Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“Heaven, darling. Heaven. At least get the zip code right.” – The Prophecy
If all dogs go to Heaven, I expect cats go to Purr-gatory?
Life has often been seen by me as a series of delayed gratification games. It’s like an “If – Then” statement. Something like:
If I go to work and work really hard and save money in my 401k, then when I retire I can have fun.
This first one is one that we’re told from when we’re little. Work hard now, and get the rewards later. And, for the most part, it’s true. Like the old Chinese proverb, “Try the crunchy bat! It’s tasty, if a bit undercooked!” “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is today.”
Over time, hard work really does pay dividends. But the downside of that fairy tale is that you’re going to have far more fun when you’re thirty than when you’re ninety. I’m not saying I don’t want to live as long as possible, but understanding that if all you do is work until you’re used up, you never did learn to have fun.
Oops.
I also know a lumberjack who logs a lot of hours.
If I work hard now, I can make money now, and go back later and get in better shape.
This is one I fell for. I can put in a 3,000 hour year for two years in a row, right? Well, I could. But if I spent all the rest of my time with family, then when was there time for me? This is a tradeoff that looks a lot like the first, but probably has a more significant health toll, since the reason you’re working 3,000 hours in the first place isn’t because the work is stress-free.
Strangely, the healthcare program was also the retirement program.
If I’m good on Earth, and have faith, when I die I can go to Heaven.
Now, I’m going to start off with this: I know that there are atheists and agnostics that are here. Bear with me. I’m not. But the nice thing about all of the atheists that comment here is that none of them are atheists because they hate God, it’s because they don’t believe. Those kinds of atheists roll their eyes because to them we folks who believe are goofy.
That’s okay.
I asked my atheist friend why he celebrated Christmas. He looked at me and said, “Well, you celebrate Valentine’s day and no one likes you.”
It’s my theory that atheists that hate God hate Him because they think He gave them a raw deal. But that’s based on a sample size of two. My theory may suck, but for the two atheists who hated God that I knew, well, they were constantly angry at Him because of the way that their lives had turned out. For whatever reason, I haven’t seen the haters show up here often.
But the point I’m going to make is a new point to me, because just like points one and two, I believed point three until I really thought about it. Then I realized:
I was being really stupid. I believe I had Help in this realization.
My realization was simple. To the extent that I structure my life for a reward that only occurs after my heart stops beating, well, that’s goofy. Sure, I have faith. But why am I waiting when I can have all of the benefits now.
The inventor of AutoCorrect was an atheist. He’ll go to he’ll.
This is where I pick the atheists back up. From their standpoint, that they live a mayfly existence, a one-shot of being born, getting a driver’s license, getting a job, retiring, and then ceasing to be. They have to get meaning, as much meaning as they can out of life, now.
But even if you have faith that there’s an afterlife, you can have the benefits that most people think about being tied to Heaven, now.
Peace
Love
Calmness
Virtue
Certainty
Hope
It was my own (very bad) If-Then thinking that said to suffer now for bliss later.
Nope. Now, you still have to be as good as you can. You can’t actually get the benefits listed on the label if you’re not good. For instance, if you know you’re doing something wrong, say juggling kittens, you’ll never be at peace. Likewise, if your primary focus is pursuing, um, “physical affection,” you’ll never know actual love until you start looking for actual love.
The Tibetan monk was shocked when he saw Jesus’ face in a tub of margarine – “I can’t believe it’s not Buddha!”
Is life still hard work? Yes. Enjoy it. It’s making you better.
Does life still involve pain? Yes. Embrace it. It gives you a contrast, and often a lesson so you’ll learn.
Does life still involve sadness? Certainly. Use it to mourn for those who have left us.
Does life still involve difficulty? Every day. Be calm. See the beauty and hope that come from avoiding fear.
And, if you’re not an atheist, use every moment that you can to get closer to God, because, after all, what is Heaven, anyway?
“Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.” – A Fish Called Wanda
Four Norse gods, one Roman god, and two astrological bodies walk into a bar. Everyone knew Wilder was going to make another week joke.
Farther back than written record exists, people have been fighting each other in an organized fashion. Though there are indications of earlier Egyptian battles, probably the first written records of tactics come from an inscribed stone thought to depict a Sumerian victory around 2500 B.C. Again, perspective – the time of Christ is closer to us than Christ was to this battle. Another way to say it? Almost as old as your mom.
The tactic as shown on the stone would have been familiar to a Greek or a Roman or a Viking: it’s a shield wall. The idea is that soldiers working together would provide each other mutual protection through their overlapping shields. In the case of the Greeks, the shield wall (or phalanx) was manned by citizen-soldiers called “hoplites.” The Greeks had a lot of stories, though. The half-human, half-horse who was a doctor? They called him the Centaur for Disease Control.
Each hoplite protected himself and the man on his right. Much of the most effective fighting was done by the guys in the second row, who were also protected by the shields of the front row. The shield wall was generally employed by both sides during ancient conflicts. As a superior technology, the choice was simple – adopt or learn to speak a new language, if you were lucky.
Protons are underrated. They’re always so positive.
Photo CC BY-SA 3.0, Sting, viaWikimedia
Combat was simple. The opposing shield walls would meet and, as near as we can understand, a big sumo match between porcupines was the result. The worst thing that could happen to a shield wall is breaking. If a shield wall broke, the only real option for the side that broke was to flee. For just that reason, the Greeks put the most inexperienced soldiers in the front and center of the shield wall. That gave them psychological comfort of being surrounded by experienced fighters, plus they couldn’t get scared and run off. They were stuck there in the middle of the fight.
The shield wall is one example that I could think of where the responsibilities of the individual to the group were vitally important. Individual thought in a Greek phalanx is more than discouraged – it’s fatal. That’s why the put the rookies in the middle. The choices in the middle of a Greek phalanx are two: fight as a unit and maybe win or be individuals and certainly die.
Philip also asked if he should come to Sparta as a friend or a foe. The Spartan response? “Neither.”
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between responsibility and individuality as I get older. When I was younger after I read Ayn Rand I was a ready-to-move-to-Galt’s-Gulch Libertarian. My thoughts were rather simple: I’d do as I please, not harm anyone, and the world would let me be.
