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“My God!  If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

So you should save your money because a recession is coming.  A recession that’s caused by too many people saving money . . . ?

It was the middle of December.

I looked across the desk at my boss.  He had called me in to his office, asked me to close the door, and looked very uncomfortable. Not “Abraham Lincoln at a play” uncomfortable, but more “Pope in the woods without toilet paper” uncomfortable.  It was unusual to see him look uncomfortable, because this boss was an old hand, very calm.  I had worked for him for about 18 months at that point, and we had a great relationship, so he wasn’t going to fire me right before Christmas.  Unless he had figured out who what put the Gummy Bears™ in the paper shredder.

“Umm, John, the company is giving you a bonus.”

I perked up.  I liked the sound of a bonus, but didn’t like the “Umm” so much.  “Umm”, in my experience, is a verbal placeholder that means, “This is going to sound good, but really isn’t.”

“Great!”  I actually was enthusiastic, even given the “Umm”-modifier.  Bonus is a great word.

“Well, the board of directors voted on the bonus structure and the bonus pool back in October, about sixty days ago.  And they chose a specific number of shares for each employee.  And when they voted, the shares were worth seven times what they were today.  I just want you to know I value you, and the company values you.”

What was left were the unspoken words . . . “I hope you’re not insulted.”

No swimming pool this year . . . .

I wasn’t.  I could multiply my bonus by seven and see that someone, somewhere, liked me when the corporate board voted.  Sometimes it really is the thought that counts.  Except when I get deodorant for Christmas – that seems more like thought that indicates a passive-aggressive criticism about my hygiene.  And comments like this when The Boy introduces me don’t help:  “This is my dad, he doesn’t drink quite as much as his poor hygiene might indicate.”

When I finally cashed in that stock five years later, it was worth 15 times what it had been on the day my boss looked so upset.  By no means was it a life-changing amount, but I’m still pretty happy.  What changed to make the bonus worth so much more?

The economy.  That puny stock bonus was given to me in the middle of the Great Recession.  Five years after that, the company was worth a LOT more.  I sold my shares (I kept the certificates in my underwear drawer), paid my income taxes on the stock, and was certainly not insulted.

We sit at the start of 2020.  By 2030, I can assure you we will have gone through at least one recession, and probably more.  Right now, the United States is in the single longest economic expansion in its history, passing the 1991-2001 economy in duration by six months.

I hear the economy is so rough that Bill and Hillary Clinton shared a room on their last trip.

Doubling an all-time record?  It certainly won’t happen.  It cannot.  No matter how the Federal Reserve™ manipulates the economy, it can’t go that far unless they give everyone roofies and tell them that they have twice as much money in the bank as they actually do.  Besides, we shouldn’t go that long without a recession.

Why?

Let’s look at the economy as if it were a natural, physical system.  Generally, physical systems are not continuous; they operate in of cycles.  Trees grow leaves in spring, through the summer they gather nutrients, in the autumn the leaves fall, and in winter the tree is dormant.

Companies follow a cycle, too.  A company is founded.  It starts in business, sometimes growing, and in the end, it’s finally bankrupt or sold off and then it’s dead.  For example, the top 10 companies in the United States in 1917 were:

• US Steel
• AT&T
• Standard Oil of New Jersey
• Bethlehem Steel
• Armour & Co.
• Swift & Co.
• International Harvester
• DuPont
• Midvale Steel
• S. Rubber

What are the top ten companies today?

• Apple
• Alphabet (Google)
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Berkshire Hathaway
• Johnson & Johnson
• Exxon-Mobil
• JPMorgan Chase
• Wells Fargo

How many of them are still in the top ten?

One, kinda.  Exxon used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, so at least we know the Rockefellers are doing okay.  That keeps me up at night, worrying that the Rockefellers might have to drive their own cars.

How many of the top 10 companies today will be in the top 10 in 50 years?  How many in 100?

If it’s raining, that might be a drizzly bear.

I’ve shared this opinion before:  recessions are good for the economy.  Bankrupt businesses are good for the economy.  Are they painful in the short term?  Certainly.  But they provide a great service – they clear out the companies that don’t add value to the customers.  Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) had a great post a while back that describes the impact on physical systems when they’re overly managed and constant.  He used the example of salmon streams that had been dammed, that no longer experienced spring flooding from snow melt.

From the post:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning.  It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet.  The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed.  They were a desert for salmon fry.

Before dams were installed across every stream, spring flooding would fill old channels with rock and gravel and would cut new meanders and channels.  The flooding would flush the silt out of gravel beds.  Stream beds were braids of old, crisscrossing channels.  Not only did they look like strips of bacon from the air but they intercepted huge amounts of sunlight and the gravel beds provided outstanding habitat for the pantheon of invertebrates that were the base of the food chain.

The Fed™ is trying to manage our economy like that salmon stream, making a nice, constant flow.

A decade is a long time without a recession.  Based on the past experiences of the 2001 and 2008 recessions it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the longer you wait to address a problem economy, the bigger impact it will have on people’s lives.  Heck, the longer you wait to address any problem, the worse it becomes.

Want a housing bubble?  This is how you get a housing bubble.

If the Housing Bubble had popped in 2004, the associated recession would have been much smaller than the nearly economy-ending Great Recession of 2008.  If the 2001 recession would have happened in 1998, it would have certainly pulled some of the inflation away from the Dotcom Bubble and perhaps avoided making the Spice Girls® celebrities entirely, and no one would know who Scary Spice, Posh Spice, Sporty Spice and whatsherface were.  I guess we’re safe now that they’re all Old Spice™.

We sit in the year 2020 with severe economic unrest a certainty in the next decade.  What year?  I’m not sure.  And I’m also not sure I’d trust anyone who says they know the exact timing.  But it is coming.  2020?  2021?

Don’t know.

This coming recession has had a decade to build up.  That decade has seen significant bubbles building in, well, everything.  One of the biggest bubbles is in corporate profits.  Let’s pick . . . insulin.  The price of insulin has doubled in five years.  Does it cost more to make insulin today?  Almost certainly not – the techniques to make this insulin have been known and perfected for decades – it probably costs less to make it.  Is it better insulin, somehow new and improved like the Super Bowl® without the Patriots™?  Nope.

Well, then, why does it cost more?  So Eli Lilly and Company® can increase corporate profits.

I like profits.  I think that profits are good for society for a number of reasons.  They allocate funds to effective businesses during competition.  If the McDonald’s® in your town sucks?  Go to the local Burger King©.  Effective management and good products are rewarded.  Bad management is punished, all without anyone having to lift a finger.  That’s the beauty of capitalism – everyone votes on which businesses get to stay in business, every day.

But Eli Lilly and Company™?  They are raising the price of Humalog® insulin because they can.  How do we know this?  They’ve recently introduced a new insulin with the same exact formulation as Humalog™, but with a new name, Lispro™.  But the price of this new rebranded insulin?  Half.  For the same exact stuff.

Eli Lilly and Company© didn’t do this in the past, but they do it now because investors demand not only profit, but profit growth.  How long is this sustainable?  Not forever.  But it’s a great example of how in 2020, instead of just a housing bubble, we have a bubble in corporate profits.  We have a bubble in money (which is the only way to get to negative interest rates).

Will Eli Lilly and Company™ start charging double the current price to bring the total to $1000 a bottle for Humalog®?

No.  They can’t.  There is a cap not on what diabetics will pay, but on what they can pay.  There is a maximum profit that can be obtained.  Period.  You can’t rent a house for $20,000 a month if the average wage is $15 an hour in your neighborhood, just like you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck.

Obscure, I know.  But it felt right.

Without the cleaning that a periodic recession brings, junk builds up in the economy.  The average recession historically happens every three years or so.  When the recession of the Tumultuous Twenties® hits?

It will hit hard.

The outcomes are unpredictable.  The Federal Reserve© interest rate is ~1.5%.  Back in the 1990’s, it averaged 5.75%, so the Fed™ had the ability to lower rates to stimulate the economy.  That mechanism is gone.  What’s left, printing money?  Tax collections are down due to tax rate cuts.  This is a good thing.  But government spending is up, too.  Add them together, and we’re looking at deficits of a trillion dollars a year or more . . . forever.  We’ve already slipped into Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).

That means there’s a limit on how much more money we can print.

The trigger for this future recession will be blamed on some other event – the 2001 recession was blamed on 9/11, even though the stock market started to fall well before September.  Our minds like explanations, so we sometimes create them even when they don’t exist.  Maybe it’s the Great Internet Blackout of 2020 that caused it.

Mark my words:  This economy will be cleaned up by a recession, probably a big one that we will find difficulty in spending our way out of.

Don’t get caught in the flood.

And if someone offers you free money?  Smile and take it.

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police.  One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (2005)

I hate to make fun of India.  I heard they lost power at their largest mall, and hundreds of people were stuck on the escalator for hours.

I was originally going to write about another topic, but then I saw this article (LINK) about how the Army® was testing a fighting force using a system that combines soldiers, flying drones, and land drone vehicles and I couldn’t resist.  The short explanation of the system is that flying drones are used for real time reconnaissance, and followed up with both living troops and land drones to attack an enemy.  Those are followed up by McDonalds® and Starbucks™.

Based on the simulations that they have run so far, a group of soldiers augmented with the drones was able to attack a defending group of 120 soldiers and win.  This isn’t unusual – defending soldiers lose all the time, just ask the Trojans.  But in this case, the attackers were a platoon-sized group of only 40 soldiers.  They also claimed nearly zero casualties in the simulation, although one participant ran out of GoGurt©.

This version tested well, except in certain areas of Asia.

This is opposite of all of general wisdom about conventional warfare.  General wisdom (based on hundreds of years of us killing each other) says that a competent defending force has roughly a three to one advantage – that is, 120 defenders is equal to 360 attackers.  In practice, if troops were available you’d probably nearly double the number of attackers to 600-700 troops to overwhelm the defenders and minimize attacker losses.  Yet, the Army exercises showed they’d be able to defeat those 120 defenders easily with only 40 soldiers if they remembered to pay Comcast® for Internet.

