Valhalla – Page 17 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

How I Got Into Debt, Trench Warfare, and an End of the World Cult You Can Believe In

“Well, if you don’t like that, try some Archduke Chocula.” – Futurama

After World War One, the phrase, “Happy as a Hapsburg in Serbia” fell out of favor, as did the “Hair Smile” style of mustache.

I’ve already told the story about digging out of debt. In retrospect, it seems to me that all of those stories end up sounding the same: “I weighed six hundred pounds, my kitchen floor was covered in dirty dishes and cat food, and I had $3.7 million in debt until I found Wildernetics© and the First Church of PEZology™. Look at me now!”

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part One). These are from a soldier’s joke newspaper, The Wiper’s (a mangling of Ypres) Times, produced for soldiers by soldiers that found an abandoned printing press.

I know my methods can solve everything, but today I had a crazy idea. How about spending some time talking about how I got into debt in the first place? I know that might cut into the revenue of the Wildernetics© End of the World Cult and Take-Out BarBeQue Restaurant®, but I figure you might come back for the brisket. It’s very tender.

I’ll quit teasing. How did I get into debt? First a little. Then all at once.

Let me rewind a whole marriage. As regular readers will know, The Mrs. was not the first, but she is the final spouse. My first marriage was an example of a series of escalating poor mutual decisions where each side seemed to lack a brief moment of sanity to back out before anyone got hurt, sort of like the run up to World War I. Even before Archduke Franz Ferdinand proved that .380 ACP was a useful round against Hapsburgs and their notably gelatinous bones, World War I was inevitable. Before I said “I do” everything was in place for the trench warfare of future divorce.

Okay, I apologize for this joke. I think it violated the Geneva Convention.

But, rewinding. After graduating college I got married and got a starter job, which is to say I had a job that just barely paid the bills. Nearly exactly. In fact, after working at the job for a few months, we were exactly (most months) at zero. We weren’t saving any money yet, but we also weren’t in the red. Success. My credit card limit was 10,000 . . . Siberian Lira. This was equivalent to a whole bright and shiny quarter. This helped me stay debt free.

Then came the table.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Two), this one is for James.

We had a dining room table. It wasn’t great, and the chairs that came with it were a bit ratty – the vinyl arms had been slammed into the table often enough that it looked like a pack of rabid Chihuahuas had spent their lives sitting on the chair seats and gnawing on the arms. I imagine them growling and chewing in unison as they sat around the table, like Viking Chihuahua rowers. Most all of our furniture was second hand or gifted, but the table really was the biggest eyesore.

Okay, this one isn’t mine, but I couldn’t resist.

At some point discipline broke. I know how silly it sounds to say that now, but back then, month after month of not buying anything but actual necessities takes more discipline than Elizabeth Warren around a tribal gathering. Eventually I gave in. We bought the table. Using debt. Back then, individual stores would give you amazing credit limits just to buy their crap. They gave us more than enough credit to buy that table, and with the money I saved from shipping the Chihuahuas back to Denmark, I figured we’d be money ahead.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Three).

The table was only $500, but the difference between having no debt (outside of a mortgage) and having debt, even a small one, was a huge psychological hurdle for me. It’s like having a doughnut when you’re doing low carb. “I got weak had one doughnut, so I might as well have, say, 36. And do you have any whipped cream I could just guzzle straight from the can? I broke my diet, and don’t want to waste it.” Pretty soon other nice to have things showed up, very few of which I still own today. But I had crossed that mental barrier from peace (debt free) to war (spend away!). Suddenly, the credit card companies realized I had debt, and immediately wanted to lend me more money. My credit limits tripled.

I hope that this doesn’t sound like I’m blaming The Ex. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I was fully complicit. Ultimately the debt grew faster than my wages. This led to the idea of grad school: I could get free tuition plus be a paid graduate assistant. Would it work?

Sure. There were also student loans. Free money! Oops.

Okay, let’s all admit that Nachos Bellgrande® is NOT a war crime.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Four).

There were some places along the way that I could have gotten off the merry-go-round. When I sold that first house to move for a new, post-grad school job, we’d made a stunning 40% profit in three years. It would have more than paid off a good chunk of my student loans. Nope, that would have made too much sense. We did pay down a little debt and bought a new house, putting down the minimum down payment.

