTube video.  Pugsley had been looking for a drill, some hydrogen peroxide, and an N-size battery, so he might by a cyborg by now.

John Wilder:  “What other events were there on the way to the Civil War?”  Since The Boy had taken US history most recently, perhaps some things were fresher in his mind, and since we were in the hot tub, it was easier to ask him than to Google® it.

The Boy:  “What about the Dredd Scott decision?  That was a biggy.”

John Wilder:  “Yes, even the courts were involved in the unravelling before the Civil War.  But with the people divided as they were – Dredd Scott could have been decided either way and would have inflamed one side or the other.  In this case, it drove the North nuts.  If they had decided the other way?  It would have driven the South nuts.  A no-win situation.  The sides weren’t even talking the same language at that point.”

The Boy:  “Well, I guess that leaves Fort Sumter.”

John Wilder:  “So what does our Fort Sumter take place?  Or has it already?”

Fort Sumter was the spot, on April 12, 1861, at 4:30AM, Confederate soldiers fired on the Union Fort.  (Spoiler, they won.)  Fort Sumter is notable because even after Southern secession, several months passed before the first shots were fired there.  It was as if there was a hope that things could be brought back together, that there was some alternative to war.

John Wilder:  “So what is it, what does it look like?  Does it occur after a Trump 2020 victory?”

The Mrs.:  “Well maybe sooner.  If the Republicans continue to hold the House after the 2018 election, I think that might make California secede.  From what I seen on Facebook®, they’re in a frenzy already.  They can’t even stand the idea of Trump finishing a single term.”

John Wilder:  “What if . . . what if Fort Sumter is going on right now?  Let’s look at it:  there was a part of the government, in that case the states, which denied the legitimacy of the sitting president.  Okay, they might have thought him legitimate but they decided that they didn’t want be a part of it.  Isn’t that’s what’s going on right now with the Deep State?  Insurance policies?  Investigations into people not because of a crime, but investigations of people to find a crime to prosecute them for because they don’t have the right political belief, that they’re not part of the right club that gets bacon-wrapped shrimp at the Friday get-togethers?”

The Boy:  “Not sure if that fits.  Maybe.  Maybe.”

John Wilder:  “An attack doesn’t require that the militia brings out cannons and shells Dallas.  No, if you look at that, plus the sanctuary cities, plus the judiciary routinely ruling against Trump on things that they would have rubber-stamped for Obama?  Is this open insurrection right now, just not with cannon?”

The Boy:  “I’m not sure.  But I do think I know the end point of all of this.  I’ve been thinking . . .”

And he had a pretty insightful observation.  More on that next Monday, I think.

Medical Advances, Pop Rocks, Agriculture, and Nic Cage

“News team, let’s hunt.” – Anchorman

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The view from the coffeemaker (story below).  No coffee was injured in the making of this post.

I was talking with a coworker at the coffee machine back when I was working in Houston.  Our offices were in the 45th story of a gleaming skyscraper.  Very futuristic.

“So, Mr. W, what do you think the most important invention was?”  I have no idea why he called me Mr. W, but it’s been a theme – Mr. W.  No idea why.

“Ever?” I asked.  This was the setup.

“Sure.  Most important invention ever.”

“Agriculture.”

I love it when I look into a person’s eyes and literally watch their brain slowly melt from the answer they just got.  That was the case here.  For a full fifteen seconds he didn’t move, blink, or breathe.  I think his brain was rebooting.

After he got past the login screen:  “That’s . . . that’s a good one.”

I had that answer ready because I’d been thinking about just that.  What was the most significant invention in history?  Heck, even the Bible talks about it – the story where Cain (the farmer) killed his brother Abel (the sheep herder)?  It’s potentially an allegorical story about where agricultural civilization replaced the earlier pastoral civilization that’s come down to us over thousands of years.

Or maybe Cain was just a dick.  I kid.  We all know Abel had it coming.

However, agriculture was transformative.  Prior to that, it was hunting, gathering, and herding.  Or starving if you didn’t know how to hunt, gather and herd.

Notice that I didn’t say that agriculture was good for us.  There are plenty of ills that came from agriculture, but it was undoubtedly the most significant transformation that humans have ever encountered, with the possible exception of the invention of Pop-Rocks©.  I heard a kid ate a whole bunch of Pop-Rocks® and then drank a Pepsi™ and his stomach exploded.

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I found this, oddly, at the Pop Rocks© website, where they assure me that their product hasn’t killed anyone recently.  That they know of.  I kid.  Pop Rocks™ has a website to assure you that you are in no danger of a stomach rupture eating their product – it’s here (LINK).

I heard that they experimented with a product called Pope Rocks©, but it was made illegal because it reportedly turned water into wine, which is totes illegal in Utah.

Oh, yeah, I was talking about agriculture.

Agriculture was an important step – it made people stop moving around.  If you planted a crop, you had to stay there and grow it.  And if you stayed there, and had food?  Now you had to defend it.  And you had to have houses.  And you could make pots.  And buy furniture from StoneAgeIKEA®, which was largely abandoned by 3000 B.C. because no one had invented screws or hex wrenches.

Just that one invention changed economics, developed division of labor could exist.  Mankind now had farmers, soldiers, generals, and developed taxation and accountants.

Yeah.  Taxes.

But this didn’t make mankind a bit healthier.  In fact, it made the average person die sooner.  Oh, and when they died?  They had new diseases like arthritis.  And they didn’t grow as tall or as robust as their nomadic ancestors.

Why did we do it?  Dunno.  Women like houses, probably.  And men could brew beer (which happened to show up about the same time as the first agricultural settlements.  That same downfall occurs throughout history – women and beer.

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I assure you that you didn’t want to mess with this guy.  And he was probably average.  Not sure that Twinkies®, cars, and air conditioning helped his overall health . . . . and I’m sure that Google® now thinks I want to see pictures of shirtless men.  Oh, the things I do for you, readers.

Let’s face it, not everything that modern medicine has done has helped our health.  Some studies have shown that the nomads and herdsmen, on average, lived longer than the farmers that followed them in history.  Oh, and don’t forget, if you don’t have farms, no need for slaves, right?

But let’s look at medicine more directly:

What actual changes have made life healthier?