The reason that this works for the attackers is fairly simple – the flying drones give nearly super-human information about where the adversary is.  For soldiers, this is nearly a super power – to be able to see and know where the enemy is without them knowing where you are.  It provides a significant advantage so attacks can be precisely planned and ambushes detected.  The Army has recently ordered 9,000 Black Hornet® drones from FLIR™ and they’re going into service – at a price tag of $15,000 each.

Every single picture of this drone I found was someone looking lovingly at it as it floated above their hand. 

The other type of drone mentioned were land drone systems.  When they first ran the simulations, the Army commander would get information from the flying drones and then bring up the troops and land drones, but that allowed the adversary to know that the attack was coming, so in later simulations the attacking commander tried to bring up the air and land drone forces for a simultaneous attack.  So what did the land drones look like?

My bet is that they will something like the picture below, a combination of weapons and sensors so that the drone can attack without exposing humans.  Sort of a combat Roomba®.

Want an A.I. uprising?  Because this is how you get an A.I. uprising.

In the article, the author casually noted that the augmented drone/soldier combination wouldn’t be all that effective against Russia.  Honestly, I think he’s being optimistic.  When attacking any state-sponsored military, the countermeasures required to detect and stop the drones are generally far cheaper than the drones themselves.  The only way to completely stop the countermeasures is to increase the autonomy of the drone systems to the point where they’re making a lot of decisions by themselves, or by air dropping lots of vodka for the Russian troops.

Again, defense costs less than building an attacking force.  A great list of ways knock out drones is here (LIST), H/T to the Docent over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) for the link.  He always has pretty interesting links and commentary, so consider dropping by on a regular basis.  History has shown that advances in military technology are generally short-lived.

In many ways, it is nearly certain that the Russians could easily field sufficient electronic deterrents to knock our small drones out of the air, and also potentially use them against us by using our radio communication signals to pinpoint attacks.  The Russians routinely jam our GPS® signals, and it’s likely they’re the reason that my Wi-Fi goes out at 3:00AM, just when I’m trying to upload a post.  Fighting Russia, the advantage probably goes away.  In some senses, increased technological complexity can work against soldiers in a big way – that complexity must be supported by logistics – the average soldier carries twenty pounds of batteries into combat.  If there aren’t spares?  What then?

Similarly, China would likely be immune to such attempts at force multiplication, since they’re making most of our electronics anyway and have probably inserted code that turns our electronic hardware into Pokémon® games if we ever declare war on them.  Though anecdotal evidence indicates that the quality of the individual Chinese troops would be stunningly deficient when compared with the average soldier of the United States, I believe that they have no intention of ever fighting a stand-up war against the United States.  Any attacks China makes will be surprising and asymmetrical and probably focused against Western economic systems.

So who is the Army thinking about using this technology against?

It probably won’t change the outcome in Afghanistan, where the Afghans are fighting a guerilla war using 100 year old rifles and improvised bombs.  They don’t depend on holding ground to win – they just have to tire the United States out.  Drone technology already is saving their lives, but it won’t win the war.  And if it won’t (probably) work as effectively against Russia or China, who are we preparing for?

The Cubans?  Venezuela?  The Great Heathen Penguin Army of Antarctica?

I’m pretty sure that Barney wore it better . . .

My fear is that the answer is that the technology might be used here in the United States, not by our soldiers, but by our police.  Whereas there are plentiful and relatively inexpensive ways to detect and/or defeat drones by a State actor, the idea of using them to control and defeat a semi-organized and relatively low tech group of citizens seems more likely.

The police are already becoming a military force.  In 1980, there were 3,000 SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raids a year.  In 2016 there were 50,000-80,000 such raids yearly.  Over $5 billion worth of military equipment has been transferred.

In fairness, he also took a Tour of Italy at the Olive Garden®.

I wonder how much of that technology is in Virginia?  But I’m sure that if citizens give up their guns, the police will turn all that stuff back in.  Right?

What, the cops have no intention of turning it back in?  Maybe the Great Heathen Penguin Army has the right idea . . . .

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Magnum Force

I assure you, playing Risk® with Clint Eastwood is difficult.  He brings real artillery.

Ma Wilder was into pot.

Pots, really, ones made out of clay.  Which led to the next step:  Ma Wilder wanted a pottery wheel.  Why?  She was making pots, and the closest public pottery wheel was 45 miles away.  Heck, Ma Wilder and some bored doctor’s wife were probably the only people who had a pottery wheel in the whole county.

Being that Pa and Ma Wilder had enough money to pay for Wilder Redoubt, feed me, and to pay for the pottery wheel, Pa bought a pottery wheel for Ma.  Since this was before Amazon® Prime™, Ma Wilder ordered it out of some magazine, probably Bored Doctor’s Wife’s Hobbies Quarterly, and a group of burly UPS® drivers drove an hour out of their way to deliver the wheel.

What arrived wasn’t a fully assembled pottery wheel – it was the parts.  This particular contraption was heavy – it had a large concrete wheel several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick.  The idea behind a pottery wheel is that you get the whole contraption spinning, and the inertia of the heavy wheel would keep it going while you turned a $3.00 piece of clay into a lopsided $1.50 pot that only a kindergartner’s mother could love.

It was Ma Wilder’s goal that they name a radioactive turtle after her in 300 years.

Pa Wilder spread the pottery wheel parts out on the shag carpeting in my bedroom.  My bedroom had a door to the greenhouse where Ma Wilder wanted to set up her pottery studio, so it was nearly a logical place to put the pottery wheel together.  Pa Wilder had many things that put him in a good mood – but assembling pottery wheels was not one of them, and I could tell that this particular Saturday morning he was not amused.  Grumpy, I believe is the term, but grumpy doesn’t convey the sense of hate that I felt emanating from him onto the parts arrayed on the floor like the internal organs of a Muppet® after an autopsy.

This particular Muppet® kermitted suicide.

I sat quietly watching, as it was my bedroom, after all.  I think I was in fourth or fifth grade.  Even then, I liked to build models – model planes, model spaceships, model tanks, model ships, and model cars.  I loved the feel of the parts fitting together, the minor polishing and trimming to make them fit perfectly, and look perfectly.  Modelling to me was intuitive, as was assembling most mechanical things.  It also was a great protector of my virginity.

While Pa Wilder made many wonderful things in his woodshop, they were things he designed, things that he built in his mind before he ever let his saw cut into the wood.  I still have a bookcase he built when he was in high school – a beautifully crafted piece of furniture that was assembled without a single nail.  But when it came to building things that other people had designed, especially mechanical things?

Yikes.

So, as I sat and silently watched him cuss the pottery wheel together – mostly various forms of “damn thing” and, certainly no f-bombs – I tried to psychically will him to put the right Tab A into the correct Slot B.   Eventually he did.  The pottery wheel was built well – all the pieces were well manufactured, and fit perfectly when they were assembled correctly.

I was pleased to find a picture of the exact same model.  Not included:  Pa Wilder.

Pa Wilder, at times, looked like he was attempting to build a trap for some sort large aquatic animal, say, a beaver.  It was difficult watching him put uprights in upside down.  He stared at the end caps that covered the tubing like a Neolithic caveman attempting to understand quantum mechanics written in a language entirely derived from rap lyrics, yo.  But, he finally got most of the parts together.

Then it came to the final step – assembling the motor.  This particular pottery wheel had an attachment, a motor that you could install so you could skip kicking the concrete disk and use electricity to power up the wheel to optimum clay-wasting speed.  Pa was attempting to install it.  I watched him, frustrated, try to put it in exactly backwards.  I finally burst.

“NO!  It doesn’t go that way.  You have to turn it.”

He looked down at the instructions, grimaced, and looked back at me.  He held out the motor assembly.

I took it.  I fitted it to the upright.  “It fits this way – you have to adjust it so when you push your foot on to this pedal,” I pointed, “That it pushes this switch down.  That turns on the motor.”

This is the pottery wheel equivalent of vaping.

He pulled out the wrench and tightened down the bolts holding it in place.  He smiled.  Rather than being mad at his odd son, he was pleased.  And as he looked on the completed pottery wheel, he was happy.

For about a minute.

“Dad,” I pointed at the door to Ma’s new pottery shed, “I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to fit through the door.”  To his credit, he still didn’t drop the f-bomb.

It went together more quickly the second time.

Different people have different aptitudes.  And while Pa Wilder was wonderful at many things, like running a business and not killing his son for waiting to tell him about door widths, there were things he wasn’t good at.  He wasn’t mechanically minded at all, and seemed to have a “deer avoidance radar” during hunting season.

That pottery wheel frustrated Pa Wilder to no end.

There was a time when I thought I could do anything.  I felt, flush with the hubris of youth, that I was invincible, bullet-proof, and a dozen feet tall, and that was before I discovered tequila.  But after a while, I realized that there were jobs that, while I might be able to do them intellectually, I would never be able to do them for a living.  Well, I might be able to do them, if they took all of the sharp things out of the room, and maybe covered all that tough drywall with padding so I didn’t hurt my head when I slammed it into it.

Accountants have a heck of a time getting to sleep – if they’re counting sheep and miss just one . . . .

Let me give you one example:  accounting.  I would suck at that.  I saw an accountant chase $1.37 for a day.  Why?  Because the books had to balance.  It didn’t matter that the $1.37 was out of about $700,000.  Nope.  Still had to find it.  So, accountant is out.   I could name a dozen more jobs I would hate doing.  But for me, knowing what I’m unsuited to do is victory enough, especially since I can do other things, like polish Johnny Depp’s philtrum and uvula after he’s had a hard night with the “ladies”.  I don’t spend time trying to fix my accounting weakness, rather, I spend time trying to learn and get better at things I’m good at, which people might also pay for.

A large part of avoiding frustration in life is understanding what you are good at.  More importantly, understanding what you are good at that will make money for you.  As good as I might be at making models (and I’m not anymore, but 14 year-old me was), there’s certainly no demand for people who make models.  Unless they’re Cindy Crawford’s parents.

Cindy spent an hour staring at an orange juice can – it said “concentrate.”