But most of the money was just spent. About this time I also had one of the worst ideas I’d ever had in my life. The Ex and I were always arguing about money, and about the thermostat – I knew that 50°F in winter and 90°F in summer were reasonable temperatures, but The Ex disagreed. Well, if she had to pay the bills, she would certainly understand how tight money was. Right?

No.

We had a different view of not only household temperature, but the idea that one should pay monthly bills, well, monthly. I didn’t figure this out for three years, by which time I owed enough money to qualify as a third world country, but one of the nice, mainly atrocity-free ones. Mainly.

Taco Bell® inspired outfits?

Debt is like George Washington’s description of fire, it’s an amazing tool, but a fearful master. My advice is to pay all of your bills in full, monthly. I know that the people who own your debt disagree. Why? They want you to have debt, as much as you can pay.

I had a friend (since passed away in an accident) who I called Batman© on this blog (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman). He had one particular investment that was worth about $12 million – a series of apartments. He had paid the apartments off before they were even built by selling future property tax credits to other businesses. Yeah, that kind of friend.

But he viewed his tenants as slaves (his term), who went to work daily so they could send him money every week. I heard him use exactly that phrase to describe them. He liked his tenants, and was a good landlord. However, he knew the score: when they went to work each day, they went to work so they could pay him.

And Batman was a good guy and he taught kids that debt was a form of slavery of ordinary people to wealthy guys just like him, not that they always listened.

My marriage to The Ex? That particular marriage is proof of the old Henny Youngman joke:

“Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

Yeah, divorce just STARTS the argument.

The day she moved out was one of the happiest days for both of us.

I was still digging myself out of debt when I met The Mrs. As our relationship blossomed, I thought it was only fair to tell her of the debt that I had.

“The Soon To Be The Mrs., I have something to tell you. You might want to sit down.”

The Soon To Be The Mrs. looked shaken. She sat. I told her about my debt. She laughed.

“Is that all? I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

No, not prison. But I still owe reparations payments to France.

Mortality, Bill Murray, Art Lessons, and Avatar

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.” – Into the Wild

I’ve left a map.

“That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s an unusual thing for The Boy to say when discussing death. In this case, my death.

First, some context.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m going to die. I have no desire to die anytime soon, mind you, but I realize that it’s something that, statistically, happens to 100% of us. Not 99%. Not 99.999%. Not even 99.9999999999%.

100%.

I think the human mind has developed safeguards to distract itself from facing this inevitability, primarily so we don’t spend our days in a corner sobbing uncontrollably when we’re young, muttering, “What is it all about? Why do we even try? What if I never meet Bill Murray?” However, there comes a time in life when you begin to understand that death will come. If I am statistically average, this fate is decades away and again, I’m not particularly interested in hurrying it along.

I’m not sure the exact moment I made peace with the idea of death. It might have been when I was stuck watching a DVD of Avatar®. That will make anyone long for death, so that was probably it.

I kept waiting for Papa Smurf® to show up during Avatar©. Or the movie to be good. Neither of those things happened.

As luck would have it, Pop Wilder lived to be quite old, and was in generally very good physical health throughout his life. At the end he was taking in more calories in pill coatings than food, but he was in good enough shape to walk for miles.

His physical health was fine. What happened to Pop Wilder was that he started forgetting. Perhaps the biggest blow was that, at the end, he had forgotten me entirely. I’m fairly certain that the last few times that I saw him he had no recollection of me. His eyes were blank – worse than blank. When he looked at me he had the wariness one reserves for a stranger or a congressman.

I had been prepared for this – it was obvious that his memory loss was increasing exponentially each time I saw him. I think that the last time he really knew that I was his son was several years before he passed on. And that was okay. I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, but I will say that I had said everything that I needed to say to Pop before he lost his memory. I was at peace. Again, not easy, not happy, but at peace. I understood that there was nothing that man nor medical science could do for him, so there was no reason for anger.

I hadn’t, however, realized the impact it had on The Boy. The Boy saw the same things that I did, and knew that Pop Wilder was no longer the grandfather he knew. The Boy could sense that Pop Wilder wasn’t present anymore. Perhaps this is the most basic element of horror – watching a human transform from the person you know very well into a person you don’t know at all. It’s implicit in every horror transformation story from vampire to werewolf to zombie. Seeing it when you are young hits you even harder. That transformation is made more terrifying because you didn’t even know it was possible.