Heck, I even went to a meeting of the largest Libertarian group in the state I was living in. When I saw it was just six guys in a booth at Taco Bell® (I’m not kidding) I decided to skip the meeting. Libertarians are horrible at organizing. Everybody wants to do their own thing, which makes for lousy coordination. It shouldn’t have surprised me that there were only six of them, and that they met at a single booth at a Taco Bell™. Also, since then I’ve come to the realization that the world will never let us be so we don’t have the option of going to Galt’s Gulch.
I still love the idea of individual freedom. And even when I was young, I realized that individual freedoms came with individual responsibility. You make a mistake? You’re held accountable for it. But there’s a component that’s missing that complements the first two:
Responsibility to the group.
Do Transformers® get car insurance or health insurance? Neither, they are illegal aliens.
Does that constrain your individual freedom? Certainly. But it’s reality. If you’re on a football team, working at a business, part of a family, or even in a tribe of Libertarians living in Galt’s Gulch, your individual freedom is limited to an extent that you have responsibilities to the group.
Just as the Greek hoplite was responsible for his own life, he was also responsible for the lives of those around him. Each individual hoplite was responsible for the success of the group.
As I get older, I realize that responsibility does exist for each of us. It’s not the same immediate life or death imperative of a hoplite, but it’s serious nevertheless.
If Joe wins the election, at least Hunter can get a job closer to home.
In one sense, the State (mainly the Federal government, but also small-s state governments) has done it’s best to remove that individual responsibility to society – it’s now nothing more than a series of payments to the State – taxes here and taxes there and you can go about your life without worrying about your responsibility to the state.
Poor people? That’s easy. The State will pay for them. The break between individual charity is gone, but I’ve written about that before (Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires). But it goes much further with similar stories in education, medical care, and retirement care. There are a million ways that the State has replaced the responsibility of the individual to that group.
One impact of that has been the recent riots. Reparations? Make the State pay. Burnt out buildings? Make the State Pay. Chose to get a degree and rack up enormous debt? Make the State pay. Unhappy with your life? Capitalism has failed. The State should fix this.
During the Soviet Revolution, they didn’t get every goal, but the did aim for the Tsars.
In the minds of Leftists, every solution requires more State power. That’s been at the root of every issue we’ve seen in 2020. Beyond the riots, COVID-19 has provided another outlet for the religious fervor of the Left.
Vaccines? Should be mandatory once one shows up.
Masks? Previous: Now: Required.
Trump’s response? Previous: He doesn’t have authority. Now: Every death is on his head.
Voting? Protests? Just fine.
The cause of this is that there is a natural desire to want to have responsibility that the State has severed. In its place, there are still chances to do that – be a Little League® coach. Volunteer at the food bank. Volunteer your time down at the local shooting club to teach people how to protect the man to their right.
That’s what a responsible hoplite would do, after all.
I first heard about the following story from Lindybeige. His video is below. It’s long, at nearly an hour. It also has the very best commercial for ear buds (in the middle of the video) that I’ve ever watched.
On February 26, 1943, German forces in Tunisia began an attack toward the west.
American and British troops were to the west of Tunisia in Algeria, and British troops were to the east, based out of Egypt. The idea of the attack was to cut off the British and American troops in the west, so the British troops coming out of Libya and Egypt could be defeated in the east.
North Africa was a mess for the Germans. The British were doing a magnificent job sinking Axis supplies, so they were running out of stuff they needed to make war. The Axis had also lost most of its territory: the Italians and Germans had been kicked out of Libya and were just barely hanging on in Tunisia, whereas the British were desperate to take Tunisia so George Lucas could film Star Wars® there in 1975.
Of course, in the last interaction I had with the police, it was the goat they were looking for.
The Italians hadn’t switched sides yet, so they were still fighting alongside of the Germans in North Africa. Like Mitt Romney, the Italians tend to switch sides quite a bit. I heard a rumor that the Italians were going to switch sides and join with COVID-19 and fight against humanity this August, but that hasn’t happened.
Yet.
Anyway, the German operation had the super sexy name of Operation Oxhead, which also describes the operational name I gave to my divorce. Also, like my divorce, it was a last ditch effort to maintain my sanity. The German word for Oxhead is “Ochsenkopf” which is what I imagine Germans yell at each other during sex.
As part of the Operation, a German colonel named Rudolf Lang was given command of a pretty significant body of tanks and troops. He had 77 tanks. For a battle in North Africa, that was a pretty sizable force. He also had a technical advantage – of those 77 tanks, 20 were the new Tiger tanks.
Tiger tanks were big and slow, but they were well armored and likely the most technically advanced tanks in North Africa at the time. Heck, they might have been the best tanks in the world at the time. To have 20 of them was quite an advantage. And the Tiger was far better than the Swiss tanks, which were always in neutral.
I’m really into turrets. I love tank tops.
Lang was supposed to attack up a mountain pass, Hunt’s Gap, and the only thing in his way to achieving his objective was the 5th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment and the 155th Battery of the 172nd Field Regiment Royal Artillery. Certainly that sounds pretty impressive if you don’t speak military, but the 5th Battalion probably was somewhere between 400 and 600 soldiers and officers, whereas the 155th Battery was 130 soldiers and officers. So, somewhere between 600 and 700 guys.
Lang had 300 guys just sitting in tanks. There were at least another 13,000 soldiers, many of which had already seen combat on the Eastern Front. All of Lang’s troops were headed for those 600 or 700 guys.
At least the British were highly trained, right?
No. Those 600 or 700 guys who were trained in lightning fashion and mostly hadn’t seen any combat besides a fight over a girl in a pub. So, unless you counted numerical superiority, experience, or weapons superiority, the British had everything possible going for them.
There is a moment in time that you know that life is about to become very challenging. That happened for the British troops around 6:30am on February 26 when they came under mortar fire. Mortars are those tubes that you see soldiers drop ammunition in before it goes “fwoop” and shoots up in a ballistic arc. The German mortars had a maximum range of about a mile.
Was this the 1943 version of a “free continental breakfast”?
The guns the 155th Battery had were 25 pounders, but they only had 8 of them. These had a range of ten miles. For a fight to occur with the enemy at less than a mile wasn’t what they were set up for.
The German mortar fire was accurate. But the British held.
Then? All the things that you might imagine if you were living a nightmare where you were waiting for happened. The Tiger tanks showed up around 11AM. And the British took out four of them. The Germans withdrew, until 1PM when they showed up again, within 600 yards with thirty tanks. And they had company, with 8 Bf-109 Messerschmitt fighters, who generally shot up the place, setting the British ammunition and explosives on fire.