Yes, you have to be who you are.  Doing things that are fundamentally unsuited to you, your skills, and your personality will kill you.  And, no, getting up at 6:30AM or even 5:30AM every day is not fundamentally unsuited to you.  And no, working hard and sweating is not a skill you don’t have – we all have that skill.  Your personality?  Yeah, it can include giving everything you have each day.

None of this is an excuse for anyone to not meet their obligations or wait in Mom’s basement until they get the invitation to interview as CEO of a video game company.  In fact it’s the opposite.  Most people would suck as the CEO of a video game company, and very, very few would be any good at it.

Speaking of being not good at something . . .  .

After Ma Wilder got her pottery studio going, she decided to do the natural, maternal thing.  No, not drink wine until 11PM while listening to Tom Jones®.  She decided to show me how to use her pottery wheel.  My attempt at making a pot was similar to Pa Wilder’s attempt to put the pottery wheel together – except Ma looked dimly upon me cussing.

After my one, very sad and utterly talentless pot, Ma Wilder relented and let me go trout not-catching.  It would be called trout fishing if I ever caught one, but it was a great way to spend the day down by the river.  Fish?  Never caught one there.  But there were lots and lots of rocks.

At least I can skip a stone.  Does that pay very well?

 

For Fran:

“It’s my pot pie!” – South Park

After you’ve killed the last vampire, I guess it’s you’ve got the final Count down.

5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.

As tempted as I am to move the clock because of the party-line impeachment inquiry vote, I’m going to hold at Stage 7 this month.  A more formal set of structure needs to be in place to get to Stage 8.

The French Civil War lasted a very long time.  Those guys just couldn’t win.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Civil War II Goes Mainstream –– Updated Civil War II Index – Starvation (via Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report) – Links

Welcome to Issue Six 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 II, on the first Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK) and Issue Five is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Just once I’d like to come back and report that things were looking good for censorship, that, hey, life is getting better.  October 2019 was not that month.  In October, Twitter® made the announcement that they were not going to accept advertisements from political candidates anymore.  That’s good.  Last election I voted based on yard signs.  I think I voted for my realtor.

That sounds fairly even-handed.  But Twitter© engages in soft censorship as well, limited the reach of many tweets, most of them on the Right.  If asked, I’m sure the Twitter© would indicate, innocently, that “it was the algorithm” that was responsible.

That’s a pretty little lie fancy way of saying, “we don’t like your speech so we’re going to tune the computers to allow less of it.”

Also deleted this month was Red Ice, a 330,000 subscriber channel on YouTube®.  Since that was a main source of income (via sales) it hits the creators economically.  Paypal® banned “street artist” Sabo.  They’re hanging on to his money for six months They paid him after the bad publicity (LINK).  In the article, they have a link to a poster he was selling on (Regr)Etsy™?  Funny, not available on (Regr)Etsy© anymore.  It’s almost like he’s . . . censored.

Do not, for an instant, think that payment sites, video sites, and social media sites are anything but Leftist sites.  If you are on the Right, they want you to be silent.  If you won’t shut up, what condition do you think they want you in?

I love this video – it shows the real way that censorship works – when the ideas are censored, your mind replaces the censored material with something that was likely more exciting than the original material.  Censorship will backfire.  I too, love to BLEEP all day.

Civil War II Goes Mainstream

I heard once upon a time that couples who don’t divorce, don’t talk about divorce.  It’s as if the idea of the divorce wasn’t even allowed to enter the room.  The logic, I suppose, is that once you talk about divorce, it becomes one step closer to being real.  In that way, a divorce in New Mexico, a tornado in Oklahoma, and a civil war in the United States all have something in common – someone is losing a trailer home.

On more than one occasion this month Drudge® (yes, I know) has featured stories on the United States being near the outbreak of a Civil War.  Most of the articles really didn’t read the study; in it, it asked, on a scale of 1=peace and 10=war, where are we in the United States.  This is exactly the scale I developed in Issue One of the Weather Report.  I have us pegged at a 7.  So does the average respondent in the linked (LINK) survey.  I don’t know any social science jokes – I took chemistry instead.  And my chemistry jokes never got a reaction.

So, yeah.  7 out of 10 on the Civil War scale.  It’s not just you.  It’s not just me.  This poll shows that everyone feels we’re headed this way, and most people feel we’re about the same distance from crossing into chaos.  I hope it’s not chaotic like the Mexican Civil War where they ended up fighting Juan-on-Juan.

This month we are one year out from the 2020 presidential election.  I think if the Democrats had any confidence in one of their candidates beating Trump, there would be no official impeachment inquiry in the House – this is an emergency effort.  If you go back and read my previous posts, I was pretty skeptical that we’d see impeachment proceedings in 2019/2020.  But here we are, so take all of my predictions with a grain of salt.  There are several outcomes we can review at this point:

Senate Clears Trump, Trump Wins:  Probably the most likely scenario as of this writing, and also the most amusing.

Outcome:  I can foresee that one way where we tiptoe through this crisis without collapse is that Trump wins and somehow avoids the twin specters of public Balkanization (Left and Right) and economic downfall.  More likely?  Four more years of divided government, where Trump is thwarted at every turn by activist judges that hate (certain) laws being enforced with increasing deficit spending.  Expect increasing street violence.  Regardless:  Trump will be the Last President (Trump: The Last President?).

Senate Clears Trump, Trump Loses:  The second most likely scenario, although in this case I simply cannot see a Democratic candidate that won’t whither under the Twitter®fied gaze of Trump.  However, Silicon Valley® is doing everything it can to pull all of the oxygen it can away from Trump – it has deleted account after account of followers on the Right for comments that followers on the Left routinely get away with.

Outcome:  This emboldens the Left.  They think they have already won.  I would anticipate an attempt to immediately erase everything Trump did, up to and including stacking the Supreme Court.  Attempting to push too far, too fast tips the economy.  Things get spicy, quickly.

Elizabeth Warren would lose the election to a drawer full of socks.  I think she can taste defeat.

Senate Convicts Trump, Democrat Win in 2020:  The third most likely scenario.  Which democrat?  Elizabeth Warren?  Creepy Joe?

Outcome:  This also emboldens the Left, perhaps even more than Trump being acquitted.  In this they would have their dream of the last three years come true.  The Democratic party is already split, between the Legacy Left (think Biden, Pelosi) and the True Left (think AOC and the Teen Girl Squad).  This puts the True Left into control.  The True Left likes what’s going on in Venezuela and Cuba.  Gotta break a few eggs to get to the Worker’s Paradise, right comrade?

Senate Convicts Trump, Republican Win in 2020:  The least likely scenario of the four, and also the weirdest of the four.

Outcome:  The Republicans would be in disarray after a conviction.  In fact, I think in more ways than one, Trump has ripped apart the Republican party from within and exposed people like Mittens Romney as the “me too, but let’s wait a year” wing of the Democratic party.  I’d be surprised if Mittens isn’t writing articles titled, “The Conservative Case for Redistribution of the Means of Production to the Proletariat,” and, “Transgender Surgery for Minors – A True Conservative Value.”  The Left would be even more outraged that yet another election was stolen, and would push back even harder.

Are there other scenarios?  Sure – we are in a time where people think we’re 70% of the way to Civil War.  That could lead to things normally reserved for Third World countries where the President-for-life wears a fancy uniform with lots of medals.  Coups.  Military juntas.  Trump calling out tanks in the streets.  A ninth season of Game of Thrones.

Updated Civil War II Index

I’ve been teasing graphs for two months – here they are, with full bikini treatment.

Violence:

Up is bad.  Violence is up overall during the year.  I would have expected that it would have peaked in the summer, but, no.  It’s staying high.  I expect real riots in June and July of 2020.  Potentially there will be riots at both national conventions – the Republicans in North Carolina, the Democrats in Wisconsin.  I expect that the Republican National Convention in 2028 will be held in a Ramada Inn® in northwestern Montana.  The Democrats?  Probably a reinforced bunker in an undisclosed location.

Political Instability:

Up is bad.  Surprisingly, down a little from September, but still quite high.  Actual action on impeachment will increase this, especially if resolve fails in the Senate.

Economic:

Down is bad.  Weird things are going on in the economy.  Interest rates in many countries are negative(!), yet mortgage rates went up last month.  High interest rates in mortgages will lead to housing price declines.  And the last time that happened . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in.  Trebuchets would get that number to zero in an afternoon.

Starvation (via Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report)

“As in all war, food would be weaponized in a Civil War II. We don’t have to go back to antiquity for examples, more recent events provide a long list . . . .”

Remus talks about this in issue 600 (LINK) and issue 601 (LINK) of Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report.  These would be good to read and share with friends.

History and cold calculation suggest food would be a weapon in a Civil War II, one of many, but of prime importance long term. Civil wars have long gestations, go kinetic suddenly and get complicated in a hurry. We have no firm knowledge what would set it off, who would be actively involved or how it would end. But the outlines are repeated well enough to guide our preparations.

The ruling class already treats middle America as this century’s Untermensch. Nothing is off the table in a civil war. Seizing the nation’s food would be an obvious move. Expect them to deploy troops to secure big ag and the necessary transportation facilities, destroy anyone who got in their way and terrorize potential troublemakers. But there’s a limit to even the deep state’s resources. Prudent survivalists in the far hills wouldn’t warrant their attention, they’d be more likely to trade shots with desperados than find themselves in a firefight with regular forces.

Food is the indispensable survival prep. At minimum this means a secure long-term stash of high calorie food sufficient to outlast the initial violence and privation without relying on resupply. Call it a year, maybe two.

The United States is one of the most spoiled blessed countries on Earth.  Calories here are cheap and abundant, and very few people in the United States have ever felt real hunger at all.  Starvation is such a non-problem that there is no statistics for people in the United States who have died of starvation.  The biggest complaints is that people live in “food deserts” where the only things they can get are processed foods, which make them fat.  More like “food desserts” than food deserts.

Are there hungry people in the United States?  Certainly.  Are there many starving people?  Certainly not.  Obesity in children is a far bigger problem.  Oops.  Was that insensitive?  Larger problem?

Beefcake!