Fast forward to Saturday, six days ago. We were driving home from an event, and I mentioned that there were some things I wanted to see from him in the next twenty or thirty years.

“Don’t dawdle. I don’t want to have to wait to die when I’m ready to die.”

It was really meant as a joke. The look on The Boy’s face as he drove, though told me he was thinking about it. Deeply.

“I saw what Grandpa Wilder went through. That was tough.” Pop Wilder had passed on years ago. “I like your idea better.”

“My idea?”

“Yeah. The one where you’re going to go off into the woods with just your .30-06 and enough supplies to live. Or die. That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s true. I had shared with The Boy my thoughts that, should I be judged to be terminal, or if it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, that rather than lingering, undergoing chemotherapy, or having to sit through another Avatar© movie, I’d sling my rifle and enough physical supplies that if I worked at it and was skilled, I could live. Until, of course, I couldn’t. It would be an adventure. Maybe I’d keep a diary. That would be some great blogging from beyond the grave. I could even sketch memes in pencil.

See, drawing is easy!

“I hope that you’d drop me where there are bears.”

“Why?”

“Well, one might attack me and I could fight back with a knife. It would at least allow me to go out of this life like I came into it – screaming and covered in blood that wasn’t mine.” Okay, I stole that joke. At least The Boy thought it was original.

He laughed.

But the point was a clear one. I know that I certainly couldn’t have dropped Pop Wilder into the forest – that certainly wasn’t anything he had ever asked for. Watching him decline, however, was tough. In my mind he will always be 45, at the height of his business acumen, personal physical power, and filled with the vitality that kept him always going. When I think of him, that’s the man I see.

I can’t square the conception of my future as one that ends in a nursing home, surrounded by the never ending too warm room and hollow echo of footsteps on beige vinyl tile and antiseptic smell of hospital grade cleansers. No. The frozen morning’s icy touch on my cheeks, the sound of the wind rushing up the snow covered valley, and the harsh smoke of a campfire. That has a better feel. A truer feel.

An adventure to cap off an adventure, my next day of life dependent upon my wits and the cold steel of my knife and rifle.

If there or no bears to fight, I’m sure I can pick on an owl to fight to the death. Plus? Owls are easy to draw – only two steps.

I’m not sure that walking away into the woods will happen – there are certainly plenty of things that would prevent this from being my destiny: obligations and events beyond number, that chance to hang around and become drinking buddies with Bill Murray.

But right now? This adventure continues. It’s time to make the most of the next few decades . . . there’s only so much time.

Get busy.

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes. But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen. People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn. We can become better. The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one. It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun. No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story. And I was there for this one. As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning. In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts. We were insufferable. My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun. It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic. I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun. And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

It looked very real. Mine was the one on the bottom. It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times. Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun. This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me. Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car. I still have the BB gun and the boots. I lost the knife, probably at school. It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun. My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it. I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot. I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t. I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record. (For kids: Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm? I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside. It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this. Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes?? Oh, yeah. Soviets. Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill. I kept going. What was I looking for? I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly. I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step. But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do? Hunt. Win World War II again. Look for communists. It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans. Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best. I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road. I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner. All of those applied. But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike. About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear. It was a black bear. I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all. Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone. I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well. Communists? Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears? Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy. He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time. My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me. I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear. Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would. Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times. Why? A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside: In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets. Or, does it? When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs. I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free. But back in the day? We weren’t building weak Soviet children. No! We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual. I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom. Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door. I stamped my snow-covered feet inside. Yeah, I know. But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!” I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear! It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts. A bear! A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head. “Bears are hibernating. None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face. “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started. I know that look because I saw it then. Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed. Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road. I had my BB gun. I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked. I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story. I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).” As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship. Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies. We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away. It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it. I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless. It must be dead! Pop Wilder killed it! Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet. We walked home in silence.

So, there was that: the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic. Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below? Merry Christmas to all.

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

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

Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.

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

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

Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:

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

Is there any data to back up these theories?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

1994

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

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

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

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

2004

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

2017

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

How bad is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will be the spark.

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

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

Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You

This is Part I, click here for Part II.