The British, realizing they had to have ammunition, actually unloaded the ammo from the burning trucks. The British knocked out another three tanks. Again, the Germans withdrew.
At 5:30PM the next attack began. Tank fire took out British cannon, one at a time, with some fighting between tank and 25 pounder taking place at 10 yards or less. I personally can’t imagine the courage that took, launching an artillery shell designed to go miles at a tank right in front of you. Since they were using armor-piercing shells, the also had to use the highest propellant load.
Courage, plain and simple. The last voice message on the radio was, “Tanks are upon us.”
I can’t find casualty figures for the infantry. I’m sure the numbers were horrible. The survivors eventually broke and escaped to the west, probably not long after the 5:30PM attack started.
The artillery? When the day started, there were 130 men, as I mentioned. Nine made it back to British lines, and seven of those were wounded. Several were taken as POWs, and survived the war, but I don’t have a definitive number.
This is the same model that was used by the 155th.
It sounds like this might have been a useless activity, but it wasn’t. The actions of the 155th Battery slowed the Germans down long enough so that the British were able to put together a defense to turn them back. This blunted the German attack, and the last German offensive in North Africa was over. A few months later, 250,000 Axis troops would surrender in North Africa. This was at least partially because the 155th held.
Their sacrifice turned the tide of battle. Whenever you feel that you can’t win, well, you might not win. But continuing to fight the good fight for as long as you can may help others win.
Rudolf Lang, the German commander, even got a nickname from his own troops after the battle – Panzer Killer – I was able to find the dispatch online which was sent to Berlin where it was mentioned by his superior officer. Now, that sure sounds like a cool nickname. But when it’s given to you by guys whose job it is to drive Panzers?
Not so much.
I said the last voice message from the 155th was, “Tanks are upon us.” That, however, wasn’t the last message the 155th sent. There was one more message, in Morse code:
. . . –
If you think of this as a sound, think of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that’s the sound, and that dot-dot-dot-dash was played on every BBC broadcast during the war. It’s a letter.
“Oh, haven’t you noticed? We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300
When I was a five or so, my parents had horses. One of the horses had a foal (baby horse for you city folk), and Pa Wilder brought the foal and the mare (momma horse) into the barn – it was brutally cold, and the barn was much warmer. They brought me down to see the foal. It was young and awkward as new horses are.
Inside the stall was a series of closely spaced rails in a square, about four feet by six feet.
I asked, “What’s that for, Pa?”
“Well, when the foal is in here, he’ll find that he can’t walk across the bars. His hooves won’t quite fit. That will train him so he won’t do that when he gets older.”
Even at five, I had seen cattle guards and knew cows wouldn’t try to cross them. But here was a horse.
From Library of Congress.
“Won’t he try to jump over the cattle guard, Pa?”
“Some horses, the smart ones, will figure out and a cattle guard won’t work on them. But most don’t. Heck, you can just paint parallel lines on an asphalt road and some horses won’t try to cross them.”
The little training bars were a device, a device to train the horse that he was in a prison made up of parallel bars on the ground. In that, the horse restricted his own freedom.
In the last post (Money, Power, Politics, and Soros), I discussed the difference between Money and Power. I actually finished most of the last post before I wrote the conclusion. Money and Power as described through most of the post were entirely materialistic concepts. Ending it with just that discussion wasn’t right, since the theme of my writing is often to balance the material with the concepts of spirit and virtue. We live in a material world, but the reason we live is for a purpose greater than this moment.
Freedom isn’t important to either Money or Power; Freedom is actually the enemy of both Money and Power. Throughout most of recorded history in the West, when either Money or Power get too out of balance, there is a backlash, and Freedom eventually wins.
It has for thousands of years.
And it will again. I firmly believe that the destiny of the West is in the hands of those who love Freedom, especially in the United States.
Why?
The Left is utterly afraid of the Right. Though they put forward a great front – they are shaking. The American people on the Right compose the largest potential army in the history of the world.
The numbers:
There are at least 400,000,000 guns in private hands in the United States by one estimate. That seems right.
There are 800,000 or so cops. Assume they have two guns each. Heck, assume they have three. Round up. Three million guns. The Military in the United States owns about 4.4 million guns. Round up. That’s a total of less than 10 million guns in the hands of the United States government or other governmental authorities. And that assumes that they stand with the government, which is questionable at best.
Assume only 35% of the American public owns guns, a number I think is very low. Call it 100,000,000 people. Assume that those owners skew mostly Right – 80/20? That’s 80,000,000 on the Right. Let’s do 80/20 again on those that will not stand for a communist uprising in the United States. That’s 16,000,000 Americans ready to stand in the breach. The largest army in the history of the world (so far) were the United States armed forces in 1945: 12,000,000 Americans under arms.
I’ll state it again: American people on the Right have the potential to compose the largest army in the history of the world. Period.
People on the Right, men and women, also have more and better training for field conditions. I’d put The Mrs. up against most people on the Left if it came to a rural setting, because Leftists have no idea that trees are even made of wood, and I doubt that many on the Right will want to make the Stalingrad mistake and get caught in the cities as Leftists consume themselves. How many people on the Right have their homes on the market to escape from Minneapolis? From Seattle? From any of dozens of cities where they know that they no longer belong?
I have no idea. But they’d be fools to stay.
And even though we have the numbers on our side, there’s more good news. We don’t even need overwhelming numerical superiority:
How many apostles peacefully changed the religion of Europe?
How many Spartans defended all of Western Civilization at Thermopylae?
“But John,” you say, “most all of the people in your examples died for their cause.” Yes, they did. And we remember them for that, because they changed the world. Thousands of years before Robert Heinlein said it, they knew the truth of his quote: “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
Besides, everyone is going to die. Is it better to be a Leonidas or a St. Peter?
We outgun the Left. We have Truth, capital T, on our side. The other day Vox Day had this inspiring clip at his blog (LINK).
It was a good clip, and one I’d forgotten. So we watched the movie again tonight – it’s one that could not be made by Hollywood® today. That clip also makes the point I tried to make earlier much more eloquently than I ever could.
The Black Riots Lives Matter riots are demoralizing to people of good character. This is intentional. The riots are meant to make you feel alone. The riots are meant to make you feel that the Right has already lost.