  • Well, agriculture has increase the overall amount of nutrition. We wouldn’t be able to feed everyone on Earth if we didn’t have that.
  • Maternal vitamins and nutrition make healthier and smarter babies. That’s good.
  • Sanitation is amazing. Not living in poop somehow makes you healthier.  Who could have imagined that?
  • Cheap food. Hard to be healthy if you’ve starved to death.
  • Pest control. Vermin are also not real healthy to live with.  Plague and all, right?

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  • Clean drinking water is much better than the alternative, but not as good as Scotch, which I guess is another alternative, so clean drinking water is second.
  • Antiseptics are good. Much less Civil War surgery.

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  • Antibiotics are also pretty good. I’m pretty sure that they’ve saved my life more than once.

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  • Trauma surgery is now awesome – many things you would have died from 20 years ago are now survivable, from gunshots to car accidents.
  • Vaccinations are, on balance, probably good. Is there proof that they kill people?    More people have died from HPV vaccinations than from HPV.  So, yeah.  But I’ll skip the small pox, thank you.  Oh, they don’t vaccinate for that anymore?

So, what’s not on this list?

  • End of life care. It’s expensive.  And it barely makes life longer.
  • Many cancer treatments are difficult and require hacking and poisoning the sick person. Some really do extend life, for decades even.  (Some don’t do much of anything.)  But none are more important than clean water, exercise, and PEZâ„¢ to human health.
  • Most really expensive diagnostic tech. Sure, some of it is awesome, but I’m not sure an MRI machine is all that awesome.

What societal changes are actually hurting health?

  • Cheap food. Yeah, it’s a paradox.  Starve or be fat.  Sue me.
  • Automatic stuff.   As a whole, we have to do much less work than 20 years ago.  Much, much less than 40 years ago.  And 100 years ago?  Oh, my.  Elevators replaced stairs.  Natural gas replaced firewood.  Cars replaced bikes.  Exercise drops through the floor.
  • Climate controls. I’ve got a theory that if you turned off the air conditioning and the heat in your house you’d actually be healthier.  But this theory will never be tested because I have The Mrs., for whom climate control is a right up there with free speech and free shotguns.  Thankfully she likes it about 60°F in the house all the time, too.
  • What is in Doritos?  40 different ingredients, many of which have never been incorporated into the diet of a human until the last 50 years.  What’s in a steak?  Cow, which we’ve been eating as soon as we developed spears.  Because steak is worth building a spear and chasing a wild, untamed giant auroch through the forest.
  • Lack of genetic culling. I’m not in favor of this as a policy, but it is a fact that the genetic pool is degraded over time when people who would have died out reproduce and pass along defective genes.  Let’s look at me:  I wear glasses, and developed the need about age 20.  I would have made a crappy nomadic warrior, so, unless I was smart, I would be squinting at the horizon while Ugg and Trevor chased the hairless caribou across the frozen tundra of the African veldt.  And no food for my family.  So we died off.  But wait!  This is 2018, and I’ve got lots of kids because I don’t have to squint, but glasses?  Yeah, that’s a thing for half my kids.  Ugg and Trevor had kids with keen eyesight.  Again, not a policy since I like my life and the kids I have, but as we save more people with health issues like my nearsightedness that can be passed along genetically?

Like anything, there are good and bad effects of changing our civilization.  Without agriculture, we never get to the Moon, but we also never get Nicholas Cage movies.  A tradeoff?

nicteroid

Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps

“Yeah. See, my cousin is getting married down at TJ, man, so he calls the immigration on himself.”

“But why?”

“So he can get a free ride, man.” – Up in Smoke

shaguer

This will all make sense, baby, trust me.

This is the second post that I’ve really thought a very long time about, and read a lot about.  Illegal immigration is a difficult topic, and one that’s certainly one of the most polarizing topics in the country today.

I’ll start out with the end conclusion:  unrestricted illegal immigration is devastating both to the illegal alien and to the country entered, and is a phenomenon sure to cause amazing pain across the world.  Now that the Band-Aid™ is ripped off the wound, let me further note that illegal immigration is currently considered the top problem in the United States, and certainly is up there in many European nations.  I’m pretty sure it’s not considered a problem in California, since, you know, weed.

I won’t attempt to discuss specifics of this issue from a global situation – in reality, even though I read a LOT of news, I’ll admit my knowledge of the on-the-ground impacts in Europe is limited.  I could talk about it, but it would be the equivalent of a nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding – sure I’ve read about it . . . .

“But,” you say, “John Wilder, this is a nation of immigrants!”

Nope.  Not even close.

What became the United States was a colony, specifically a colony of Great Britain.  A colony isn’t a group of immigrants, it’s the growth of the home country by extension.  In this case, the original colonies were founded by British companies operating under British law and eventually British colonies.  The British brought their independent legal system, common law, system of representative democracy, religion, and culture, or at least that’s what the Saturday morning cartoons said.

You may or may not like the British, but the places they colonized remain the most free places outside of Europe.  Here’s the Freedom House map of political freedoms in the world today (CC by SA, 4.0):

1280px-Freedom_house_freedom_of_the_world_2018_map

Thankfully, they didn’t mandate that you drive on the wrong side of the road to be free.

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Groovy, baby.

And British culture and religion formed and shaped the politics that led to the American Revolution.  The belief in ordered freedom, that laws stood above all men regardless of birth (i.e., a King was subject to law as much as a commoner), that commerce should be fair, and corruption was to be frowned on.

corruption

Amazingly, you can see that lack of corruption is tied to . . . wealth!  Amazing!  Part of the way to being wealthy is to not be corrupt.  Who could have predicted that? CC-BY-4.0-DE, Transparency International

walled world

Here’s a map that shows where the wealth is, based on this website (LINK) by Theo Deutinger.

Let’s sum this up:  The British language, culture, and religion was the vat that held the Special Sauce® that became America.  In this particular “melting pot” it was British culture, plus the inheritance of Western Civilization that produced the slightly different culture we have here, and it fits in pretty well with the rest of the productive world.  The United States is not a nation of immigrants; it’s a former colony that has created a variation on the themes that have (so far) been the most successful the world has ever seen.  (Note to the Chinese instructor in the year 2230 making fun if this comment, it seemed to make sense at the time.)

So why not have immigration?

Well, I never said no immigration, even though immigration is by its very nature creates tension, and is part of the basis for the balkanized United States that I wrote about in (The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths) and still feel is likely.

Want me to prove that?