“Get her? That was your plan, Ray? Get her?” – Ghostbusters (1984)

Texans have a plan for hurricanes – and they’re pretty sure they haven’t seen any little ole storm that can beat them.

This is part one of a multipart series. The rest of them are here: (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo, TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana), TEOTWAWKI Part IX: Home at Last, and the Battle of the Silo and TEOTWAWKI Part X: Gump, Wheat, and Chill: Now With 100% Less Netflix,and Last TEOTWAWKI – The Battle for Yona, Final Thoughts on EMP, How To Power Your Car With Smoke

I was at the hotel when it happened. There wasn’t any noise, really.

It was night, in February. Although a near-record blizzard was hitting the Northeast (it was called “SNOWPOCALYPSE II” in the New York Post), where I was in the Midwest was unusually warm – the night temperatures were forecast to be above 40F for the next week, not bad when the usual low for this time of year was 20F.

What woke me wasn’t a sound – it was, rather the opposite of a sound – a sudden silence. The radio I had on in the hotel room (it helps me sleep) was off. And I mean it was off – no power at all to the LED display.

The pale pinkish-yellow sodium vapor light from the parking lot poles was never really stopped by the blackout curtains of the hotel – it always crept around the corners and through the cracks.

It was gone, too.

The heater to the room was silent.

I looked at my wristwatch. It had a button to illuminate the display. I pressed it.

Nothing.

A blackout would explain losing the radio, losing the parking lot lights. It wouldn’t explain the watch.

I picked up my cell phone, and pressed the button on the side to wake it up.

Nothing.

A blackout wouldn’t kill the batteries.

I wasn’t groggy anymore. I guessed looking at the moon that it was about 4AM. At this time of year, it would be about four hours before full sunrise.

I had been travelling for business and was a 252 miles from home. I got dressed and opened up the window. The interstate was dark – no lights. The town that I was staying at – big enough for a Marriott™ because it was on the interstate – was dark.

It wouldn’t be long before dozens of people woke up. And it wouldn’t be long until a few people came to the same conclusion that I had come to: the electronics were gone – all of them. Power wouldn’t be back on soon, if ever.

I had to get home before it started to get bad. And that would be soon. But how? Well, the beginning of a plan was already starting to form in my head.

### (for now)

Honestly, I think that greatest probability collapse of America will come by degrees – more of an erosion than an earthquake. I think of this slow collapse like Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens in The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways – gradually and then suddenly.”

“Gradually” is the world falling slowly into some sort of Blade Runner®-esque existence. The decay is evident even now as “poop in the streets” has become a new normal in big cities, which occurs here in flyover country only during the Fourth of July parade as the horses (who are last in the parade for a reason) come through. Then the streets are cleaned. And then we don’t have poop in them. I could keep going – lowered life expectancy, lowering IQ, but I’ll stop for now.

This post isn’t about gradually, this post is about “Suddenly.”

There exists, for the first time in history, the ability and civilizational structure to destroy civilization all at once. Sure, we’ve had nuclear bombs since 1945 hanging over our heads, but we’ve upped the ante – we’ve created a civilization that is more prone to catastrophic failure than any in the past. Gary North (you can find his free articles here LINK), a prominent warning voice about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem wrote many articles in which he pointed out the vulnerabilities associated with modern society. He called the three prerequisites for maintaining our current civilization the Iron Triangle. North defined the three legs of the triangle as electricity, telecommunications, and power:

Electricity

Electricity is first because it’s the most important. Lose it? It’s over.

Without electricity modern society is impossible. From traffic lights to grocery stores, everything would just . . . stop. No refrigeration. No gasoline. No air conditioning. No cash registers. No cell recharging. No blinking inflatable Snoopy® in your yard at Christmas.

And as we saw in Japan after the earthquake, a nuclear power station needs power constantly to keep the nuclear-radiation stuff on the inside, and not on the outside. And I’ve heard rumors that even starting a power generating station requires . . . power. Hopefully the wind is blowing the electric windmills that day we lose power.

There are numerous countries on the planet that could lose power for weeks or months at a time with little to no change in lifestyle – these countries lose power for days at a time now, and have learned to cope. Most developed countries would see anarchy within three days if the system went down. In Chicago? Even power isn’t enough to stop anarchy now.