The Right has not lost.
How did the Modern Sporting Lawyer make you feel?
That’s why he and his wife are condemned. That’s why they have vowed to cancel him, to make an example of them, to find a way to charge them with crime. They are the opposite of demoralization.
The Modern Sporting Lawyer and his wife drive the Left crazy. Here, their desire to destroy as a senseless mob was turned back by only two people.
Can you imagine if the Right was united? I can.
The corollary is obvious: quit fighting each other in the right. Stop. People don’t believe in your exact brand?
You can’t stand Libertarians? You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day? That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom? The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?
Too bad.
We are in the same foxhole. Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other. Now. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.
How do you know if you’re with us?
We like building statues, not tearing them down.
We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.
We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.
We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”
We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.
And that is the difference. The Left is bitter. The Left is seething. The Left is angry.
Why? Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners. They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person. But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.
The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left. They see themselves as weak. Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness. But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good. They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate. The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.
The Right rejects that. All of it.
Sex isn’t a virtue, chastity is a virtue. Sex isn’t evil, but making it the focus of your life is no different than any other addiction – it is a vice. But which of those does the Left celebrate? Inside, they know that it’s wrong, and that also fills them with self-hate.
Because of that hate, and seek to make the Right weak like them. How? By demoralizing the Right, by taking virtues and attacking them while publicly celebrating things we use to call sin. By coming up with never ending list of impossible demands and nonsensical redefinitions of the English language on an ever more frequent basis. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has recently been excommunicated from the Left for being brazen enough to indicate that women might be, well, women.
The Right has built Western Civilization, and built it with a compassion for the weak. That makes the Left hate the Right even more. They seek to make us doubt our morals and virtue: everyone is racist, every historical figure is fatally flawed. That is justification enough in the minds of the Left to tear down everything that has made their prosperity and wealth transfer possible. The Left makes no real art, just caricatures of the genius that has gone before, photographs of Christ soaking in urine. The Left is a parasite that, failing to create, destroys.
But those games won’t work anymore. The Right is strong. The Right is virtuous. The Left seeks to build nothing because that is the province of the Right. And to the Left, those who are strong and build statues to the virtues of flawed men are evil.
Was Columbus perfect? No. Did he open up a New World? Yes. How many people in Mexico City would prefer to revert to the charnel house of the Aztecs? Some, but every hand that goes up will belong to a member of the Left.
The Right is not evil. We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands. Why? Because they could never build it. The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.
Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.
I don’t think we will win.
I know we will win. We are the foals that recognize the painted lines on the asphalt for the lie that they are. We are the horses that realize that they have the strength to jump over the cattle guard that we used to think was our prison.
From Library of Congress.
I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall. We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history. The Right doesn’t know its own strength. But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.
We will win. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. Maybe not even in the next decade. And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis. We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.
And we will make it better.
And we will win.
We always have.
What is your profession?
I rarely ask people to share these posts, but if you have people you know are feeling down – please do.
Count de Monet: “It is said that the people are revolting.”
King Louis XVI: “You said it! They stink on ice.”
–History of the World, Part I
When I copy in these big clocks into my posts, it’s a huge paste of time.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.
We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight. I didn’t move to step 9. last month because last month, violence was just happening. This month? Violence is being commonly justified by local and state authorities. When protesters a mob tore down a gate to access private property in St. Louis, which set the stage. When the Modern Sporting Lawyer™ and his wife pulled out firearms to protect themselves, the sane world cheered.
Yes, I recycled this one. Couldn’t resist.
That’s why a District Attorney vowed to find something, anything to charge this couple with. The one thing the mob cannot stand is decent, armed people standing up to the mob. The politicians have made the mob and know that it must be fed.
The fact that CHAZ/CHOP was allowed to exist, with the rampant lawlessness of the mob in charge for weeks was another sign. We are very, very close to open warfare.
In this issue: Front Matter – A Year Down The Road – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links
Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.
A Year Down The Road
I started the Weather Reports a little over a year ago because I could see the changes coming faster and faster. I’ve been concerned about the economy since I read The Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) back around the year 2000. When you look at all of the trends – social, economic, political – I could see trouble on the horizon. If you want some in-depth thought on how The Fourth Turning is progressing, Jim over at The Burning Platform (LINK) is your man.
The 2007 housing price collapse wasn’t a surprise to me. When I bought my house, I was (fortunately) in the position to negotiate with my employer that they’d cover any loss on sale if I moved for them. As house prices were going up, up, up . . . they agreed. And why not? It wouldn’t cost them a dime.
It did. My house dropped 20% in price between when I bought it and when it finally sold two years after I moved out. I don’t give myself genius points for this, but when they offered me a loan that was nearly ten times my salary? With no income verification?
Yikes.
The tensions we face aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re not anywhere near their peak. Those same social, economic, and political factors have gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years.
Is anything out of the question?
Will one more year down the road have as much change as we have seen in the last year?
Why wouldn’t it?
Are you ready for that?
Violence and Censorship Update
In the previous posts, it has been either violence or censorship that’s shown up in a month. This month? We get both. I’ll start with censorship.
What’s out? Statues. Toppling statues is censorship – censorship of the past. George Orwell described it well in his book, 1984:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”
No bit of American history is safe, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt to “American Pioneers”, Spanish explorers, and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yup. All have to go. And not by vote, not by decision, but by the raw power of the mob.
An episode of the British television classic Fawlty Towers has been removed because of offensive language, and the wind has done gone with Gone With The Wind, which had to be shuttered “temporarily” so that (pulls answer from hat) people won’t be offended.
So, history has been judged to be insufficiently woke.
Right now the media is so woke, it’s like they took NoDoze® with coffee and meth to get ready for their Gender Studies final.
YouTube® just concluded its next round of purges. Dozens of large channels with millions of views are now gone. The biggest personality banned was Stefan Molyneaux, philosopher and badthinker. His crime? Not sure. People think it’s because he has had guests (scientists) on in the past that indicate that there might be group differences in cognitive ability. Oops – can’t discuss that idea in 2020.
Among other channels that YouTube® suggested for me and that I listened to from time to time was The Iconoclast, a British guy on the Right who advocated for lower immigration into Great Britain. Now? Gone. Plus? A major newspaper published a story on The Iconoclast’s identity. In 2020, having the wrong views means going without a job.
But that’s not violence, right?