Hunger is a potent weapon.  Food is, by any historical calculation, amazingly cheap now.  Stocking up 3,000 calories per day for a person for a year could be done for $500 – if you really like rice.  Flour is cheaper – $250 or so.  For a year.  It’s not a lot of variety, but it’s way better than starving.  Here’s a great website that breaks down food on the basis of how many calories you can buy for a dollar (LINK).  How much would you like to have if the trucks stopped coming to the local store?

Check out The Bison Prepper (LINK) for ideas on frugal prepping when dollars matter.  Time might be short.

Links

As always, please feel free to send me links or leave them in the comments!

Glenda on Globalism.

Adam on Multiculturalism.

A book suggestion from Montefrio at The Burning Platform.

From Mary Christine at The Burning Platform:  Frank and Fern.

From Vote Harder at The Burning Platform – 500 survival links.

A video from Mark at The Burning Platform.

An article from Mark at The Burning Platform on Lenin.

From Ricky:

Feels Like Civil War

America’s Domestic Viet Cong

Permanent Coup

“To a New Yorker like you, a Hero is some type of weird sandwich, not some nut who takes on three Tigers.” – Kelly’s Heroes

And the phasers won’t be set on “hug”.

I was surrounded.  There were four of them.  They were younger than me, and one of them looked faster.  Maybe.  But I still had the upper hand.

I knew their weaknesses.

The reason I knew my foes so well?  They were my kids:  The Boy, Pugsley, and Alia S., and backing them up was Wee, my grandson.

I’ll have to admit, it was fun.  There was lighthearted bantering all around, like when Alia mentioned to Pugsley that he should beware of stray currents, since he was grounded all the time.  Half of the comments were digs at me and my parenting style over the years – tales of early mornings, tales of me saying “it’s not good enough” and tales of me, in general, giving them a task and letting them figure out how to do it despite them building up Chernobyl-like levels of frustration.  Yup.  I’ve seen each of them melt down.

I enjoyed every second.  I enjoyed even more looking at them, and seeing that each one of them was highly competent in their own way.  I felt proud.

Much later, Alia S. went off to bed while several of us were still up.  Most notably, Wee was up.  Wee, being small, wanted to watch Spiderman©:  Into The Spider-Verse™.  I haven’t seen it, though I’ve heard it’s good.  In the way of the grade school set, Wee wanted to watch it for the second or third time…that day.

The great thing about being Grandpa is that they’re not your kids.  I gave him a bowl of ice cream and looked for a movie that I wanted him remember watching with Grandpa Wilder for the first time.  Star Trek®:  Wrath of Khan showed up on the suggestion list.  It had been years since I saw that movie.  My bet was that it was perfect for a “Saturday night at Grandpa’s” movie.

And at Christmas?  Why not the Wreath of Khan?

It was a perfect movie for Saturday night.  It was also stunningly free of the Leftist social messages that every movie seems to be pushing in 2019.  The Wrath of Khan was simply an attempt to make a good movie that engages the audience, where characters learn and grow, and where the good guy (Kirk™) is really a good guy.  The bad guy?  Yeah, he’s really bad, and it’s established quickly.  Khan® puts tiny mind-control armadillos into Chekov® and Captain Redshirt™ and laughs at their agony.

Khan™ really is a bad guy.

And the good guy displays virtue, and wins in the end.  Is the victory at a cost?  Certainly, but Kirk© knows that, and his character changes as a result of that cost.  I was stunned at how much better that movie was than most movies being put out today.

After finishing Wrath of Khan©, Netflix™ suggested Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers®.  The Two Towers™ was always my favorite book in the Lord of the Rings® trilogy.  When I was a kid growing up, the middle school library didn’t have The Fellowship of the Ring™, so I picked up the worn paperback copy of The Two Towers®.  It was amazing.

It started in the middle of the action – no preamble, no explanation, and slowly I pieced together what the characters were and what their relationship was to each other.  When I finally got a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring©, I was a little bit disappointed.  It was good, but not really necessary for the story.

Wee was sleepy, and I hadn’t seen a three hour movie in a while, so I clicked on The Two Towers®.  I had watched it when it first came out, and I was wondering if I’d enjoy it.  I wasn’t disappointed.

I won’t get into the plot deeply, because Tolkien wrote backstories for his characters running for thousands of years.  But there is one sequence that I wanted to mention.  The king of Gondor had been slowly seduced (partially by magic) by his advisor, who was named Gríma Wormtongue.  With a name like that, how did the king not see betrayal coming?  Rule 2:  Never take a resume from a person named Wormtongue.  What’s Rule 1?  Never trust anyone who likes the band Flock of Sméagols.

Remember, Rohan is really a nation of immigrants.

Anyhow, due to his condition, the king wasn’t cognizant of his son dying, and that his kingdom was being overrun.  Who was overrunning the kingdom?  Orcs, under control of the bad guy, and humans that had been convinced that Rohan really belonged to them.

At the last minute, Gandalf the Just-In-Time shows up and wakes up the king from the magical spell possession (edit by JW, see comments), and kicks Wormtongue out of Rohan.  As the king prepares to defend his people, surrounded by an army of ten thousand, he says:

Where is the horse and the rider?  Where is the horn that was blowing?  They have passed like rain on the mountains, like wind in the meadow.  The days have gone down in the west, behind the hills, into shadow.

How did it come to this?

The Mrs. keeps muttering words like, “Hobbits”, and “Gandalf” and “Mordor” while she’s dreaming.  She keeps Tolkien in her sleep.

The line, “How did it come to this?” was the kicker.  A realization that he and his entire nation, their culture, their way of life, were in danger of being destroyed and this single battle was all that was between them and all they had ever known being snuffed out forever.

Not an original – found at “Know Your Meme”.

The Two Towers is certainly not a movie that could be made today.  It’s not the violence – there are many movies that are more violent that have been made.  It’s simple:  the subject matter is far too controversial.  Groups of good men fighting against evil, standing fast, holding the line.  Tolkien warned against using his stories as allegory for the modern world, but it’s difficult not to see parallels.

The Mrs. wasn’t there to watch the movies, but she had seen them before.  When I mentioned they were good in a way that today’s movies aren’t, she said, “Good guys are good guys because of what they do, not the color of their skin, their gender identity, or who they choose to sleep with.  They are good guys because of their actions, not the boxes they check.”

The Mrs. and I had discussed Friday’s post (How One Texas Court Case Defines The Future For A Seven Year Old . . . and The United States), and she had picked one line that I had discussed prior to writing it, “11 out of 12 jurors in the Lone Star state voted that a seven year old boy should be allowed to become a girl, is a sign not that society is collapsing, it’s a sign that society has collapsed.”

“That was the part I was wanting to hear about,” The Mrs. said.  “Why has society collapsed? Why did the jury vote that way?  Were they afraid?  Or, worse yet, did they actually believe that was an appropriate way to treat a seven-year-old boy?”

Collapse Cat is never wrong.  If only I would have sold that Sears® stock like he told me to . . .

I think it’s both.  In my county, Trump received nearly 90% of the vote.  But I noticed something strange – there were few signs supporting him in front lawns.  I had nine signs, as I recall.  Why nine?  Because I didn’t have ten.  Even in a deeply Right part of the country, there is some hesitation to show that allegiance in public.  Showing Leftist views?  Not a problem, even here in Modern Mayberry – in pride day everything is as rainbow as Lucky Charms®.

I think people are afraid to push back against a society where the media does everything it can to make people on the Right think they are alone, that they are a small number, weak, divided.  That’s not by accident.  Again, 90% of the county voted for Trump, but I saw only a few dozen Trump signs.  I did see one Obama/Biden sign even though they weren’t running, but I think those people just wanted to advertise they were gun free because they wanted Allstate® to buy them a new couch.

Sort of like this.  H/T Kenny

The deeper rot is the change in public opinion.  How many jurors really felt that it was a good idea to let a seven-year-old make choices like that?  I cannot think of a fact that would make me agree to that disposition.  We live in a country where, too often, parents leave teaching to the schools, especially on the crucial issue of values.

Today we are taught in our schools and in popular culture to value everything and everyone.  There are no bad guys, just misunderstood people.  9/11 wasn’t the fault of the people who brought the towers down, it was the fault of the United States.

That’s clearly wrong.  There are bad guys.  There is evil in this world.

And there is good.  I’ve seen it in the eyes of my children this weekend, when they roasted me in the basement.  Perhaps that really is the answer – have children, raise them well, and watch as your children come back to see you.

And make fun of you.  But that’s okay.  I loved every second of it.

“It means we’ll find allies on every side. Look at them, the poor wretches are just waiting for someone to lead them in revolt.” – Flash Gordon

When I was a bartender a ghost of a dog with a missing tail showed up after we closed.  I had to kick him out.  We didn’t re-tail spirits after hours.

From Issue Number One:

5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Response to Z-Man –– Updated Civil War II Index – John Mark/Ramzpaul Interview – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to Issue Four of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are a bit different than the other material at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), Issue Two is here (Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links), Issue Three is here (Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links), and Issue Four is here (Civil War II Weather Report, Issue 4 – Violence, Censorship, and Beach Volleyball).

Violence and Censorship Update

Censorship and violence rhyme.  Okay, maybe they only rhyme in Urdu, and then only if you’ve been drinking, but when you get one, you generally get the other.  And now?  Ideas are being regularly censored.  Let’s look at one tiny example that I came up with off the top of my head:

I went to Google™ and typed in “google changing votes” and nine of the top ten results were all how that was a “false,” “bogus,” and “wrong” theory based on “Trump Cranking the Crazy to 11.”

Wow.  Certainly Google® is unbiased, right?  Well, just to check, I went to Bing©.  Yeah, I know that Bing™ is the ugly step-puppy of search engines, but what does it say when I type in “google changing votes”?  “Google and Big Tech bias hurts democracy.”  “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election.”

My friend?  Hell, I’m not even sure that Zuckerberg is human.