But one requirement is that this power outage is not just a local phenomenon – if Switzerland lost power, well, who would notice? But if people decided that they wanted the Swiss chocolates and the Swiss army knives and the Swiss hot cocoa, well, they’d pitch in and help Switzerland. There exists a reserve capacity outside of Switzerland that’s big enough and well supplied enough that they could help the Swiss.

Likewise, when a hurricane hits Texas, well, I guess that’s a bad example because the Texans don’t need any of our damn help.

Loss of power to the entire continental United States? Who could help us? Most resources that could help would be an ocean away, assuming that they’re unaffected. The happy projection if electricity was lost in the United States? Half the population dead in a year. The less-than-rosy projection (from a United States Congressional study) has 90% of the US population gone in a year. And not “moved to Cleveland” gone.

What could possibly take the power down all over the United States? Really, there’s just one candidate: an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

What is an EMP? It’s like the Sun was rubbing its feet on the carpet, and then put its finger near you and gave you such a shock. Except instead of a shock, it shoots charged particles at the Earth making pretty auroras. And charges up the electrical infrastructure so much that the tiny electrical circuits in your smart watch, or car, or computer, or electrical power plant short out and become as useful as Play-Doh® after you left the lid off for three days.

Has this happened before? Certainly. The solar storm of 1859 was significant enough that it charged up the atmosphere enough that communication via telegraph wasn’t possible for a few hours – some telegraph operators reported being shocked by their telegraph lines.

Not a big deal, right? No, not in 1859. But a much smaller solar flare in 1989 took out all of the power in Quebec (part of America’s hat, Canada). And if a solar flare similar in size to the 1859 flare happened today, it’s estimated that it would cost at least $2 trillion dollars (more than Johnny Depp spends on wine in an average month) to fix the damage in the United States alone. Oh, and if you’re on satellite television, well, those would be gone due to the solar flare, too.

Another way to get a similar amount of damage is to explode a nuclear bomb above the United States. This bomb wouldn’t cause any explosive damage – it would unleash x-rays, but rather than just bathing in the healthful x-ray light, the x-rays would smash into atoms in the atmosphere and cause a cascade of electrical energy.

You and I might not even notice this cascading energy, but, again, the tiny circuits in your local power plant (depending upon the size of the pulse) might be fried.

Oops.

No power.

Telecommunications

Every transaction you do depends upon some form of communication – often via satellite, but also through the internet. In a small example of how this communication is important, I witnessed a series of gasoline pumps going offline. Across the nation. These gas pumps were primarily located at small Mom and Pop convenience stores. The stores were open, but if you showed up at the pump? The pump just didn’t work. The reason was fairly simple – the home base in the transaction, the company that provided the interface between the fuel pump and the payment systems, had gone bankrupt. Shut the doors down. The gas was there. The credit card company was there. The electricity was there. But the last leg of the transaction – the communication link to bring it all together, pay the taxes, and order more gasoline – had ceased to exist.

And it’s not just convenience store fuel transactions.

The inventory management of stores like Wal-Mart® is highly efficient, as in it is highly mechanized. If Wal-Mart® lost their ability to computer-manage their inventory? They’d have no way to figure out how to move products to their warehouse, let alone deliver them to a Wal-Mart™.

In a real-life example, Maersk® shipping, which accounts for about 20% of the volume of containers shipped worldwide, had their computer system infiltrated. Essentially their entire shipping information system became encrypted on their servers. This resulted in them losing over $300,000,000 in a ten day period, as chaos occurred at computer-managed dock after computer-managed dock. They were saved because a backup of the system wasn’t updated since the Internet was down in Africa when they normally synced the systems. Folks from Europe flew down to Africa, took the computer back to Europe, and used its information as the seed to reboot 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in a 10 day period.

Costly? Sure. But this was likely just collateral fallout of stuff going on between Ukraine and Russia. This points out that the systems that we have created for inventory management and logistics required to run civilization have the potential to fail. Something actually targeted at telecommunications for these systems . . . could have been devastating.

What would it cost to lose the Internet for a day?

What if it went down for a year?

Banking

When I was a kid, it was still possible to go to a store while the register was broken and get a clerk to do the math on what was owed and take your check or cash. Now? I’m not sure that most retail employees are up to the math (who even does math anymore?) let alone trying to figure out how to do a transaction without the Internet. And who, besides me, even carries cash anymore?