On Reddit®, I heard that over 2000 subreddits were banned. I had been to several of the banned subreddits in the past, and was a bit surprised. One of them, r/consoomers was specifically set up for self-improvement and rejection of globalist commercialism. A little politically incorrect?
Yup.
Now gone. Another dead subreddit is r/The_Donald. It’s crime? Can’t be sure. I think it was too popular, with over a million subscribers. And a group of a million people who like Donald Trump? Triggered!
Reddit™ made rule changes as well. They initially rolled out this new rule for commenting:
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority….”
After someone got on Wikipedia and figured out that, for instance, men are in the minority since there are more women in the world, the rule on protecting people from hate wouldn’t apply to people who were misogynist. Oops. They changed that rule.
But it sure showed what they were intending.
This is the biggest month of censorship against the Right in, well, ever. I expect it to get worse. The idea that Donald Trump could be re-elected is mind poison for the Left. Leftist fetishize politics as a religion – Trump is the ultimate demon. They will do everything and anything so that he isn’t re-elected.
Share this meme and help a Leftist lose sleep so they can stay woke.
I’d spend more time updating you on the violence of the past month, but it’s probably easier to update you on the places that weren’t violent. Modern Mayberry was one. Here, we watch the news and see the world falling apart, and it’s like there’s another country out there.
There is. It’s just waiting to be born.
Updated Civil War II Index
The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.
June has been the worst month so far – economic, violence, and political instability are all in bad shape. It’s so bad that even the illegals don’t want to sneak across the border.
Violence:
Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement. I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June. I was almost right, and now June has pegged the scale. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. Yes, the Y-axis label shows 350, but that’s because I didn’t notice until I’d put the graph together and it’s 3AM.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall. I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December. I expect more instability heading into November, and may make some changes to the inputs next month.
Economic:
Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again. I’m hoping this is the worst that we’ll see, but I expect a market crash this month (July) or next.
Illegal Aliens:
Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is at a five year low for this time of year.
LINKS
These are from Ricky this month:
Although the US Government has FINALLY stopped paying for the First Civil War…
“The time for negotiation is past. The actions of the British army at Lexington and Concord speak plainly enough. If we wish to regain our natural-born rights as Englishmen then we must fight for them.” – John Adams
The FBI arrested my algebra teacher when I was in high school as he was teaching us about graphing. They said they were sure she was plotting something.
Boston, Massachusetts: 122 killed, 211 wounded in a daybreak raid by troops sent to confiscate privately owned weapons and ammunition.“Patriots” claim government troops fired first.
It has been reported that at dawn a group of self-styled “Patriots” engaged a heavily armed troops sent to confiscate guns and ammunition. These “Patriots” though initially outnumbered, stood by the side of the road, fully armed with modern assault weapons at the ready. The “Patriot” leader at the site, John Parker, claims to have been only standing there with the other “Patriots”. It has reported that Parker said, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
According to Parker, the soldiers ordered the “Patriots” to leave, and he ordered his men to “disburse and go home,” but “the soldiers were yelling,” and there was confusion. There was a shot, fired, but both the “Patriots” and the spokesman for the troops claim the other side fired the first shot. Badly outnumbered at first, the “Patriots” were reinforced by the local members of their radical libertarian movement as the firefight wore on. House-to-house fighting was reported.
Sources to this blog have indicated that the “Patriots” had been tipped off to the troop movements and were aware the gun confiscation was coming. The troops were forced to withdraw under fire, although rescue from a larger detachment of troops from Boston was required for their safe evacuation.
Why did Paul Revere ride a horse on his midnight ride? Well, have you ever tried carrying one?
Although no weapons were found at either Lexington or Concord, authorities have indicated that persons of interest in this case are: Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. His Royal Majesty King George III had no comment, but Brigadier General Lord Percy, had this to say:
During the whole affair the Rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance & resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body. Indeed, they knew too well what was proper, to do so. Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers against the Indians & Canadians, & this country being much covered with wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting.
This is a statue of Captain John Parker, Patriot leader who led the Militia at the battle of Lexington. He died five months after the battle, of tuberculosis. Since you don’t know what I look like, you can assume I look exactly like a bald version of this.
A local lawyer, John Adams, viewed the battlefield the next day, “The die was cast. The Rubicon crossed.” Pressed by this blog for an explanation of these cryptic comments, he referred us to our previous post (American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?).
The events listed above happened 245 years ago, except John Adams being snarky to me, yet somehow the concepts behind them are fresh in American life in 2020. The battles of Lexington and Concord, though small by today’s standards, produced the “shot heard ‘round the world” as the American Dream and American Identity were formed.
Lifted straight from Wikipedia, here’s a story from the battle that made me chuckle:
Against the advice of his Master of Ordnance, Percy had left Boston without spare ammunition for his men or for the two artillery pieces they brought with them, thinking the extra wagons would slow him down. Each man in Percy’s brigade had only 36 rounds, and each artillery piece was supplied with only a few rounds carried in side-boxes. After Percy had left the city, Gage directed two ammunition wagons guarded by one officer and thirteen men to follow. This convoy was intercepted by a small party of older, veteran militiamen still on the “alarm list,” who could not join their militia companies because they were well over 60 years of age. These men rose up in ambush and demanded the surrender of the wagons, but the regulars ignored them and drove their horses on. The old men opened fire, shot the lead horses, killed two sergeants, and wounded the officer. The British survivors ran, and six of them threw their weapons into a pond before they surrendered.
This soldier was old enough to experience both mustard gas and pepper spray. He’s well seasoned.
I’ve long thought that our new, modern form of Civil War will feature far more old folks than the past ones. Unlike the Civil War 1.0, Civil War 2.0 will be fought more like the Revolutionary War, with armed Militia on both sides. The little story above is (for me) confirmation that in America, being over 60 doesn’t mean “out of the fight.”
But this is about the Revolution, and I’ll write more about Civil War for Monday. The Battle of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775, and it wasn’t until over a year of fighting skirmishes that the Declaration of Independence was drafted.
Saying and doing are different. Sure, in 1776 we said we were independent and gave a list of reasons, but it took years of war to make it so. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first steps in making it so, and setting the pattern for a nation that has spread more freedom and prosperity than any nation in the history of the world except for Great Britain.
“I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the polarity flow through the gate.” – Ghostbusters (1984)
I haven’t figured out how to publicly indicate that I’m against protesting.