The reaction to the following ad, when it appeared in 2008 was, to put it mildly, relatively positive south of the border, and relatively negative north of the border.

vodkamexico

The tensions are currently greatest with Mexico since that country is putting the largest number of unassimilated immigrants into the country, but at different times the tensions have run high with other ethnic groups – the Irish certainly, and around the turn of the last century immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe led directly to the Immigration Law of 1924.

This particular law mainly set ceilings that aimed to preserve the existing ethic makeup of the United States – of particular note, immigration of Hispanics was less regulated, as they were considered not as Hispanic, but as European.

Eventually this policy was reversed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which led to an increasing proportion of the foreign born in the country – now at over 13%.  This was about the proportion that led to the Immigration Law of 1924.

immigration-population-highest

But hey, if they’re legal, they’re American, right?

Well, no.  It takes more than just a stamp on a piece of paper to be an American.  Let’s run a thought experiment – The Wilder family decides to move to . . . someplace in Western Europe, say, Denmark, mainly because they love hot dogs and pastry.  We become citizens!  Are we Danish?  No.  We’re Americans who moved to Denmark and became citizens.  Well, our kids are Danish, right?  No.  They’re the “kids of the Americans.”  They’ve been raised by people whose culture is clearly not Danish.  Okay, their kids?

Maybe.  And that’s in Denmark, where we have genetic background from, and it’s a culture pretty similar in corruption levels and social standards to the United States.  I’ll note that Denmark has just put into place restrictions on immigrants who will have difficulty assimilating to Danish culture – Denmark isn’t a big country in either area or population, and the Danes like Denmark just the way it is, thank you very much.

denmark

Being a citizen is more than a piece of paper – it requires assimilation, it requires ties.  It requires buying into the culture and religion (not that you have to join that religion, but you have to respect the way that it forms and shapes the psychology of the country).

And that doesn’t mean that having the desire to “get to a better place” gives anyone the right to move to a new country.  That economic incentive would thus justify that 75% of the world would have the right to move to a Western country.  Also, if the immigrant is wanting to come here only for economics but is otherwise uninvested in the culture?  They will bring their old culture with them – the very same culture that strangled their economic opportunity at home – the borders of the United States doesn’t hold mythical properties that make those that show up prosperous – the culture and religion do.  The United States isn’t a magic bullet – it’s just got a great combination of freedom plus restraint, planning, and trust that derive from religion and culture.

And large clumps of unassimilated immigrants aren’t really Americans, regardless of where they were born or what their passport says.  Technology has allowed foreign-born populations to live with television stations from home every minute of the day – learning English is now not required.  And since they don’t learn English, the only jobs open to them are decidedly lower tier.  This keeps them on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and also displaces lower-skilled Americans.  The relatively recent immigration enforcement phenomenon has led to much lower unemployment.

wee britain

An example of one such cultural enclave in the United States that must be rooted out.

People from different cultures also assimilate at different rates – back to the Denmark example.  Danish culture would be pretty familiar to the Wilder family, but if we were to try to assimilate into, say, Chinese culture?  We know nothing useful for assimilation there.  Literally nothing.  The Mrs. and I would be rather hopeless, The Boy and Pugsley less so, but every day for them would be a titanic struggle to assimilate to a 3,000 year old culture with vastly different norms.  But that’s unlikely to be an issue – China, a country of over a billion people, approved only about 1,500 green cards last year.  Like an invitation to arm wrestle Queen Elizabeth®, those green cards amazingly hard to get.

But let’s ignore reality: what happens if everyone in the world moved to China?

Well, if you desire diversity – that would be the death of it.  Diversity doesn’t flourish when you pull everyone from every culture into the same country – that’s the exact opposite of diversity, and the result (after the inevitable wars) is homogeneity – a single monoculture.  And diversity has huge value, because as different populations have time to grow in (relative) isolation, interesting genetic things can happen, like clusters of genius, or clusters of resistance to certain diseases, or the near superhuman powers of the Sherpas or the Wilder clan.

Here’s what I just said, put more eloquently by physicist Freeman Dyson from his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe:

It is not just an inconvenient historical accident that we have a variety of languages. It was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly. Rapid evolution of human categories demanded that social and biological progress go hand in hand. Biological progress came from random genetic fluctuations that could be significant only in small and genetically isolated communities. To keep a small community genetically isolated and to enable it to evolve new social institutions, it was vitally important that the new members of the community could be quickly separated from their neighbors by barriers of language.

So our emergence as an intelligent species may have depended crucially on the fact that we have this astonishing ability to switch from Proto-Indo-European to Hittite to Hebrew to Latin to English and back to Hebrew within a few generations.

It is likely that in the future our survival and our further development will depend in an equally crucial way on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. In the future as in the past, we shall be healthier if we speak many languages and are quick to invent new ones as opportunities for cultural differentiation arise. We now have laws for the protection of endangered species.

In many cases the smartest and most able people come on over to the United States.  That benefits the United States (in many cases), but what does it do to the country that sent those people over?  Does it make India better to send over people who are smart programmers and great leaders, or does India suffer from this? 

It destabilizes India, which, in turn, makes the world a less stable place.

The current mass-migration of peoples on the planet, regardless of their aims and difficulties, will end in violence and tears – there is no instance of a stable multicultural society in the history of mankind.  The longer it goes on, the more devastating the end will be.  But I’ve stopped worrying about that.  Too scary.  Now I just worry about fashion trends.

The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar

“Who the hell is Julius Caesar?  You know I don’t follow the N.B.A.” – Anchorman 2

Pompey

This is Pompey, the opponent of Julius Caesar.  Yeah, there’s no second place in history for “nearly became emperor.”  Thankfully, there was first place for “widest head in history” which he won, hands down.  I mean, seriously, how could this guy buy glasses?

Last week’s post was the first prediction about the coming future of the United States.  You can read it here (The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths) and another good post about the life of empires is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence).  Breakup was the first, and in my mind, still the most likely scenario.  But it isn’t the only one – there is at least one other possibility worth considering.

As I referenced in the post, there was a moment where Julius Caesar stood upon the banks of the river Rubicon and thought about his future.  As he looked at the shallow river he considered the orders from Rome:  at the banks of the Rubicon he was to turn over command of all of his legions.  Julius had four legions under his command in his conquest of Gaul.  But as he stood on the banks of the Rubicon, only the 13th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) was at his back.