Banking is a system that exists only so long as we believe in it. Banks are allowed (by law) to lend out all of the money in the bank except for 11% or so. Thus they have a “fractional” reserve of cash, and they’re a fractional reserve bank.

If you have $100 that you put in the bank, chances are very good that they loaned out all but $11 of your money. The other $89 is out earning them interest. If you want your money, you can go back and get it, since the bank has the $11 from everybody else. If everybody wants their money back at the same time? Problem! In actuality people will get paid, because each bank lends a bit of money to the Federal Reserve bank that they can draw on in emergencies such as a bank run. That’s really the big idea behind the Fed, to stop a systematic failure of all of the banks like happened in the 1930’s during the Great Depression.

But in 2008-09, it nearly happened again. Banking systems were shutting down. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury pumped the system so full of cash to prevent a complete shutdown of the financial system as we know it. Did it work? Sure. But Interest rates are at near record lows a decade after this intervention.

Are there other risks to the banking system? Certainly. And if it doesn’t work? The bright side (such that it is) is a dictator could and would seize control and force the system to work for a while without banking, but the loss would be our freedom and the civilization that we now know, along with millions dead from the sudden inefficiencies in the system.

Why?

Why have we put ourselves at risk to the Iron Triangle? Because the efficiency that it brings has made society freer and wealthier that it could be without the Iron Triangle. The Iron Triangle squeezes efficiency out of the system, but an efficient system is a fragile one; one prone to failure. If you think of all of the systems that you have double of (like lungs) it’s not a bad design, it’s that having a spare lung or kidney increases your chances of living longer. Or, failing that, you could trade your kidney to your bank to pay off your loan . . .

So, next Monday I’ll pick up where we were back at the Hotel.

I really do have a plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But never in the United States. Why not?

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

But those are weakening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

politicalspectrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11nations

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

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

vote-by-nation-2016

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

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

civilwarstats

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

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

geminaxiii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what else will cause this war?

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

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

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

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

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

Breakup.

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

Guns
Abortion
r versus K (r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people))
Economic Freedom
Role of Absolute Morality
Definition of what is an American
Globalism versus Nationalism
Cultural Relativism
Judicial Activism
Does Evil Exist?

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

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

Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings

“I thought I alone considered your boyfriend a narcissistic moron, but the whole galaxy does.” – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Tribe begins its annual war, an ancient rite known as “dodge ball.”

What if we’ve been looking at mental health . . . all wrong? This may be the most interesting thing you read all month, maybe all year. But that’s just what a narcissist would say . . .

I was thinking the other day (a dangerous thing to do, I know, thinking is something to be left to those that work at universities and in congress) and had an idea. Maybe (some) mental illness has a purpose. I’ll explain, but first I have to explain Dunbar’s Number, which, of course, is named after Kim Kardashian. I’m kidding. Dunbar’s Number is named after Caitlyn Jenner.

Robin Dunbar, British Psychologist, looked over the size of the human neocortex (not Neo-Cortez, who would take over the Neo-Aztec) and after playing with a particularly plump and pleasant neocortex, decided that brains just might have something to do with how humans relate to each other. The neocortex is actually the newest (in a biological sense) portion of the brain, and allows humans to do complex things, like talking, snorkeling, and making microwave ramen.

Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? Because people are tough to deal with. And it takes time to deal with people, rather than strangle them.

One potential reason that the “Dunbar” number for people could be higher than predicted is language. Whereas other primates have to use non-verbal cues like body-slamming them, people, after the advent of language, can talk to each other so they can explain why they are body-slamming you. For that reason, especially when dealing with modern (the last 12,000 years or so) humans, I favor a Dunbar number in the 250 range.

There is some validity to the number. Anecdotally, I’ve been involved with a company that had two divisions in the same area. One had 120 or so employees. The other? It had far greater than 500 employees. I observed that the smaller division operated as a single unit. Every employee knew every other employee – and they knew about their families, their hobbies, and their history. Did that consume time? Sure. You couldn’t just go over to talk with one of them – the entire social greeting took at least 10 minutes. You had to catch up. And that’s the way that close relationships work – you can’t just say “hi” and walk on, you have to catch up with each other. That explains why when I come home, The Mrs. wants to talk and stuff. We’re engaging in a practice that’s at least thousands of years old.