Huh.  It’s almost like there’s a bias.  Censorship consists not only of stopping publishing, but in 2019, censorship includes showing people only the facts and ideas that are “safe” – you don’t have to cut off access to the content unless it’s really popular and spreading.  All you have to do is bury the content in the irrelevant, and stamp down on it so it never has the chance to become popular.

Response to Z-Man

There is a blogger (quite a bit more popular than yours truly) known as the Z-Man, who operates the Z-Blog.  He posts frequently, and posts on a variety of interesting content.  If you haven’t visited, I’d suggest you give him a try – he has unique views on a lot of subjects.  I’ll warn you:  he’s not as funny as I am, but then again who is?  Okay.  Steve Martin.  And Dave Berry.  And . . . I want to stop playing this game.

On September 18, the Z-Man published a post titled “Thoughts on Civil War.”  It’s here (LINK).  For a TL;DR, I’ll throw in his concluding paragraph:

When you start to puzzle through it, the probability of an old fashioned civil war is close to zero, while armed rebellion is in the single digits. Things will have to change a lot for the conditions to be right. On the other hand, a new type of rebellion, one suited for the age and the sorts of people unhappy with the system, is increasingly likely. Middle-class mom giving company passwords to rebel hackers is a likely scenario. The revolution of the future will be low-grade and mostly non-violent.

See?  Not a single joke in there.  I’m definitely funnier.

On the Right, we tend to quibble a bit about definitions of things.  One common one is what a modern civil war in the United States will look like.  It’s unlikely to involve cannon and massed men and horses unless the ghost of Confederate Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart picked a fight with the ghost of his father-in-law, Union Major General Philip St. George Cooke over who lost the remote and it spilled back over into Virginia again.

And you thought Thanksgiving at your house was tense.

Will there be armed conflict?  Earlier on in the post, Z-Man makes the points that there is no need for the Left to revolt.  They already own the institutions, so why would the Left revolt?  The biggest threat, he felt, was from white suburban dudes.  Those were precisely the people who are kept in debt, and absent a significant economic dislocation, they wouldn’t risk anything in today’s world.

That’s not really the case.  At the Bundy Ranch hundreds of people showed up to stop the Bureau of Land Management from taking Bundy’s cattle.  Was this something I loaded up the Wildermobile® and took the streets to help with?  Nope.

In retrospect we should not be surprised when things we make collapse.  Docks for instance, but they mainly fail due to pier pressure.

Hundreds of people did, however.  With rifles.  As I looked at the pictures, I was surprised to see not only young men, but women, too.  And even more so, there were older men.  I’d expect that some of the men in camo had never been in the service, but I’d expect that many were.  The fact that Bundy was able to round up this many people to quite literally put their lives on the line for his cattle was surprising to me.

What surprised me the most was the number of old dudes with white hair out there.  While it wasn’t “nothing but old guys” there were plenty of people who were taking social security but were slinging an AR or a six gun and weren’t afraid to die.  I’m sure that they’re happy they didn’t die because none of them were married to my ex-wife, but they had seen how the Federal Government dealt with women and children at Waco.  They weren’t dumb.  They knew what the stakes were.  And they still stood there in an act of open rebellion against the government – a position the Left would call treason, since the Left views people as serving government, hence rebellion against government is treason.  The Right views the government as serving people, and open warfare against the will of the people is treason.

Which explains why we’re in our current mess.

I absolutely think that Z-Man is right, and we’ll see people throwing “sand in the gears” at various places when the rebels get Mom’s password.  Last year at this time I was skeptical – an active Civil War II represented a stage that was important enough to talk about, yet such a departure from the past it seemed unlikely that we would we see it.  We been stable for a long time as a country.

I’m still not certain that we will see a Civil War, but as I trace the developments of the last year I have become convinced that, while not inevitable, Civil War II is likely, and likely to be messy and filled with atrocity.  I think that it’s likely enough that I decided to publish this monthly update, which provides a way for me to view over time the ratcheting up of anger in the country.

It’s not been pretty – escalating violence, and escalating rhetoric.  Don’t count on your neighbor saving you, however.  And don’t count on pulling your pocket copy of the Constitution stopping the Leftists like a crucifix to a vampire when they show up at 3AM to take your guns.  Heck, your pocket copy of the Constitution won’t even work at 2PM when they show up at your work to take you into custody after a few of the 3AM gun collection parties go poorly.  As is commonly quoted at Western Rifle Shooters Association (LINK), “Your Constitution won’t save you.”

I emailed a copy of the Constitution to a friend.  I was hoping the NSA would finally read it.

As we have seen from previous Leftist Singularities (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), once a Leftist movement is started, the killing only ends when a leader, (Stalin or Mao, for instance) kill everyone to the left of them.  The Right has seen this, the Right understands this.

As I’ve stated since the start of the Weather Reports, the next step is establishing or taking over a governing structure.  While that may take several years, from what I’ve seen it’s coming.  When Federal power is overturned by a governmental structure, who overturns it?  Hint:  think marijuana.

Updated Civil War II Index

Economic:  +3.84 this month, +4.43 last month.  Plus is good.  Unemployment is slightly down – interest rates were slightly down, and the Dow was only slightly down.  I expect that October will be ugly in the markets, which will drag this down.  But I’ve been wrong before.

Political Instability:  -13% last month, -50% this month.  Boy, did I blow this prediction.  Here was my comment last month.  “As we get closer to the election, I would anticipate that political instability will continue to decrease as focus goes on to the candidates and away from tearing down the systems.”  Oops.  Every metric took a nosedive this month.  Every.  Single.  One.  A cynic would say that the Democrats can’t field a candidate that could beat Trump so they decided that they wanted to stage a coup in the open.

Interest in Violence:  +13% this month, compared to +8% last month.  This is a smaller increase than I expected.  A related metric showed a big peak after El Paso, dropping nearly immediately.

Illegal Aliens:  Down 28% last month to 64,000 (month over month).  That sounds great, but it’s still 50% higher than last year.  Maybe we need snakes and alligators?

Pretend I made a graph and this is it.

John Mark/RamZPaul Interview

John Mark made an appearance in the second edition of the Weather Report.  There was some commentary that his video was, umm, a tad unrealistic.  But he is thinking about the problems that we’re facing.  RamZPaul is like Cher or Meatloaf in that he’s a singer has one name.  He’s a pretty constant “vlogger” who produces frequent and fairly short six to ten minute videos.  But on the weekend?  Pull out the stops.  He has a program called “Happy Homelands” where he interviews people.  Recently, he had John Mark on.  The video is above.

The video clocks in at two hours, and is fairly interesting, although if you’re a constant reader of sites like mine, there will be a lot of overlap.  Rather than give a review, I thought I’d just share some of the ideas that I found interesting that were in the video or were inspired by the video.  Note – this video will disappear off of YouTube® after a while – RamZPaul will be pulling it down after a while because he won’t keep his content up too long – YouTube™ appears to periodically purge creators for videos they created years in the past even if those videos met the Terms of Service®.  Yup.  1984 was supposed to be a novel, not be part of the Google© Employee Handbook.

• Next step is creating a governance structure for the Right.   Governors?
• Focus of the Left is currently an Internet ban plus hate and idea police. They’ve won – they want to crack down.
• The problem with the Right is people wait for a permission slip to revolt – they want for the other guy to swing first, even when they are surrounded and outnumbered.
• Trump really surprised the Left. They thought they had finished history – that they would rule forever after Obama.  Trump proved the Silent Right and Libertarian Center existed.
• The Right has nowhere else to run to. The United States is it.  We can’t retreat.  If we lose the United States, it’s effectively over.
• Does John Mark take off his helmet when he showers?
• The Left has replaced class communism with race and gender communism.
• Related: the only commonality of race and gender based communists is they hate white capitalist guys more than they hate each other.  If the Left gets power, a strongman will be required.  Why?  I read an article today where a gay person was complaining that a bisexual shouldn’t be allowed in LGBTQWERTY+ “safe spaces” if they were currently in a heterosexual relationship.  Yeah, you can’t make this up.  The Constitution won’t save them either if American Lenin ever gets put in charge.

Pop Wilder says nobody shot at him during the war, but he was with people that were being shot at.  No, really, that’s what he told me, which is probably the ultimate Dad Joke.

If you’ve got a spare few hours and are interested in the topic, give the video a look.  Like with any link, the only person I agree with 100% . . . is me.  And sometimes I don’t even agree with me.  So there.

Links

Here are the links – please leave your nominations for next month in the comments below or toss me an email if you’re shy:

https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america

From Tom Chittum (yes, that Tom Chittum) who notes – “watch the video” – it’s only five minutes, but if you thought I was pessimistic, wait until you see what the Pentagon thinks:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-21/american-apocalypse-governments-plot-destabilize-nation-working

From Ricky:

Hedgeless Horseman at Zero Hedge is convinced there will be another Civil War.  Here is his latest missive dated today on the topic.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-09-17/civil-war-2-electric-boogaloo-deplorables-vs-socialists

From last spring:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-22/pre-reading-war-america

I have found his various articles over the years about “introduction to rifle ownership” to be very interesting.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-30/well-regulated-militia-being-necessary-security-free-state

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-18/political-power-grows-out-barrel-gun-mao-tse-tung

Also from Ricky, variations on a theme:

https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/

https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-american-militia-movement-a-breeding-ground-for-hate-is-pulling-in-cops-on-facebook/

https://www.revealnews.org/article/american-cops-have-openly-engaged-in-islamophobia-on-facebook-with-no-penalties/

 

And also from Ricky:

http://www.unz.com/chopkins/trumpenstein-must-be-destroyed/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/30/after-trump-invokes-civil-war-people-twitter-mockingly-rush-sign-up/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/rush-limbaugh-america-is-in-the-middle-of-a-cold-civil-war

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/civil-war-on/

“So you want to be real artists?  It’s okay, I can sell that angle.  But you two have to go all the way.  One of you has to lose an ear.” – Bob’s Burgers

If you’re a guy and you order White Claw® it comes with a sippy cup and Crayons™.