Rubiconbanks

Caesar at the banks of the Rubicon.  Some say he thought weighty thoughts about how he could best govern Rome.  I wonder if he was thinking about what was on TV, or if Brutus accepted his Facebook friend request?

To cross without them would, he feared, most certainly end with him being tried for political crimes (mainly the crime of being more popular than the sole remaining counsel, Pompey).  To cross without the army, then, might mean that his long career for the Roman Republic would end in dishonor.  In Gaul alone, his legions had faced over three million men, killed a million of them, and enslaved a million more – not a record that generally leads to disgrace, but a record that still irritates the French 2000 years later.

Legend recounts that as Caesar decided to cross the river and conquer Rome, as his horse’s hooves went into the shallow Rubicon he said, alea iacta esto, or, in a less-metric language, “Let the die be cast.”  And it was a gamble – he was outnumbered.

Caesar’s refusal to be a political pawn set him up to do what no other man on Earth could do – he conquered the most powerful nation on Earth.  He transformed the Roman Republic after a civil war, and created the Roman Empire with him as the leader.  The Roman Republic would never again exist.

At the time of Caesar’s ascension to becoming “dictator for life,” Rome had become a Republic ruled by a small number of families, including the Bushes and Clintons those of Pompey and Cicero.  Historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes in his book Caesar, Life of a Colossus (p. 378), that, “The Republic had become dominated by a faction who ignored the normal rule of law and particularly refused to acknowledge the traditional powers and rights of the tribunate.”

The empire that Caesar helped create removed the instability of the late Republic, and replaced it with a more stable structure that lasted another five hundred years.

vercingetorix

Here is a painting of Vercingetorix, a chieftain who united the Gauls, throwing down his arms at Caesar’s feet.  This was painted in the 1890’s in France, and there are numerous historical inaccuracies in the painting.  Among them:  it’s unlikely that Vercingetorix would have had such a stupid mustache, and Caesar always had his iPhone® at surrenders listening to “We Are the Champions” by Queen on a loop in his earbuds.

The transition from Republic to Empire was completed within 20 years’ time.  Caesar put all of the rules in motion for his last name to become a title – the Roman emperors became Caesars.  The title followed to the German king – Kaiser and the Russian Emperor – Czar.  Think about that – your last name becoming synonymous with being an emperor for 2,000 years . . . “Wilder John the First” has an awesome ring to it, right?

But this is the other possibility for the United States:  whereas breakup into multiple states is likely the longer we go, there is still the possibility of an American Caesar, especially if the crisis is within the next 10 years or so while some shred of commonality can be forced upon us.  Sure, we won’t call him (or, much much much much much much less likely, her) “Caesar.”  We’ll probably call them “President” and pretend that the “for duration of the (endless) emergency” part doesn’t exist.

klingonemperor

If we have a female American Caesar, she will probably look like the picture above.  Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite.  Oh, wait, she does bite.  And that’s not autographed to me – I found this one on the Internet.

And notice that I said forced.  The way we get to an American Caesar is through crisis – real or invented.  A currency one would do just fine, and I’ve pointed out that a currency crisis is inevitable here (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse) and here (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck), it would certainly bring the “need” for a strong, popular leader to take the role of power to save us all.  We almost ended up with one in 1932, but thankfully FDR gave out as World War II was nearing completion – if it had been a younger, more physically fit man?  Yeah, it scared the heck out of America.  That’s why we had a two term limit in place for Presidents before Roosevelt’s corpse was cool.

History shows that people give up freedom to someone who makes promises.  Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and well, here’s the map from Freedom House.  Most of the world’s population lives under what would be considered a dictator.  Very little freedom.

2017freedom

But never in the United States.  Why not?

  • Historically, the United States has been driven by a core desire for individual freedoms and liberty. Those freedoms and liberties were specifically written into the Constitution, despite several politicians of the day noting that no government would EVER try to take these freedoms away.  The Bill of Rights has been a firewall against government power.
  • Separation of powers is another key. The President can’t make laws, only Congress.  The President can just refuse to sign them.  And the Supreme Court has the ability to call into question the Constitutionality of all of those laws (Jefferson argued the President had those powers as well).  These divided powers were intended to prevent the Federal government from acting unjustly.
  • As a further (and much stronger) barricade against tyranny, the states had significant power: they appointed Senators.  Without the Senate, no new law could be made.  The states further had delegated to them all powers not specifically granted to the Federal government.

But those are weakening.

  • The Supreme Court has made decisions that create new categories of rights of people to have stuff (the old Bill of Rights prevented government from doing things, not granting people rights to stuff). And recent rulings generally allow the government to do pretty much what it wants in most cases.  We’ve gone from a limited Federal government to a Federal government that can choose the size of your toilet tank and define what features you MUST buy if you buy a new car.
  • Separation of powers is eroded. Congress writes the laws, but bureaucrats from government agencies run by the President write the regulations that implement those laws.  Page after page of regulation.  81,000 in 2015.  Stack one atop the other?  A three story building’s worth of paper.  With that many regulations, everyone is guilty.  Everyone has done something wrong.  To go back to a Roman, Tacitus:  “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
  • States in the United States are little more than counties since Senators become popularly elected. Senators are just Representatives (Congressmen) with longer terms, and they don’t represent the states at all.

So, the stage is set – a collapse of the walls that kept a dictator from gaining power.  Now all that’s needed is a set stage.  As I mentioned above, a significant crisis will set that stage.  Maybe it’s actual civil war, as noted in the previous post, which is driven almost entirely by economic difficulties.  People don’t fight in civil wars if they the major problem they have is whether to go to the mountains or on a cruise for vacation.  Civil wars happen when people have nothing left to lose.

And when people have nothing left to lose, Caesar will (possibly) emerge.  You won’t look at him like he’s the bad guy.  Political lines will disappear.  I was watching the Netflix® remake of Lost in Space.  Not bad, but there was one scene that was so unintentionally silly I laughed out loud.

Space eels were drinking the space fuel that the space ship needed to move away from being crushed.  Plus, the space eels looked like they could kill people, too.  The husband went down to the ship’s 3D printer to print out a gun to save the family from the space eels.

Mom had the codes to the printer, and it wouldn’t print out a restricted item (gun) unless she said it was okay.  Then she harangued her retired Marine husband that guns weren’t necessary to fight the space eels.

Okay, you can have staunch anti-gun principles, but the second a space eel is going to eat your kids?  You print a dozen guns.