The larger division had broken up into various factions based on job functions. These factions looked like little tribes – each had a leader, an agenda, and they fought against each other regularly, often over nothing. And each of these fights ended up hurting the company. Gore-Tex® found the same thing – they built buildings for 150 people. When the building filled up? They built a new one. They tried to keep the trust, the positive aspects of the tribes predicted by Dunbar from spilling over into intertribal warfare that happens at larger group sizes.

But ancient tribes didn’t have kid’s soccer, and FaceBorg®, and the myriad of connections that occur outside of work. So, the Gore-Tex™ number is smaller than the “actual” tribe size. Again, 250 seems about right.

So what does this have to do with mental illness?

Well, for a tribe to survive over time, while most members would be able to act as general “tribal” members most of the time (i.e., hunting, gathering) there would also be the need for specialist skills and attributes. Situations the tribe might encounter (and overall group cohesiveness) require different talents.

Let’s take schizophrenia. It’s prevalent in about 0.4% of the population. It often manifests with being able to hear things that aren’t there, see things that don’t exist, and believe in a reality that others can’t see.

Sounds like a Shaman to me. Every good tribe needs one, right? Well, 0.4% is 1 person out of 250. I got goosebumps when I did that calculation – the number seemed like a nice fit for the theory right off the bat.

Okay, what about another common mental condition? Anxiety. Anxiety is found in about 10.6% of the population. So, in our tribe of about 250 we’d have about 26 planners. 26 people worrying on a daily basis about how the whole tribe would die. These people are a pain in the butt, but this ability to dream up a constant set of disasters that the tribe could anticipate and avoid has huge survival value. In today’s world, not so much. Back 8,000 years ago? This was an amazingly important skill.

About 6 of our 250 tribe would be obsessive-compulsive. Mainly older folks. I can see the meticulousness compulsion of the older, wiser tribal member being infectious – and leading to greater spread of learning throughout the tribe. There are certain things you have to do right, you have to double check (think food poisoning) or else the tribe will die. Having these super process-driven people might have been quite a help.

About 6 would of the tribe would be paranoid. Again, like planning, it serves a purpose – but in this case the paranoia is about what other groups are doing and thinking. Very helpful to have someone looking for the hints that the tribe will be attacked from outside. Or, from inside. Are you threatening me?

Narcissism? About 1%. Only so much room for leaders. This would have about 2 of them in the tribe.

Psychopath/Sociopath? About 1.2%. So, 3 bold, direct, mean leaders of raiding parties/war parties. It takes a village to kill another village.

Pictured: Psychopath. I like the cut of his jib!

Outside of oral history, our hypothetical tribe had only one way to pass on information about required roles and how to do them – genetics. Genetics matter – many of these conditions are at least partially inherited, making it more likely that the leader was . . . the son of the leader. The shaman was . . . the son or daughter of the last shaman.

This genetic tendency to replace the leader with the leader is (likely) the source of the concept of hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility. And, genetically, those people were likely the best leaders around at that time, and they kept breeding . . . so, there was (at least for a while) some good reason to think that the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs might be pretty good choices for kings. They were bred to be kings. Now: perhaps a bit too much cousin-lovin’ (LINK)?

So, yeah, all of the roles required for a self-sufficient band are built within our genetic profiles – but some of them aren’t valued so much in our current society – we don’t need a half-dozen war-band leaders in every high school. And, as far as I know, this is an idea I developed (more or less) independently. Which is also something a narcissist would say . . . hmmm.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

DNA Testing, Cousin Lovin’, and Khannnnn!

“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys

I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?

So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.

The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.

How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.

The results are:

Europe West 40%
Great Britain 24%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
Scandinavia 17%

Low Confidence Regions

Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Iberian Peninsula < 1%

None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.

What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.

The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:

Population
South Asian	–
Caucasus	4.89
Southwest Asian	1.56
North Amerindian + Arctic	0.57
Siberian	–
Mediterranean	9.72
East Asian	–
West African	–
Volga-Ural	7.66
South Baltic	13.09
Western European	26.41
North Sea	36.10

Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:

For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!

This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.

But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?

No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).

Huh?

Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.

If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!

Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.

Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).

But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.

And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).

Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.

Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.

“Sit down, John.”

Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.

Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.

I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.

Now I have to go see this.

But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.

Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:

“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?