Names given to concepts in science are influenced by the time and place the names were given – for instance, instead of having properly dry and scientific names like the properties of an electron, the subatomic particle “quark” has flavors, which include terms like “strange” and “charmed.”  Those silly physicists from the 1960’s!  Everyone knows that flavor is just another word for emotion, which explains why I’ve been feeling ketchup all day.  I guess that works.  Hopefully we won’t let the hipsters in California even read about particle physics – soon enough they’ll want their bread to be gluon-free.

Isaac Newton died a virgin.  In honor of that, whenever I see a physicist I beat them up, take their money, and buy myself something nice.

A particularly flourishing time in science was the Victorian Era.  I think it was because people were rich and bored and had servants to do most everything.  It was about that time that real study in geology started.  I think that was because in England, sex had to be scheduled for every alternate Thursday, so it gave Victorian men a LOT of extra energy to work off by staring at rocks.  Me?  I think sex is like bicycling.  It’s all skimpy outfits, sweating, legs pumping, the uncomfortable silver helmet, my neighbors watching and sadly shaking their heads, and the police telling me to stop doing it on the sidewalk.

One concept I learned about in geology was the “angle of repose.”  With a name like that, it was certainly coined by some weak-jawed Victorian Era guy named something like “Earl of Pancake-Mountbatten de Saxe-Coburg” while looking at a pile of sand and thinking longingly about his “bicycling trip” scheduled for next Thursday, barring any inclement headaches.  But the concept of angle of repose was simple enough that even my drowsy freshman self quickly understood the concept while fighting to remain awake in Geology 101.  If you take something that’s granular, say sand, grain, gravel, or the ground bones of your enemies and put the grains in a pile, it will take form what you’re used to seeing – a pile.

Being within six feet of your wife in Victorian England was considered a public display of affection.

What our particular sex-starved Englishman noted was that the angle was, for a given material, always the same.  Dry sand has an angle of repose of about 34°.  Other materials have larger angles.  Flour has an angle as high as 45°, even larger in Germany.  Why?  The favorite game played in Germany requires a stiff flour.  The call the game “gluten tag.”

But dry sand never has a natural angle of 5°, and it never has an angle of 45°.  Can you get dry sand to go down to 5°?  Sure.  Shake it and it will flatten out.  But just pour it out and that natural angle will be there.

I remember reading as a kid that “nature has no straight lines,” which I dutifully nodded and agreed with until I took a look at the world around me – nature is filled with straight lines, and the slopes of the mountains around me were obvious rebuttals to that nonsense.  The angle of repose determines just how steep those slopes are.

But the really interesting part of the angle of repose (at least to me) is that it has real-world implications when it comes to things like, oh, avalanches.  You can imagine making a sand avalanche – drop sand slowly onto the top of the pile, grain by grain.  Each single grain will make the pile taller.  You can, by gently putting the sand down, exceed the angle of repose for a time.  The slope can become a little steeper than the magic angle.

What happens then?  One single grain of sand will hit the slope, and the internal friction of the pile won’t be able to hold the temporarily too-steep slope up anymore.  The result is inevitable:

An avalanche.  The slope collapses.

Avalanche humor – it’s snow joke.

Snow has an angle of repose, and slowly falling snow can, given wind and climate conditions, exceed the angle of repose.  For a while.  It was a constant joke on television when I was a kid that the absolute smallest noise in Idaho would make an avalanche happen in on a sitcom in Switzerland.  It’s not far off – an avalanche in snow or sand can happen because the energy stored in the slope above the angle of repose can be enormous.  The trigger to unleash that energy can be as small as a congressman’s conscience.

But only so much slope can be coaxed out of a pile of dry sand.  To really make the slope steep, you have to add in water.  I’m sure you’ve all seen sandcastles – the walls of the damp sand can even be vertical.  Through hard work and fighting to get the moisture content just right, amazing structures can be made.

Never accept a construction job in Egypt – they have a problem with pyramid schemes.

Our entire economy – strike that, our entire civilization is like that sand made into a pretty cool sand castle.  In our natural state, the Earth can carry about 4 million to 10 million people, or about as many who stopped liking Star Wars® last year.  That’s the maximum population the world can do with hunter-gatherers.  But, no, we decided we wanted beer, so we invented agriculture and built an entire civilization so we could have access to beer year-round (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer).

This one advance, agriculture, allowed civilization to start growing and soon enough the world could support 250 million people around 0 A.D.  Civilization and the discoveries that made it possible was a little bit of water added to the sand.  The slope could now be steeper – our sandcastle could now have walls.  Each individual discovery and great occurrence for society including the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of PEZ®, My Birth, and now the Information Age has made our sand castle ever more glorious.

I think it was Stephen Wright who said, “It’s a small world.  But I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

But we can look at our financial system as well.  Our innovations have allowed markets to form.  Certainly that allows the wealth in an expanding society to be allocated to best create growth.  The financial “innovation” has allowed the markets to reach the height where they are today – things like Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse, The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs, and Economic Bubbles, Knife Juggling Toddlers, and Sewer Clowns are the water holding up the sand castle as we build it ever higher – certainly steeper than markets alone would have allowed.

I’ll admit, I called the Market Top back in April (I think in a comment over at Lord Bison’s (LINK) place).  Oops.  The Dow is up 500 points since then.  So, yeah, I was wrong.  And I might be wrong about the upcoming difficulty I see with our sandcastle, and we might have set up our economy for everlasting prosperity, a growth that will last forever until we have a stunning galactic empire complete with thousands of bikini princesses, pantyhose, and White Claws® for everyone who wanted one.

But until then, I’ll keep looking up and seeing if I see sand starting to flake off the walls.

Originally, this was going to be a post solely about the economy – it’s Wednesday, so I try to hit economic stuff on Wednesday.  Instead, I got a bit philosophical and went further.  It’s an exercise in thinking about where we sit, and the deep future we face, which is a theme that runs through the blog.  I’ll have another one of these on Monday, so don’t forget to set your VCR to record.  Or you could hit the subscribe button up above to have these delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:28AM Eastern (US) time.

“As you know, Bart, one day your permanent record will disqualify you from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs.” – The Simpsons

I have to remember that every time I talk to my wife, my conversation is being recorded for “training and quality” purposes.

In my younger days at school I actually heard teachers say, with great regularity, “That’s going to go on your permanent record.”

The teachers didn’t say that to me, of course.  I spent spare time in the classroom quietly reading the Bible.  Okay, that’s not true.  I was actually that kid in class that got away with everything.  But even though I wasn’t getting in trouble for things like taking blood samples in fifth grade for use in making slides for the class microscope (I got samples from about a dozen kids that all used the same needle).  And in kindergarten I think I spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom.

I actually deserved every minute I spent in the principal’s office.  Today?  I think they’d have tried to pump me so full of medications that my street value would have been about $6 million.

Nowadays they’d say I had ADD, but in reality I had a serious case of JAAD.  As in John’s An A____e Disorder.  Feel free to fill in the blank.  No points if you’re my ex-wife since she would claim she discovered this syndrome.

Even when I was fifth grade I knew that the “permanent records” threat was nonsense.  One thing that America used to be great at was losing records.  When I asked Pa Wilder how he did in high school, he just smiled and chuckled and said, “the school burned down, so those records are gone.”  He didn’t smell like gasoline, so I’m hoping he wasn’t the one who helped that fire along.

“Nice school you’ve got there.  Be a shame if my Permanent Record didn’t show all A’s.”

But even the courthouse in the county burned down while I was in elementary school.  I’m sure that they had some of the records stored elsewhere, because they were still able to charge property taxes.  But I assure you that some records were lost – this was a poor county, and if they were lucky they had microfilm stored offsite for property tax purposes.

The really, really nice thing about records was this:  they weren’t permanent.  Sure, we have cuneiform tablets from the time of the Sumerian emperor Sargon the Great dealing with taxes from Umalahook selling a goat to Brandon for a fraternity prank.  However, the great part about history is that most of it is forgotten.

Really, do you think that gouging the eyes out of a chocolate Easter bunny is grounds for a restraining order?  I’ll admit doing it with an ice pick was a little excessive.

There are gaps in history, where we don’t know the motivation of people, not popes, not kings, not Elon Musk.  The records for some years are so sparse that there’s actually one theory that 297 years were entirely made up and we’re actually living in the year 1722 (LINK).  And, no, I wouldn’t trade in your t-shirts and cargo pants for hose and a tricornered hat, yo.  The theory is that history was such a mess that, at some point, people just made up a bunch of years (between 614 A.D. and 911 A.D.).  I can see that all of Europe could have decided that it’s a much better idea to skip 300 some-odd years and go straight from lice and wooden mugs of grog to iPods™ and Pringles®.

“Early to bed, early to rise, is no way to get a blog post out on time, Wilder.” – Ben Franklin

Oh, sure, there are examples of records that are nearly permanent.  The Secret Vatican Archives (yes, they really call them that but it’s in Italian so it sounds fancier) have documents that date back to the 8^th century, although the 8^th century document is actually just a Post-It® note that Pope John VII (no relation) doodled pictures of cats on during a really long meeting when he was bored and ready for lunch and stupid Cardinal Vincenzo would not shut up about the lack of clean towels in the sauna.

Oh, my, what a difference one typo can make.

Forgetting is even, thankfully, enshrined in law.  The first time (that I can find) that the idea of statutes of limitations showed up was during, drumroll, the Roman era.  Statutes of limitations started out as simply the idea that, after a prescribed period of time, people can’t sue you for damages in civil court.  Added in English law in the 17^th century was the idea that even criminal cases couldn’t be brought after a certain time.

Why?  The logic was that after a certain time, evidence of the civil case or crimes couldn’t be reliably produced. This is a good thing.  The crime that you committed when you were 18 can’t hang over your head when you’re 48.  It’s done.  For most crimes, the statute of limitations has a lot of different durations based on the type of crime.  Most Federal felonies (in the United States) expire after five years, unless the crime is murder, terrorism resulting in murder, or anything Jeff Epstein ever did in which case there is no statute of limitations.  Which is also a good thing.  As an aside, I’m really shocked to hear that the jailers watching Epstein both committed suicide tomorrow.