Your priorities change immensely after three days without food.  You’d be just happy to have a strong leader who will protect you.  A leader who will feed you.  And you won’t worry so much if you can’t criticize him, especially if you have food.

trumplandpng

There was some comment that the maps from the previous post didn’t show the great amount of land that Trump won during the last election.  Here’s a different version, represented by area.  Future battle map for a new Caesar?  Asking for a friend.

You’ll look at him like he’s saving you, which he just might be doing.  He’ll have songs written about him.  And if he does a good enough job?  He’ll be remembered for 1,000 years.  If he does a bad enough job, he’ll be remembered that long, too.

When (if) he rises to power?  You’ll applaud.

Possibility, Your Choices, McDonalds, and Your Responsibility . . . (and too many “Your Mom” Jokes)

“And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s.  And you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese in Paris?” – Pulp Fiction

DSC02743

This is a picture of the McDonald®’s shoe car, circa George W. Bush’s presidency.  Notice the French fries dangling from the rear view mirror.  Must be some sort of talisman that makes him attract your mom.

There is a brief moment at your birth, when every single possibility of who you will be, and what you can achieve is open to you.  If your genetics support it, you can do it.  You will never have more possibilities open to you than at that moment.  And, over time – slowly at first – those possibilities narrow.  Your life is a funnel, and the wide open end is the possibilities that you have on day one.  Eventually, that funnel narrows.  You make decisions that cut off possibilities – you decide to dedicate yourself to a single sport rather than trying to letter in three.  Possibilities disappear.  You decide to go to college rather than open a business.  Possibilities disappear.

Possibilities never reappear.  They were always there.  You can’t conjure them out of nothing, but you can fulfill them.

Your life consists of two things:  the choices you make (which determine the possibilities that you have) and time.  And your choices even determine how much time you have.  Choose wrong?  You lose a few options.  Want to shoot up heroin?  Chances are poor that you’ll live very long, unless you’re Keith Richards – honestly, I imagine that if you could isolate how to kill him you could make cockroaches AND mosquitos extinct with a single drop of that stuff.

But your life consists of your choices.

kaepernick

Some good choices, some bad choices . . .

Ray Kroc was the guy who got involved with a little restaurant in 1952.  He helped franchise it.  Kroc built it into a brand we all know today – his vision drove the entire process.  Ray Kroc is the single person most responsible for McDonalds™.  He created, single-handedly, the concept of a clean hamburger place where you could get a decent meal inexpensively and wouldn’t be afraid that bikers or rowdy teenagers would cause a scene in front of your family.  Sure, a dollar burger isn’t five star French cooking, but it’s a dollar burger in a clean restaurant with a clean parking lot.

What Ray was doing at the time he got involved with McDonalds® was selling milkshake mixers to the McDonald brothers (who owned the restaurant).  He looked at the hamburger shop and saw it had great possibilities.  He went to work with the McDonald brothers (named Ronald, Bono, and Sting), and eventually bought the brothers out.  Oh, and in 1954 when Kroc started with them?  Yeah.  He was 52.

He was a FIFTY TWO year old milkshake machine salesman, and let’s be real – nobody puts that as their career ambition under their senior picture in the annual.  And Kroc was trying to sell a dying brand of milkshake machines.  Like your mother, his machines weren’t very popular, and unlike your mother, they were expensive.

He didn’t create a single new possibility when he made the jump from being a travelling salesman – that possibility was always within him.

Ray made the choice.  He was going to do more, and be more than a washed-up 52 year old milkshake salesman waiting to collect social security.  Why didn’t he do it before?  Don’t know.  Maybe in 1954 he just got up feeling like he had nothing left to lose – at 52 you know you’ve got more weeks behind you than in front of you, and maybe he sensed he had to make something go.

I know that many people like to put the cause of their situation in life and give up.  And it’s easy to blame everyone around you.  It’s easy to blame society, or your mother (let’s face it, we all blame your mother) or genetics.

Sure, it’s pretty unlikely that Ray could have been competition for Elvis in 1952 – Ray was too old.  Likewise, his shot at pitching for the Yankees® was finished.  He was past his prime – he would have had to start much earlier, rather than, you know, fight in World War I.

Those possibilities were closed down for him – but the reservoir of possibility was still open for him to lead a restaurant franchise system that’s served billions of meals and created an entire industry – without McDonalds® there wouldn’t be a Burger King™ or a Wendy’s©.  And if he hadn’t created that industry, there’d be no place for your mom to work.

Kroc eventually bought the San Diego Padres®, so there’s an argument that not all of his ideas were great, although he bought that team (when he was 70) for $12 million dollars, roughly as much as a current Major League® ballboy makes per inning.  As of today, that team is probably worth about a billion dollars.

So, I guess even that was a good deal.  True story:  when he told his wife he bought the San Diego Padres™ she asked, “What, is that a monastery?”

Friday is the day for health posts, so why am I posting about choices and Ray Kroc?

You are where you are today, almost entirely due to the choices you’ve made in your life.  If you feel that your situation is beyond your control, and blame everything else besides you, you’re done.  And those are a horrible people to hang around with – always whining and complaining about how the world is out to get them and the deck is stacked so they cannot win.

People who believe that the world outside controls them and their ability for success have what’s called by nerdy psychologists an “external locus of control” – and that’s not a good thing.  People who feel that way are stressed out all the time, and it shows in the results:  people who an internal locus of control believe the ball is in their hands.  The have better jobs that pay more.

Perhaps, oh, just perhaps, people who think that their output matter – work harder, and get better results.

So, short version?  Get your big boy pants on (or big girl panties on) and understand that your life is what you make of it.  The crappy time that you’re having at work isn’t because people are out to get you.  Unless your last name is Kennedy.  Then?  Yeah, maybe.

mommcdonald

 

The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths

“Well, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.  l would be surprised if the affiliates were concerned about the lack of an old wooden ship, but nice try.” – Anchorman

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So, I guess that my “Secretly Wants To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic Society” secret is out of the bag?  I guess I need more dehydrated food.  And scotch.

(Part II of this series is posted at: The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar)

There are some posts where I know exactly what I want to say, and how I want to say it.  Often, those are fairly well scripted, either with a handwritten first draft or a set of researched bullet points.  I’ll expand those into the full post.  Those are nice.  The structure has been created.  The post flows out.

Some topics are topics that are well planned out (I actually plan the blog topics about three months out) and fit.  Some topics just hit me with a blast of inspiration and nearly write themselves.