I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago, and casually mentioned Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals as a playbook that had been used by the Left back when they controlled very few of the country’s power centers. Top Hollywood® stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Sinatra were openly patriotic – it was the norm. Politics is one reason I think Frank Sinatra would hate 2020, and the other would be whenever he started coughing he’d think he had Crooner Virus.
But the Leftist rot had already started long before the 1960s. It started in academia. Sure, that seemed safe. Let the Leftists work quietly where they had little money. It was thought the most important decision made was what the professor’s wife would wear to the faculty dinner and the most important rumors were about that new cannibal professor, Hannibal Lecturer. But once it took root, Leftism spread from the colleges and out into the streets.
Alinsky started his quest to organize in the 1940s in Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune described his legacy this way:
“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky’s amusement.”
The Tribune was one of the few papers that were negative about Alinsky. By the time Rules for Radicals was published in 1971, the editorial departments of most newspapers had been taken over by Leftists that those “harmless” college professors had indoctrinated. Most newspapers applauded Alinsky by 1972 when they reviewed his book.
Professor Karen wants you to think for yourself, but will grade you based on her politics.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.
Professor Warren now explains why free speech doesn’t apply to you.
One of the methods the Left used to obtain power was the vigorous application of Alinsky’s Rules. Here they are – along with my annotations:
“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Most of the Leftist power is based on fear – fear of what they might do. That’s the reason the takeover of the media was so important to them – they use it to divide and minimize people on the Right so feel that they are as alone as a Joe Biden basement thought.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Which may explain the rioting and violence of the Left in the riots today. They’re not good at building things, but they sure can hit a plate glass window with a brick from thirty yards.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – The idea of the riots is to go beyond every expertise. It has been decades since a president had to deal with riots across the country, and even then, they weren’t all at the same time.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – For instance, Christians must be made to live up to Christian principles – that’s the example Alinsky himself used.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – Saturday Night Live® used to make fun of politicians on the Right and Late night comedians used to make fun of the Right and Left. Now? Only the Right is mocked, and (for reasons I’ve explained before Why The Left Can’t Meme) even then, poorly.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – Whatever it is, it should give them emotional payoff – the people crying at the Trump protests early on were an example – they enjoyed feeling the pain and rage. And as we’ve learned in 2020, who doesn’t love riots?
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Sit ins? That’s so 1960’s. Burning down Wendy’s®? That’ll teach them to, um, exist.
“Keep the pressure on.” – Ideally, it should be one event followed by another – don’t give your target a chance to think straight
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – Alinsky threatened to do things – all of the time. The word “threat” appears 38 times in Rules for Radicals. Often he would leak the threat of a plan, and never even have to do it as the opposition gave in to the threat alone.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Back to point 8 – think of things that can be kept up for a long, long time. Riots in the spring and summer nights can go on for months. In December in Minnesota? Not so much.
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – A great example of this is how BLM has kept the narrative moving about police violence against blacks, when the truth is, statistically, that blacks are shot less often than their level of police involvement would indicate, and whites are shot more But push it long enough?
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – The Left no longer does this – rather than have a constructive alternative, they want things like “removal of the systems of white supremacy” and “defunding of the police.”
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II and now Trump. It’s hilarious that they thought W. was the anti-Christ, and Romney was the Devil when they are now nearly saints of the Left.
Sometimes, you can hear the “Reeeeee” from here . . . .
But can the Right use the same playbook? Absolutely. And they are.
“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – The Left is really afraid of the Right, and fear the most the Right creating a coalition in the same way the Left has. They will do anything to stop that. Sadly, we on the Right seem to be very, very picky on who is in the foxhole with us. A heretic on one point? The biggest power the Right has is in joining together.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Protesting violently isn’t in the Right’s DNA. We have jobs. Rioting isn’t in the Right’s expertise. Planning is. Communicating is. Through years of necessity, we’ve also learned to meet quietly.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – Memes are a good example. The Left ceased to be funny in 2004, and ceased to any sense of humor around 2012, so using memetic warfare is nearly as unfair as playing Twister® with a colorblind super model.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – /pol/, the politically incorrect part of 4chan, did exactly that when they posted signs around Seattle telling the homeless that CHAZ would have free food for them. “No borders” and “sharing” were in rules for CHAZ, so, they ran out of food on day two. Plus? It was hilarious – point 5.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – This, in part, explains why I write some of the things I do. It was particularly satisfying the day I saw one of my memes being made fun of by Leftists on Reddit®. They don’t fight back unless you’re over the target.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – I love poking fun at the Left, because I know that it bothers them. I enjoy it. Other things I see people on the Right enjoying are planning and organizing and communicating and moving away from California.
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Expecting things to go back to “normal” isn’t working for the Right. You can come up with other examples of these – but in large part the playbook needs to be re-written.
“Keep the pressure on.” – The closest that the Right has come to doing this is The Donald himself and his use of Twitter® as a continual agency of chaos. He pokes. He prods. He shakes things up and looks for advantage. He’s had Democrats so tied up in nots they said that Haiti was a paradise.
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – The Right hasn’t been very good at making threats or even having a cohesive plan.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Again, outside of Trump, there has been little pressure made on the Left, and next to no organized pressure on the mainstream Left. When has the idea of freedom of speech been used against the Left in an organized way on a college campus? This started with academia, and a good solution will leave college departments where the Leftists lurk defunded. Imagine a Grievance Studies professor having to look for a real job because they violated the campus speech code?
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – Opposition to illegal immigration is just one issue of the Right that, if it were pushed is a winner. There are others.
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – What is it that the Right wants? Do we know?
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Groundwork has been made with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her Leftist group, but the Left is expert at this – Justice Cavanaugh is a textbook study, even though they lost.
But what do we want when we have a victory?
Long term, I’m not sure Alinsky’s rules will be enough for the Right as we wander towards Civil War 2.0, but they’re a start, and they’re certainly fun. As I mentioned above, it has lost institution after institution to the Left, and many of those without even a fight. None of this will be quickly won, and the Right must begin to think in decades, and also look to make common cause with people who aren’t exactly fitting some sort of mental ideal for the perfect person on the Right, since they don’t really exists.
“I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” – Fight Club
I don’t want to be killed by a large sneeze, though. I don’t want people saying I bit off more than I could achoo.