But digital media has changed all of that – the courthouse or school burning down won’t destroy the D you got in high school algebra or the record of the DUI Mel Gibson was arrested for.  They’re backed up on multiple servers in California and Ohio.  Unless there’s an EMP, those records will last a long time in the United States.

“They can feel us up at the airport, but they will never take our freedom!  Oh, wait, I guess that’s totally taking away our freedom.”

Europe has put in place a law in 1995 establishing a “right to be forgotten.”  This law, more or less, says that if the information is no longer relevant, it should be removed from search engines.  Of course, publishing the truth is a zillion percent protected by the First Amendment, which is why people publishing books like the Anarchist Cookbook are legal.  They’re facts.  If you don’t commit a crime using those facts, you’ve done nothing wrong.

Likewise, if people in the United States get Google® results that show someone in Britain did something naughty in 1977, well, that person can’t complain since we seem to have written that pesky First Amendment as a direct result of people telling us what we can and cannot say.  Like a kindergarten-age John Wilder attempting to see how sharp a knife was on a classmate’s forearm, we Americans just don’t take direction very well.

I guess we’ll just have to live with that on our Permanent Record.

I guess I’ll just leave this here.

“I can promise you this will not silence your demons.  If you can’t control the violence, the violence controls you.” – Star Trek:  Voyager

I really didn’t expect to do this so soon – the clock moved closer to midnight.  Last month was 6.  Now we’re at a 7.  The scale is from the first issue (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming)

5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence Update – Forward Observer Video and Criticism – Logistics – Updated Civil War II Index – Who Benefits, Part II? – Chittum’s Book – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to Issue Three of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are a bit different than the other posts here at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming) and Issue Two is here (Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links).

Please keep the comments, emails, and links coming in – they provide a way for all of us to get smarter, faster.  You can comment below, or send me an email at movingnorth@gmail.com.  If I get an email, I’ll assume you don’t want your name mentioned or to be directly quoted (except for links), and I’ll honor that unless you explicitly give permission to refer to you or to quote you.

Violence Update

Last month this was the Censorship Update, and even before the El Paso shooting I had selected violence the topic of this month.  I had this section written before the El Paso shooting this weekend and had to (obviously) re-write it.  Here’s what I had written:

Almost all of the violence started on the Left, and was perpetrated by the Left.  The biggest story was the beating of Andy Ngo, though there were multiple other attacks on display.  July and August are typically months where violence is running high – heat seems to make riots, though I’m not sure if that’s changed now that air conditioning is more prevalent.

The level of violence is rising.  I would follow Remus’ advice:

“Unless one side or the other sends death squads into my neighborhood, I shall observe my Most Excellent and Inviolable Rule One For Survival:  stay away from crowds.”

If you’re not (like me) waiting every Tuesday for the Woodpile Report® (LINK), shame on you.

Obviously, El Paso changes what I have to say.

El Paso is a narrative that will likely have legs in the media for months – this is the shooting the Left has been dreaming of – a shooter who isn’t gang related, a Person of Color, Moslem, or going after Republicans.  And the shooter wasn’t in Chicago where last weekend (7/29/19) 9 were killed and 39 were wounded in what is a more or less “normal” level of violence.  This shooter fulfills the Narrative of the Left in ways that previous shooters haven’t.

I had a discussion with several people about El Paso today.  They were less surprised than I was about the violence – they reminded me about all of the violence from the Left, including the shooter that tried to kill Republican congressmen and the now endemic violence against supporters of even the most mainstream members of the Right whenever they appear in Leftist strongholds.  From their perspective, this was a response – a predictable response to the pressure being placed on the Right.

Do I think the Manifesto is fake?  Probably not.  Do I think that this is a “false flag”?  Again, probably not.  I’ll leave room for both of those things.

What comes next?  That’s tough.  I’d expect more violence from the Left, both disorganized (isolated beatings – groups engaging in random interracial violence) and organized (Antifa®).  I don’t expect more (near term) from the Right, but I must make clear – I didn’t expect El Paso.

Will it escalate?  I spent several hours going through comments on primarily Leftist sites on the Internet today.  What I came away with was, more or less, that they feel entirely justified in increasing the level of violence and see no connection with their hospitalizing assaults and “chemical milk shakes” since they are morally justified.

The polarity increased this weekend.  And if this is the level of polarity and violence we have when the economy is “good” – beware.  A recession will lead levels of violence not seen in the United States since 1865.

Forward Observer Video and Criticism

Last month I presented and gave a critique of the John Mark video about Civil War II.  The primary focus of the Weather Report are the conditions that lead to war, not conduct of the war itself, but it seemed like a good idea to discuss the video – it was on topic, suggested by a reader, and had a huge number of hits.  The John Mark video presented what I thought was a too optimistic view of the outcome of Civil War II.

Aesop, (who you should be reading whenever he posts, or you’ll miss gems like this) and his monthly Ebola Update LINK) had some criticism of Mark’s video in the comments.  He included a link to Sam Culper’s Forward Observer series that was a response to John Mark.

I think Mr. Culper was just a wee bit angry when he started the videos.  The videos are very good, and if you have an interest in this subject, I suggest that you review them as well.  Mr. Culper knows his stuff.

One mild criticism is that he indicates that we won’t have a World War II-type war or a replay of Civil War I.  I think we can all agree that’s a given and he probably could have skipped that.  This will be far uglier and resemble the breakup of Yugoslavia or of the Beatles®.  It will be nasty, and I think Mr. Culper’s thought that the Right wouldn’t lay siege to Los Angeles or New York because it would wreck the financial system or disrupt the economy is not a concern that the Right will have.  If it gets to that point, it’s not war to take over an economy.  The Right won’t care.

In the third video, he mentions Sir John Glubb’s The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, which I discussed back in ‘17 (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence).  Glubb’s observations remain relevant as the end of the American experiment comes closer and he’s right to bring him up.

Again, the Forward Observer videos are good.  Watch them – make your own conclusions.

The reason I don’t try to delve too far into the predictions of how the war will unfold is that will depend on the initial conditions.  As Culper frequently and appropriately notes in the video, predictions are hard.  As Yogi Berra specifies, “especially about the future.”

Wait until you hear about story hour.

But those initial conditions will end up determining both the course of the war, and the conclusion.  Beware:  Your opinion now will be (depending upon who wins) be held against you at the end.  In that case, it would be best for everyone if the Libertarians™ won, but I seem to note that they’re all off smoking weed and having deep conversations about Ayn Rand.

Updated Civil War II Index

Economic:  +10.42 last month, +1.78 this month.  Unemployment is slightly up – interest rates were slightly down, and the Dow was up.  If this is right, economic conditions are slowing.  While positive is good, this is less positive than last month.

Political Instability:  +10%.  This increase in instability is minor, compared to the drop (-46%) last month, and probably related to Mueller’s testimony.  I think the proximity to elections is actually having a calming effect.

Interest in Violence:  Up 8% this month, compared to 7% last month.  I expect the August numbers to skyrocket.

Illegal Aliens:  Down 38% last month to 104,000.  That sounds great, but last month was the highest ever at 144,000, and this month was the third highest ever.  So, down is good, but third highest is still bad.  For perspective, last year it was 43,000.  This is either sign of increased instability in the countries down South, or decreased fear of deportation.  There is no good news in this category.

Logistics

Last Weather Report I dropped a (more or less) throwaway line to the effect on the conduct of the war that:

The Left can be resupplied via air and ship.  “Emergency” supplies would head into coastal cities and sustain them forever, though Denver would fall soon enough.  Would Russia supply the heartland while the Chinese supplied the West Coast?

Rightly, Joe at Eaton Rapids Joe called me on it, and noted it on his blog that you should be reading, here (LINK).

One thing that is true is that it’s certainly not going to be possible to feed the entire United States externally during a war.  Feeding the Boston-New York-D.C. corridor which comprises over 20% of the United States population from external sources simply won’t happen, and I’m not sure if anyone in Europe will even try.

What will happen without Doritos®?  And salsa?

But Mexico or China could feed Los Angeles, if they wanted to.  I put pencil to paper and found, that to give everyone in Los Angeles 1700 calories a day it’s a really small number of 20’ shipping containers of rice – 600 or so.  And, yes, China is a food importer, why would they export food to the United States, and a few million people to feed isn’t even rounding error on their current food supply.

Water would be tougher.  To secure the port would require troops setting up a perimeter, but I’d think that when the residents of Los Angeles figured out the machine guns won’t be shooting over their heads anymore, they’d stay well back.

Distribution would be a mess.  But the food can make it to the city.  Similar numbers work for San Francisco.  If you read below, however, I don’t think any of that will happen.

Who Benefits, Part II?

But who benefits from a civil war in the United States?  Internally to the United States, it depends on who wins.  Externally, the list of potential winners is long.  I wrote about China last week (China – What’s the deal?) it occurred to me that China is currently working on building a system so they don’t need the United States at all – I’d expect them to focus on having alternate sources for everything that they depend on the United States for, including food.  The end of the United States as a global power would allow them to move from a regional power to the leading global power.

China couldn’t defeat us militarily.  But if we defeated ourselves?  Bonus, and Sun Tzu would nod in approval!

And we hope he didn’t ask him to wok the dog.

Civil War would allow Russia to increase influence in Europe, so this wouldn’t bother them much at all.  Europe?  Europe would lose their free army, but would gain the markets that the United States would leave.

Would there be a period of economic dislocation for all of those countries?  A period of economic depression?  Sure.  But there is the possibility that each of them would gain.

So, who would resupply those cities?  Maybe nobody.

Chittum’s Book

I originally thought I’d be reviewing Thomas W. Chittum’s book, Civil War Two (LINK) in this issue, but this update is long enough now.  Civil War Two came out in 1997, but his analysis is so accurate it’s like he wrote most of it last week.  I’ll review/summarize it starting no later than Monday, though it might take me more than one post to complete the review.

Links

The missing link discovered zero, but didn’t tell anyone because he thought it was nothing.

First up is from Practical Eschatology.  Docent (the proprietor there) has an interesting look at mass immigration.

Notes on how fragile our infrastructure really is from Andrew Miller.