And some are difficult.  Very difficult – they occupy headspace I know that I’m going to write about them, but the issue is so difficult that I want to make sure it comes out how I want it to come out, that it doesn’t inadvertently come out in some sort of ham-handed way.  This is one of those.  I’m sort of pleased with the results – it came out the way I wanted it to come out, just like the ending to Breaking Bad, or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s last optometry appointment – he still doesn’t need glasses, yay!

Don’t know a great way to put this, but we’re (in the United States, and in Europe, though my read there is much murkier) heading towards civil war.  In Europe, civil war means dissolution of the EU and (likely) expulsion of large numbers of immigrants.  But I’m not European, so I won’t go too far speculating about them.

I’m not sure if it will be a decade off or longer, but I put the arrival of this war as soon as 2024, and as late as 2032.  Not really any longer than that.  What would stop it is a prolonged, total war that would challenge the very existence of the United States.  External threats and an external enemy are the best way to create unity (and second term for a president named “Bush”).  And that’s not good, because a prolonged war always leads to extremes, and we have extreme weapons – in that way, a civil war might be the best-case scenario.  But I digress – back to civil war.

Why?  Again, this won’t be exactly the same civil war as THE Civil War – there are some facets that will rhyme, but others that won’t.  The major theme is division.  And what better way to show that than with . . . maps.

Here’s a map from Colin Woodward and Tufts University, and Brian Stauffer, depicting the 11 cultures that they contend make up the United States:

11nations

So, there’s this.  Accurate?  I would personally draw a line between those who like Star Wars® instead of Star Trek™.  Those people are awful.

And it’s not just culture, the Woodward/Tufts map is pretty accurate at predicting where we are today politically.  Here is a map of the Clinton/Trump 2016 vote count:

vote-by-nation-2016

The redder you are, the more Trump.  The overlay of the Woodard/Tufts map is clear.  These cultures are significant, and real, and explain NASCAR®, country music, and the inexplicable popularity of PEZ®.

And I think I’ve graphically made my case for there being a division.  But how significant is it?  Well, research shows that it’s pretty one-sided.  Liberals (at least young ones) are significantly more close-minded than conservatives:

civilwarstats

Yes, you read that right.  45% of liberals would be uncomfortable with a roommate with opposing political views.  12% of conservatives would be uncomfortable.  I guess this means that liberals don’t like diversity?

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar was ordered back to Rome.  Quite specifically, he was ordered to leave his army, the 13th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) beyond the border of the Rubicon river, which was considered the northern border of Rome.  He didn’t, and then spawned a civil war that (ultimately) led to the end of the Roman Republic and Caesar being proclaimed Emperor.  To this day we celebrate this event by ordering salads in Caesar’s name.

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The last time the 13th Legion was active, I think they got in line in front of me at Arby’s® in Boulder, Colorado after a Van Halen© concert.  Man, when 4,000 people are in front of you in line, you’d expect they’d run out of roast beef.   They did.  Thankfully they had lots of panda and koala bear left.  They also ran out of Horsey Sauce L.  They claimed they ran out of horses.

So we have divisions that are significant, enduring (these divisions aren’t new), and deep.  Yet for decades we haven’t had a problem.  Why are we at the Rubicon?

Well, we were ethnically much more uniform than today.  The United States in 1965 (at the time of a major change to immigration policy) was 85% white.  Now?  62%.  That’s a pretty significant change, and one that impacts politics.  Again, cultural divisions lead to war.  And the easiest division is what you look like.  I know that people like to fight and will pick any old reason to fight.  Religion in Northern Ireland (Protestants and Catholics), football in California (Raiders™ vs. 49er’s©), and really important stuff (Star Wars© vs. Star Trek™).  People will fight each other to the death because we don’t like each other’s hats.  Historically, multi-cultural societies . . . fail.  Spectacularly.  (Again, this is not an indictment of any individual group, just a reading of history.)

But civil war in the United States is . . . very singular.  The Civil War was built upon philosophical differences (with very human consequences).  Issues involved in the Civil War include slavery, states’ rights, and Northern industrialism versus Southern agrarianism.  But one of the underlying causes might just be that map of the 11 cultures shown above.  The Northern states were built on the Puritan ethic.  They make up the Boston/New York corridor and the swath heading west from that.  The Southern states were built upon scoundrels – the Irish malcontents and Scottish reivers that immigrated later.  They’re the ones that make up Greater Appalachia.

So what will cause a civil war in the United States?

The first thing is the philosophic divisions listed above.  The desire for the freedom of individual determination is still strong in the Deep South and in Greater Appalachia and the Far West.  That hasn’t changed.  The Puritans in Yankeedom and the Left Coast still very much want to make their values the only values that matter.  Note the graph above that shows relative discomfort with diverse exhibited by liberals.  Ouch!

These groups have hated each other since the 1600’s.  And it will never go away, especially as long as the New England Patriots® keep winning Super Bowls™.  The two sides have never spoken the same language.  The time that both North and South united?  After the Civil War, the North (magnanimously) allowed the South to keep their heroes (Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis) and they were transformed into American heroes rather than insurrectionist traitors.  Not a bad trade.

There were places that held out – the first celebration of July 4th after the Civil War in Vicksburg was on July 4th, 1945.  Admittedly, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4th after a horrific siege and devastating defeat for the Confederacy.  It took 80 years and winning not one, but two world wars for Vicksburg to celebrate national unity on a regular basis on July 4.  These divisions remain to this day.

But what else will cause this war?

The Fourth Turning – it’s time.  Here’s a previous post (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) that explains this timing in more detail.  The last generation to have experience the horror associated with total war, with the mobilization of the entire economy of the United States to defeat a foe is . . . dead.  The youngest boys that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day are 95 today.  They control nothing.

Our leadership, our population has no connection to those that saw the horrors of a continent ripped apart by war.  They led our nation (and all of the nations of the West) and their actions were held in check by the horrors that they had seen.  Now their experiences no longer temper the actions of the leaders (and desires of the people) to avoid apocalyptic levels of violence.

Let’s continue with economics – I’ve discussed before that the current economic practices have a time limit (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck).  One cause of civil war (not necessary, but certainly an exacerbating cause) is economic collapse.  When people have more to lose than to gain, they won’t fight.  As Janis Joplin said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  And when people are ruined?  They fight.  See the French Revolution (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be).