As a culture, at least in the developed West, fearful of death. We hide from it to a degree that I’m not sure most of us are aware of. How could we be aware? Like our browser history, we’ve spent so much time and effort hiding it from public view.
I noticed a pattern in my life. First, when I was young, we went to funerals. Those funerals were where we buried my grandparents. As I got older, I started going to a lot of weddings as friends tied the knot, and funerals dropped to nearly zero. But as I get older, I’m seeing more funerals again. Most recently, it was for The Mrs.’ grandfather. Her grandfather was a crew chief on B-17’s for the 8th Army Air Force. He was buried in the same Army olive drab uniform that he’d worn in World War II.
Funerals are, and should be, a time for reflection. When I looked a little at the big picture, in modern America most people rarely see dead people unless it’s in a hospital bed or at a funeral. Sure, there are exceptions. Cops, soldiers, people in medicine, and morticians see them all of the time outside of those limited settings, but those people are a pretty small percentage of the population.
When I pass away, I don’t want a fancy funeral. One like this is fine.
I was half-watching a movie, perhaps in the 1990s, so I’m a little shy on details. The movie was set during the Great Depression, and the husband had died. The wife had prepared the body and it was sitting ON THE DINNER TABLE for people to come and see for the visitation. Okay, not sitting. But the husband’s corpse was stretched out where they ate their fried okra and possum sushi or whatever it was people ate during the Depression.
What the heck? “Surely they didn’t really do that,” I said. There was an older person in the room who had lived through the Depression. He corrected me. “Surely they did. Funeral parlors were for rich people. And what are you gonna do, put him on the floor?”
Wow. I guess the old saying of “dust bunnies don’t mix with the dead” is true.
Being a product of my time, I hadn’t really thought about that at all. Dead people? Call a professional. Very nice and tidy and nothing but a bill that you can pay by check or credit card.
But when you look back at life in the 1930s and before, I guess there was a reason that people had little graveyards on the farm: they were used to dealing with death and couldn’t pass the duties required by death to someone else. Who else was going to do it? You couldn’t hire it out like today. Our ancestors knew what we have now forgotten. Just as birth starts a life, death ends it. I heard a statistic from the CDC® that life has a nearly a 100% mortality rate.
I will say I’m in favor of the new congressional cheese support bill. Count me as pro-volone.
Close physical contact with our dead relatives used to be the norm, not the exception. For them, death was a part of life. My mother-in-law was doing genealogy of her family. For the most part, genealogy is not horribly interesting to me unless there’s a story. Just knowing that I had a great-great-great-great grandpa called Duncan McWilder back in 1788 doesn’t tell me a lot. Was he a scoundrel? Why did he hop the boat to America? Was it for better Internet?
I did jump on the Mormon database and at least someone thinks I am the great29 grandson of Harald Hardrada, who had a notoriously bad day in 1066 A.D. when he forgot to put on his armor when going up against the English. At least Harald has a story. After one of Harald’s vacations in Bulgaria, he got the nickname “Bulger-burner,” which is probably a lot funnier of a nickname if you’re not from Bulgaria.
And I hear that dead Viking Scrabble® players go to Vowel-halla.
Okay, that was a digression. I’ll see if I can’t get off at the right exit this time. Anyway, my mother-in-law was doing genealogy. One particular male relative had three or four wives. Polygamy? No. His wives kept dying in childbirth or from some plague that we can fix with a shot or thinking that arsenic and lead were what made makeup good, or wearing asbestos corsets and radium jewelry. People were acquainted with death in a real and up-close manner in the Victorian era.
Sad clowns don’t wear arsenic makeup, they use frown-dation instead.
I think that as we isolate ourselves from death, we start to pretend that it doesn’t exist. In some cases, people like Ray Kurzweil are attempting to figure out how to stop aging and live forever. Failing that? Ray is planning on being frozen into a corpse-sicle for later defrosting and infinite life. My bet? People will be able to live longer, but they won’t be able to live forever, because testing immortality drugs takes forever. And everyone is doing it: a guy outside of Wal-Mart® was selling immortality supplements, and it looked like a scam, so I called the cops. They were aware – they arrested the guy last year, in 2000, in 1968, and even, they said, back as far as 1880.
Ray may be able to squeeze a few more years out, but I thing that physical immortality isn’t something that we’ll see. At least not in my lifetime. Sorry, but immortality jokes never get old.
Even though life is part of death, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. But we don’t have to fear it, either. Very few of us will get to choose the time and place of our death. But we have the choice as to what we are going to do tomorrow to make this a better world – to do things that matter.
If a Viking is reincarnated, is he Bjorn again?
Heck, if I was immortal, I’d probably never get around to doing things that matter, since there’s always another tomorrow.
Until there’s not.
Just like Harald Hardrada, there will be a time and place when we’ll die. But Harald was a smart Viking, and he knew he wouldn’t drown. He knew that you could lead a Norse to water, but you can’t make him sink.
“You were going to bed hungry, scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I’m the one who stopped that. You know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It’s a paradise.” – Avengers: Infinity War
After several years of looking, I found a book on Amazon® about how clocks work. It’s about time.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
The clock didn’t move this month for the third month in a row. That’s good. But I see pressure building up quickly.
In this issue: Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Steps On the Way to Revolt – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Real Story: Economic Collapse – Links
Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. Here are the links to the previous issues: Issue One (LINK), Issue Two (LINK), Issue Three (LINK), Issue Four (LINK), Issue Five (LINK), Issue Six (LINK), Issue Seven (LINK), Issue Eight (LINK), Issue Nine (LINK), Issue Ten (LINK), and Issue Eleven (LINK).
In fact, any YouTube® video that puts forward an opinion that differs from the World Health Organization (WHO) will be removed. Do it too often? Your channel is banned. For life.
I must admit that I am a sinner in committing heresy against the WHO. In May, 2019, I did a frighteningly good post (The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again) about their silliness in describing “Burnout” and “Gaming Disorder” as new plagues that were going to destroy mankind. To quote me at the time: “When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer.” Yup, that’s probably enough for the YouTube® ban hammer.
But now it seems that having an opinion different than the WHO is enough to bring the full weight of Leftist censorship down. There were several doctors that disagreed with the WHO, and they were shut down, even though the WHO’s opinion on COVID-19 has been proven wrong again and again and again. And that is scary. The WHO (and the CDC, who I skewered in the post (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy)) have proven to be little more than government agencies that have lost their primary mission in a race to pander to news outlets to secure funding.