From Mat Bracken, two of the best pieces on Civil War Two, here and here.

From Arthur Sido, on bugging out.

Concerned American correctly noted that Matt is an excellent writer.  Buy his books.

From Ricky and Zerohedge.

Also from Ricky, on another divide.

From an e-mail, for perspective – Civil War on the Western Border and Partisans (Missouri).

Please keep the links coming!

Boston-Washington corridor map by Bill Rankin — Citynoise (talk · contribs) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8293465

 

“The Moon Unit will be divided into two divisions:  Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.” – Austin Powers:  The Spy Who Shagged Me

There’s always that one kid who won’t smile in the team picture.

I was at a garage sale the other day when I came across a small leather-bound journal in a box filled with Tupperware®.  Embossed on the worn cover was a now faded and flecked NASA logo that had once been a solid, shiny gold.  In the lower right-hand corner I noticed, so faded they were barely visible, two initials:  N.A.  I flipped through and saw page after page of journal entries in what I assumed to be Neil Armstrong’s printed writing.  I quickly paid the $2.50 price on the orange sticker on the book.

Here are the journal entries:

7/14/69, 21:00:00 GMT

Countdown begins.  I will admit to being a bit excited.  A rocket launch is never a routine event.  They’ve kept us busy though, re-practicing procedures, re-reviewing maps of the Sea of Tranquility, and, for Buzz Aldrin, eating meals consisting entirely of re-fried beans.  He says it’s for luck.  Michael Collins continues to be . . . Michael Collins.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile.  Or blink.

7/16/69, 07:22:15 GMT

Last shower, shave and breakfast.  Collins doesn’t eat anything, stares blankly ahead – I guess that’s the way he deals with stress.  Buzz had 16 cups of coffee – I counted them – and about thirty eggs.  “For luck.”

Fun fact:  your car insurance may cover you if you’ve got a rental, but generally not if you leave the United States.

7/16/69, 13:00:00 GMT

Ignition of the main engines, then 17 long seconds later, liftoff as the Saturn V slowly moves past the tower.  The first stage burns for three minutes, total, and then stage two kicks in after a brief lull, and burns for nearly six minutes.  Two minutes later, we’re in orbit.  All of this is exactly as planned, exactly as written down in the procedures.  Eleven minutes for Apollo 11 to enter orbit.  That’s got to be a good omen.

For the first time in the mission, we’ve got some time to kill.  I can’t stop smiling.  Collins continues to stare directly ahead.  “Mike, are you doing okay?”

He slowly turned his head towards me:  “All of my systems are operating at nominal levels.”  He then turned his head back towards the controls.

Does he blink?  I’m interrupted by groaning coming from Buzz.

“Oh, man, I’m hurting.  I didn’t think about the pressure differential.”  He’s holding his stomach.

The pressure inside the Apollo Command Module, Columbia, is only 5psi, or the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.  At sea level on Earth, the pressure is 15psi, or three times as much.  We don’t pass out, because the atmosphere is 100% oxygen.

Apparently the food that Buzz ate is causing him discomfort.  A minute later, Buzz sighs.

It smells horrible.  I said, “Oh, Buzz, how could you?”  My eyes are watering.  Eggs and beans.  The smell is nearly incapacitating.

Even Collins jumped in, “My nasal sensors detect a significant increase in organic gasses in the atmosphere.”

Collins was rechargeable, thankfully.

Mission Control:  “Apollo, are you alright up there?  We have just monitored a significant increase in methane in the cabin?  If this keeps up, your atmosphere will become explosive.  Do you have a situation?”

Buzz sighs again.

7/16/69, 16:16:16 GMT

Translunar injection burn started – that’s the boost that gets us to the Moon.  Six minutes later, we’re on the way.  Thankfully Buzz’s extravehicular emissions end about an hour later and the atmospheric scrubbers manage to keep the atmosphere safe until Buzz is finished.

7/16/69, 16:56:03 GMT

While we’re on the way, it’s time to dock with the Lunar Module.  It’s in that last stage that boosted us to the Moon.  Buzz then gets an idea.

“Hey, let’s change the name of the Lunar Module from Eagle to something else.  How about we name it something funny, like Soviets Suck?”

I’m against this.  “Buzz . . . we can’t do that.  NASA already has the t-shirts printed.”

Buzz continues, “Okay, let’s vote on it.  All in favor?”  Only Buzz raised his hand.

Collins added, still staring straight ahead:  “This violates mission parameters.”

7/17/69, 00:04:00 GMT

We go on television four times over the next two days.  Collins follows the NASA script exactly, word for word.  Aldrin brings up his new product, Aldrin’s Hair Care for Men®, along with Aldrin Cola© and Aldrin Paste™, which I believe to either be toothpaste or silverware polish.  I think it must be toothpaste because he says it’s perfect for astronauts – “it’s zero cavity.”  NASA has a private radio conversation with him after the first time he promotes his products.

The long distance rates shut that particular business down.

We can hear his side of the conversation:  “What are you going to do, send NASA police up here and put me in NASA jail?  Ha!”

It’s about this point that Buzz starts to try to read over my shoulder as I write in this journal.  He pretends he’s not looking when I catch him.

7/19/69, 17:27:47 GMT

Lunar orbit.  We’ll spend about a day here while we get ready to go down to the Moon.  I’m starting to get a little irritated with Aldrin.  First, there’s the humming.  He won’t stop humming the theme to the Wild, Wild West®.  Then, there’s his ear hair.  Doesn’t he know that it’s there?  It’s this one, long, 2 inch hair coming out of his ear.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I swear I hear a faint whirring, as if from small electric motors and gears from Collins during sleep period.  Maybe it’s the space ship.  I hope it’s the space ship.

7/20/69, 17:44:00 GMT

Lunar Module undocked.  When we said goodbye to Collins, Buzz made a joke, “Hey, don’t go out joyriding while we’re gone!”  Collins said, “No.  I will be in rest mode while you are gone to conserve supplies.”  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Michael eat during the trip so far.

7/20/69, 20:17:39 GMT

The Soviets Suck Eagle has landed!  This is the first gravity we’ve had in days.  Aldrin immediately takes the opportunity to, umm, do things that are easier in gravity.  The Lunar Module doesn’t have a vent fan, but we will dump the atmosphere when it’s time for our EVA.  Which can’t come soon enough.

7/21/69, 02:56:15 GMT

First step on the Moon!  On one hand, it’s pretty exciting.  On the other, the responsibility is pretty big.  Buzz follows behind me after about twenty minutes.  He’s sulking – we rock-paper-scissored for the chance to go first, and he lost.  He always, and I mean always throws rock.  Speaking of which, it’s time to collect a few.

Heck, we can’t even do it since we’ve started using the metric system a little.    

7/21/69, 05:11:13 GMT

The walk on the Moon is complete.  We’re supposed to sleep, but we’re on the Moon.  Buzz tries to tell spooky stories, but I’ve heard the one about the hook on the spaceship door before.  He tries to make it scarier by thumping on the wall of the Soviets Suck Eagle.  I remind him that even though the wall is supposed to be tougher than a steel beer can, we left the duct tape on Columbia.

Thankfully we were AAA members.

We’re supposed to sleep.  Aldrin is laying down on the floor, and I’m propped up on the ascent engine cover.  Not really sleeping, neither is Buzz.  Finally Buzz stops humming the Wild Wild West® theme, only to start humming “In the Year 2525.”  This is not much better.

This was the number one song as Apollo 11 lifted off.  Even the Moon wasn’t far enough away to escape it.

“Neil, we need women astronauts.”

“Why, Buzz?”

“Those sandwiches aren’t going to make themselves.”

He’s not done.

“The next time I dump a girl, I know what I’m gonna say.”

“What, Buzz?”

“I need more space.”

Neither of us sleep at all that night, though I do come to the conclusion that there is no jurisdiction that I could be convicted in if I were to kill Buzz.

Yeah, I know.  I’m mad, too.

7/21/69, 17:54:00 GMT

Liftoff from the Moon!  Heading home.

“No, you’re upside down.”

7/21/69, 21:35:00 GMT

We’ve docked with the Columbia.  As we open the hatch we see that Michael Collins is in the same exact position that he was when we left.  It was as if he’d never moved.

“Welcome back, fellow humans.  Was your excursion enjoyable?”

Buzz responded, “It was like any spacewalk, Collins.  No pressure.  Get it?  No pressure!”

Collins stared blankly and then said, “I am not programmed to respond in that area.”

Getting back into the Columbia was pretty rough.  It smelled like swamp and wet dog, and that was after Buzz had already been gone a day.  Ugh.  Why did Aldrin choose so many space tacos and burritos for dinner?

7/22/69, 04:55:42 GMT

We fire our engine to return to Earth.  Two and a half days to home.  Did Aldrin really order refried beans with every meal?

If I my rice is too dry, do I put it in a bag of cellphones?

7/24/69, 16:50:35 GMT

Splashdown.  I never thought that smelling air would be so wonderful.  I couldn’t wait to open the hatch to the Columbia.  A deep breath with 100% less Aldrin.

7/24/69, 19:58:00 GMT

In quarantine – Collins, Aldrin and I are stuck here so we don’t start an epidemic of space pox.  I can certainly understand why we would want to quarantine aliens so they didn’t bring in epidemics of disease.

There was a two-drink minimum.

8/10/69, 20:00:00 GMT

Release from quarantine.  I’m outta here.  Maybe I shouldn’t share this journal, after all.  Perhaps it’s best if history remembers the official story . . . .

100% heroes.

Okay, yes, this was parody, or at least that’s what my law firm, Dewy, Cheatum and Howe suggests I say.  Outside of my supposition that Michael Collins is really a robot, none of this is true.  The Apollo astronauts represented the best of us in our nation at the time, men able to go into space, yet with enough humility to understand that their achievement was made possible by 400,000 other Americans working together to design everything from their underwear to the F-1 engines of the Saturn V to the food that they’d eat during the three weeks they spent in quarantine after returning to Earth.

An aside, they really did have problems with bad smells and space gas.  NASA even calculated to see if the gas would build up enough methane to cause the ship to explode.