Economics will be a trigger, but not the underlying cause of division listed above.

So, we have a civil war.  What’s the end look like?

Breakup.

I don’t think that the things that have held us together as a nation will continue to hold us together.  What values do we have in common anymore?  It seems like . . . none.  Let me elaborate.  I could do a post on each of these (and likely won’t – other people cover this on a regular basis, so unless I have a Wilder take, I won’t):

We don’t speak the same language at all, anymore.  Even though I have friends that don’t (at all) agree with me politically, I fear that they aren’t the norm.  The end state isn’t 11 countries.  It’s probably (at least) four.  I can see a Heartland State, an East Coast, a West Coast, and a Northern Mexico.  Los Angeles will be Mexico.  Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle will be East Coast.  The Boston/Manhattan/DC corridor will be East Coast.  Northern Mexico will be as shown as El Norte.

But on the bright side?  Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t need glasses!!! How awesome is that?

Pournelle’s Iron Law, or, Why Conspiracy Isn’t Needed to Explain the Stupid

“An independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion.  Above the politics and bureaucracy that undermine the integrity  of government-run spy organizations.  The suit is a modern gentleman’s armor.” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

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When we lived in Alaska and Texas, we learned that this was what the citizens thought of bureaucracy.  And taxes.  And regulations.  And postage stamp increases.

We discussed Dunbar’s Number a few posts back (LINK).

To refresh from that post:  Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe.  After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people.  The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which is all three of your inbred relatives and the 247 from your wife’s side of the family.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death.  Why?  .

Dunbar’s number has other implications as well.  We can’t work as tribes anymore, because the major feature of tribes is massive, wanton bloodlust on a national scale.  Tribes don’t trust the law to help deter another tribe – no.  Tribes kill to solve traffic disputes.  So, to work around tribal violence, and to avoid nepotism, bureaucracy was created.

We all love to hate bureaucracy, but the nice thing about those long line at the DMV is that they prevent the tribe from Pixley killing the tribe from Hooterville over who got their license first.

But is there a darker side to bureaucracy?  Yes.

Jerry Pournelle was a wonderful science fiction writer that I loved reading.  His collaborations with Larry Niven (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye) are amazing novels that made me turn a page a minute when I read them as a kid in the back of the bus on the half-hour ride to town.  Dr. Pournelle also worked on the numerous defense department projects, and was a science advisor to President Reagan.  Dr. Pournelle was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, as his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) caused the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself attempting to keep up with our technology.

So, he’s kinda pivotal to stopping nuclear war.  What did you get done in the 1980’s, hmmm?

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Okay, the title was just genius.  The writing’s pretty good, too.

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Possibly the best science fiction novel of the 1970’s, if you don’t count Richard Nixon’s autobiography.

Dr. Pournelle also made the following observation:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Pournelle picked on government – it’s known for bureaucracy.  And it’s clear that NASA® has ceased to have spaceflight as part of “what it can do” when Elon Musk can put his car into orbit on a rocket more powerful than anything designed by NASA™ since it was run by the Germans we kidnapped after World War II.  And Musk did it for less money than NASA® spends attempting to fix a launch pad.  It’s sad that isn’t a joke – it’s true.

NASA© is now run by people whose main job in life is . . . having a job.  They hire massive numbers of people, so they have a reason to be a manager.  Then they need a bigger budget, and crowd out all of the work the agency was supposed to be doing.

Pournelle’s observation is true for businesses as well as government programs.  I’ve seen managers fight to spend every dime they could in the last month of the year – just so they could justify their higher budget request for next year.  I’ve seen people move from department to department to department until they found one that wasn’t responsible for doing anything measurable.  Then they’d stay in that department for the rest of their careers.  Which, I guess, describes Congress perfectly.  But I digress.

Where I live, if you cut down trees and branches, and it’s cold, it’s completely legal to have bonfires that are visible from the moon.  My next door neighbor and I used to burn these on a dark night, new moon, when the temperature was around 40˚F (354˚C) and watch the flames lick the night sky.  He’s younger than me.  And we live in a state where you don’t need to stand in line for hours for a burn permit.  All you need is wood, leaves, branches, gasoline, lawn chairs, a match, and sufficient quantities of Bud Light®.

My friend and I started talking about politics (this is pre-Trump).

“John, when I look at this whole mess we’re in, it almost seems coordinated.  It seems like the government agencies (he works in the highly federally regulated banking industry) want to put the small banks out of business.  It seems like a plot.”

My response:  “That’s too simple.  It doesn’t require for there to be a conspiracy.  Let’s look at your business.  Do they regulate you exactly the same as large banks in New York?”

Neighbor:  “Well, yes.  They just have tons of staffers that can answer the bank regulator questions.”

John Wilder:  “And you told me you worked for a while as a banking regulator?”

Neighbor:  “Yes.”

John Wilder:  “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on an infraction with a small bank?”
Neighbor:  “Never.”

John Wilder:  “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on a big bank?”

Neighbor:  “I did.  I got in a lot of trouble.  It was why I quit.”

John Wilder:  “The big banks own the banking regulators – they’ve captured the regulators and the regulators only do what the big banks want them to do.  Every regulator knows that their next job isn’t with the federal government – it’s with the big banks.  Don’t rock the boat.  Small banks don’t matter.  Never mistake that a conspiracy is present when incentives are in place for those same regulators to think that they’re on a job interview with their new boss.”

Neighbor:  “I guess that’s why you never got in trouble for letting a bank not get in trouble.  Only by pushing the rules too hard.”

John Wilder:  “The people in Washington don’t really care about the outcomes of their regulations – the best pollution regulations came out forty years ago and cost very little for the companies to clean up 98% of their pollution – air, soil, and water.  The last 2% cost billions.  And that’s great with the regulators – they want to have a good budget and a great story to tell to Congress when budget time comes around.  The fact that the pollution that they’re cleaning up isn’t really pollution, costs billions to “clean” and is having zero impacts on anyone?  That’s beside the point.  Bureaucracy acts to save itself.  Right or wrong don’t matter.  What matters?  Department budgets and staff size.”

John Wilder continues to bloviate:  “There isn’t a conspiracy.  It’s a bunch of little people making themselves important.  Nobody makes themselves important by cutting regulations.  They make themselves important by adding new, complex regulations.  And they increase their value when they go to work from some company.  Heck, I was told by a guy that the main author for solid waste regulations wrote them in such a complex manner that they’re nearly incomprehensible.  He did that so he could get a high paying job afterwards because he’s the only one who knows where the loopholes in the regulations he wrote are.”