Facebook™ announced it was not only trying to get rid of COVID-19 “misinformation” by deleting posts, but also was actively censoring people trying to use it to organize “end the quarantine” events. That was chilling. You may or may not agree with these protests, but the idea of peacefully petitioning government is a clear right. Libertarians and (increasingly) Leftists will make the argument that “Facebook® is a private company and can do whatever they want. Nanner-nanner.”
But know them by their works. They want your data. They want to market you as a product. A compliant product for them to sell. And, it appears, snitch on you if you are a bad-thinker.
He only needed a sip. Zucculents are excellent at storing water and can thrive in areas with dry climate.
Likewise, the Unz Review (LINK) got kicked off of Facebook®. Ron Unz’s website is a hotbed of controversial thought that’s not afraid of challenging almost any opinion: I’ve read a lot there I disagree with. The owner of the site, Ron Unz, does not stand behind every article published – it would be impossible because many of them are 100% contradictory to each other. But, even though I disagree with a lot I’ve seen there, I’ve learned a lot there that I never would anywhere else. I’m surprised Unz lasted this long on Facebook™.
Where does this censorship take us? Nowhere good, since after the first censorship, taking down the next site becomes easier and easier. It’s for the public good, after all. Can’t have people thinking unapproved thoughts, right?
Updated Civil War II Index
The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.
April was a difficult month for the economy, and that shows up in the graphs. I don’t think that May will be quite as bad, but I’ve been wrong before. I did, however, try to spend significant time on selection of the bikini pictures to accompany the graphs, since I want to at least reach the journalist integrity of the New York Times®.
Violence:
Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone is stuck in the basement. But now the end of quarantine is near, and people will become violent if it isn’t lifted soon. I expect big upticks in June, July and August. I think May will be fairly mellow, and might be the last mellow month for ages.
Enjoy it.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. Instability is down – having the field reduced to two likely candidates for the November election helps calm people, plus people are advised not to make sudden moves around Joe Biden, since his predator instinct could kick in and he might give you a good sniffing. Instability will go up if Biden falters or starts drooling oatmeal during an interview.
Economic:
Down indicates worse economic conditions. The graph speaks for itself – I had to search through a LOT of bikini photographs to find one that fit with a plunge like we’ve seen. I expect April to be better. But not by a lot. I’ll likely change the basis of this one or add an entirely new one next month – this is an instantaneous graph to measure mood, and we should start to look at cumulative numbers to measure how screwed we are. Upside? One more bikini graph.
Illegal Aliens:
Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down. Until Mexico’s economy collapses. Then what?
Economic Collapse – The Real Story
When I first started the weather report, one criticism was that we would never see Civil War 2.0 while things were good economically. And I admitted that this is true. As a people I can see limited acts of disobedience, but not outright insurrection while the economy is good. Full bellies and full bank accounts don’t lead to fighting in the streets.
The economy is in free fall. That’s not an overstatement. There has been no month as bad in the world economy as April, 2020, at least not in my life. Unless you’re in your 80’s or better, this is the worst economic month of your life, too. To find such a disaster in the United States, you’d have to go back to the 1930’s, at least.
The goat entrails have spoken! The cure is yet more debt and money printing!
As I’ve mentioned before, a strong economy could take this sort of shock. Our economy isn’t strong. Let’s take New York City. What does it produce? Debt, real estate sales, insurance companies, financial irregularity, the stock market, and national “journalism” that at best is as biased as a Kennedy mother bailing her kids out of jail. If New York City were to disappear tomorrow, the only thing from NYC the Wilder Family would miss is the television show Impractical Jokers®.
Yet New York City controls the money flows in the country. It also controls the bets made on wheat production and pork prices. NYC produces nothing, but acts as a tax on those that actually produce. In 1947, the proportion of the economy devoted to Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (F.I.R.E.) was about 10%. In 2017, it was 20%. And we do need a certain percentage of our economy devoted to moving money around, but the point of our economy isn’t moving money, it’s making things and feeding people. Oh, and doing taxes.
Are we richer because of what comes from New York? Are we more stable? Does making another loan to a big corporation so they have enough debt on their books so a New York financier can’t buy them with their own money make us better off? Is it better because the dollars aren’t backed by anything other than a printing press?
Hey, that might make a good movie.
In that same time period, manufacturing dropped from 25% of the economy to 11%. Does that make us better off, when critical goods are made an ocean away? Does that make us more stable and able to weather a crisis?
As the economy collapses, it’s collapsing because it has been hollowed out for decades. I will say that studies show, before 1980, Democrats were strongly focused on keeping the manufacturing and construction industries strong, since the unions that dominated that sector were lock-step voters for the Democrats. But, when a shiny new toy of being paid by the big banks plus being able to bring in a whole new class of voters (legal immigrants and illegal aliens) got too big, the Democrats dumped manufacturing and construction.
This collapse has been decades in the making. It won’t be done quickly. And it just might provide the pain to slingshot us into Civil War 2.0.
Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet. Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now. Wang: Don’t give up, Jack. Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang. Let’s just chew our way outta here. -Big Trouble in Little China
I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.
I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist. I don’t really think I am. I am certain that I am going to die. I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind. Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?
Probably not.
I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead. And the last six weeks our lives? Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters? Not me. Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.
But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up. The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned. Seneca put it pretty well:
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient. For he that is so wants nothing.
I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?
One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets. I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant. Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college. Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service. Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?
So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either. Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work. I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?
Nope, I guess that won’t work. I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans. In winter. After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. How bad was that particular plague? It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died. Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.
When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”
I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too. But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder. Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. There’s virtue in neither of these. There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.
None of us will escape death. All of us will fail. Suffering? Yeah, that’s going to happen, too. To all of that, I have a simple response:
So what?
All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live. You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around. There is no particular way your life “should” turn out. Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad. Was there luck in there, both good and bad? Sure, but not as much as you might think.
You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad.
And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for? Deal with it. And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering. You have electricity. You have Internet. You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating. And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too. You know, while you’re up.
I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca. Unless Mommy makes him.
Part of life is getting rid of excuses. Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”
Others?
I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
I’m too busy. Good news! After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
I don’t know how to do ______. Unless it’s differential equations. Then just do what the book says. Nobody really understands differential equations.
Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.