Neighbor:  “So, did we really land on the moon?”

At this point my neighbor was killed by a tribe of NASA™ ex-engineers.  If only we had a police force and a judicial system . . . hmmm.

Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be

“Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years… Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade… Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall… Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil… Mexico plunged into revolution… “ – Red Dawn (1984)

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Maximillian Robespierre, the guy who started it all . . .

On December 3, 1792, Maximillian Robespierre, a lawyer and French revolutionary, gave a speech about the fate of the King, Louis XVI.  Robespierre complained that he was totally against the death penalty in all cases, except this one.  He ended his speech:  “With regret I pronounce this fatal truth: Louis must die so that the nation may live.”

Eventually, it came to a vote on January 18, 1793 – Louis was convicted to die.  Two days later, Louis XVI, King of France, was executed.  But the precedent was huge.  A monarch could be arrested by his people and could be executed based on a public vote.

Who, then, was safe?

Robespierre and the leftist (this is where the name “leftist” comes from – the revolutionaries sat on the left side of the assembly before the revolution) government had a strong bent that advocated communes, and nothing less than the complete and total repudiation and remaking of all of French society.  Religion was abolished and replaced by “rationality” – the statues of Saints were actually guillotined.  Common measurements were replaced by the metric system (you see why I’m suspicious of it).  You could no longer refer to a man as “monsieur,” or a woman as “madame” – they were now simply, “citizen.”  Even the names of the months weren’t sufficiently revolutionary – they had to be replaced with new names, and each month would consist of three 10 day weeks.

The idea that replacement of all social norms would be difficult led to a simple solution:  kill anyone who opposes you.  Robespierre said:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland.

So, we’re killing you because it’s virtuous.  And boy, were the French virtuous!  The definition of a good revolutionary kept changing as the social norms of France kept changing.  Between June of 1793 and a year later (they were calling July “Thermidor” by then) nearly 17,000 had been executed because they were insufficiently committed to the revolution and the shifting definitions of a good revolutionary.

The last victim?  Robespierre himself.  He was executed on July 28, 1794, along with his 21 closest buddies.  When Napoleon Bonaparte took over a few years later – everyone was pretty happy when he called himself Emperor – it seemed far better than the tyranny of the leftists.

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Robespierre’s execution.  Looks festive!

But the French were amateurs when it comes terror.  For real downward death spirals, you have to get to the Russians and the Chinese . . .

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This might look familiar . . .

I blame Marx.  Marx was born some 200 years ago (as of this writing) and has been, in my opinion, the worst thing to happen to the world since they invented Spandex®.  Thankfully, Marx and Stalin never wore Spandex®, though rumor has it Mao wore it when he pretended to be Aquaman®.

After the Soviets finally took over Russia, for twenty years Stalin waged a purge against his own people in his attempt to create a perfect Marxist society.  People who had “a little more” – Kulaks, were killed, starved on purpose.  This was called the Holodomor, and killed between 4 million and 10 million of his own citizens.  Stalin’s totals?  During his lifetime it is likely that he was responsible for deaths (often brutal) of 15 million (low end) to 25 million (upper end).  And it came about from the same sort of internal purification that the French demanded – Stalin even compared himself to Robespierre on more than one occasion.  One story, popular during the day, was of a young Soviet boy, Pavlik Morozov, who supposedly denounced his father to authorities.  It was said that Pavlik was then killed by his family, who were then . . . executed.  Statues of Pavlik were erected everywhere.  His school was a shrine that students from across the Soviet Union would visit to see such a heroic boy.  Stalin himself was reported to have said, “What a little swine, denouncing his own father.”

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The heroic little swine.

For a great taste of what Soviet life must have been like during Stalin – have a read of an excerpt from a novel here (LINK).  It’s what leftism turns into over time, and the deaths are only a part of it – it’s the ultimate ripping apart of social and family structures that allow any sort of resistance to complete government control.  Stalin was excellent.

But if the French invented it and Stalin made use of it, Mao made a life of it.

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Mao, at a meeting to learn from the master . . . .

Mao was responsible for 40 to 80 million deaths during his lifetime.

And in Mao’s China, families were ripped apart, and the structure was ripped apart.  His “Hundred Flowers” campaign appeared to ask for other ways to govern China.  In reality, it was looking for anyone who disagreed with Mao, so they could be killed.  Mao’s cult reached its height of absurdity with Mao’s Mangoes.  Yes, you read that right – Mao’s Mangos.

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Pictured:  One of Mao’s Mangos.  Really.

In 1968, the minister from Pakistan gave Mao some mangoes.  Why?  We don’t know.  But Mao didn’t like mangos, so he split them up and sent them to various places (colleges, factories, government offices) and they exploded like a cultural grenade.  People wrote songs.  They formed up in lines to praise the mangos.  They made perfect replications of the mangos when the mangos began to rot.

How bad was it?  A dentist was executed when he said that the mango he saw “looked like a sweet potato.”

Executed.  And not for being a bad dentist.

Because he made a crack about a Pakistani fruit.

Posts occur to me sometimes because I had a thought that struck me as funny.  Or a memory I though it might be helpful to share.  Or an observation that might change a life.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen several editorials in several newspapers and magazines lionizing Marx and communism – some saying that his ideas are the ideas that will save the planet.  And I hear politicians and television announcers saying nearly the same words as Stalin or Lenin or Mao.  And I read that we need to give Marx another look.  I find particular horror in this failure to learn anything from history – as communism is a slow death – a death first of morals, and then of truth, and then of millions of citizens.

The verdict of history, by the numbers shows that no ideology ever, ever, has proven to provide more death to the people it governs than Marxism.  By any mechanism of objective judgement, it is by far the most reprehensible system of government ever created.  Nothing else is even close.

But we keep coming back to this idea – that others should take responsibility for us, and that we should create a society based on envy.  Thankfully the Marxist paradise of Venezuela, gifted with nearly limitless oil wealth shows that Marxism can work.  Oh, grinding poverty?  Malnutrition?  Immense corruption?  Guess the right people aren’t in charge.  It isn’t real communism.

Well, maybe someday if the Marxists kill enough people it will end up working . . . I bet they get it right in California – they’ll be there soon . . .