Category: Valhalla

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

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

argue

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.

pewpewpew

1994

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

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

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

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

2004

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

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2017

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

How bad is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will be the spark.

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

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

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)

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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

Pompey

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11nations

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

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

vote-by-nation-2016

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

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

civilwarstats

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

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

geminaxiii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what else will cause this war?

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

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

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

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

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

Breakup.

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

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

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

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

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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.

kermit direction

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

DSC03481

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.”

Epictetus

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.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps.  And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

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

 

DSC01251

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:

DNA

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.

GOT DNA

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.

mormon

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?

Your Passion is Stupid

“No, not unpopular, they just have a more selective appeal.” – This is Spinal Tap

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Okay, there’s a time when your passion of throwing big rocks in the river should be followed.  That’s whenever you’re at the river.

Pop Wilder was a banker.  Oh, I know what you’re thinking, John Wilder is the banker’s son, summers in Maine, winters in Switzerland.  No.  Summers in the forest cutting firewood in Colorado, winters in Colorado on snowmobiles fifty miles into the back country.  Okay, winters were better than Switzerland, at least since the CIA stole the secret of the Swiss “hot chocolate” technology and weaponized it in Swiss Miss® cocoa packets.

On occasion, especially after a few bourbon and waters, Pop Wilder would get a bit melancholy.  “John Wilder, you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, but don’t be a banker.”  Although by any measure, Pop was successful.  And he was passionate about his work.  He left every morning before the Sun came up to open the bank.  He got home two hours after the bank had closed.  He unlocked the place and locked it back up.  He never took more than 10 vacation days in any year, and I never saw the man take one day off due to being sick.  (An aside:  I’m stunned that’s the first time I came to that realization – I haven’t taken a sick day off since 2000.  Wonder where that stubbornness comes from?)

Pop Wilder, you see, wasn’t the “snort cocaine off a stripper’s butt” type banker, but rather the “small town banker that drives a car to work that’s eight years old.”  I think he might have not abused his power enough . . . I’m not sure.  What’s the use of having power, if you don’t abuse it?

What always bothered Pop Wilder the most was when he had to explain to a person who wanted to borrow money that he wouldn’t lend it to them – he didn’t think the loan was based on sound collateral, or the borrower’s income wasn’t enough to cover their living expenses plus their debt.  He was proud at the end of his career that he’d never had to foreclose on a single home.  To him, the act of lending money was a moral event – you didn’t burden a borrower with more debt than they could pay.

That didn’t make the borrowers who he turned down happy.  They were (understandably) upset that Pop had crushed their dreams, but in the process, he’d done them the biggest favor of their lives.  In a weird way, his “no” had saved their financial future from the siren song (read The Odyssey or watch Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou (LINK) if you missed that reference) of their dreams and passions . . .

One of my favorite things to see is the garden variety successful person who’s being interviewed.  Let’s pretend it’s me, since I’m rich and semi-famous:

Oprah:  “What’s your secret, John Wilder?  How did you get to the pinnacle of success and yet maintain those superb washboard abs?”  (Oprah bites her lip.  Perhaps I should have not worn such a tight shirt.)

John Wilder:  “I followed my passion, Oprah.  My passion is all consuming.”

Fade to Clip of Me Synchronized Snowboarding Off the Top of Mount Everest Accompanied by an Actual Yeti.

You’ve heard that, too:  successful people telling you to follow your passion.  I probably heard that two dozen times between high school and college.  Follow your passion.  Invariably it was by short salesmen who were in suits while I was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt.  And I was (really) thinking about going skiing or checking out the girl of the week.  My passion did not and does not involve being an old man in a suit.

Hopefully you haven’t done followed your passion, because your passion is stupid, unless you are the ghost of Steve Jobs.  Steve, you can follow your passion.  Only you.  Namaste.

I’m sorry to tell everyone else a simple fact: your passion is stupid.  And my passion?  My passion is stupid, too.  Maybe even really stupid.

The Mrs. and I have been married roughly since the invention of dirt.  We’ve thought about opening our own businesses several times, and even produced a business plan or two.  All of them have been based on things we like, things we are passionate about.  We’d discuss, fine tune, get the spreadsheets ready, and then decide if we were passionate about it.  As you’ve hopefully read in the fine pages of this blog before – the best deals are the ones you don’t do.  We’ve passed on most of the deals.

But one in particular we got all of our ducks in a huddle, got a small business loan application together, and went off to the local bank to ask for a small business loan with our spreadsheets and our plan and our proposals and estimates and projections.  I didn’t go to the meeting – I was at work.  But The Mrs. walked in, and the banker didn’t blink an eye before he got to his response.  “No.  Not now.  Not ever.  Please pretend we’ve never met.”

The Mrs. was upset when she got home.  I shrugged, and we decided to carry on without opening that business.  About a month or two later we read in the local newspaper about how someone had opened a business that was nearly exactly what we’d planned to open up.  They did a detailed story on the place, nearly a full page, with color pictures.  Amazing amounts of free advertising.

That business closed up before six months had passed.  The banker who said “No” had saved us $55,000 of loaned money.

Oh.  I get what Pop was doing.  Rather than helping people live their passion, he was saving them from their passions.

The people who say that you should follow your passion are generally not passionate about the thing that they’ve done, whether it be roasting coffee beans or creating BookFace®.  No.  They’re passionate about success.  They’re passionate about their business because it brought them success.  It’s like pretending you like Tootsie Rolls Lollipops® for the outer candy shell.  You don’t.  You like the center.

And that’s the secret of success.

I am passionate about playing the guitar.  I love to do it.  Unfortunately, my guitar is as good as Johnny Depp’s personal hygiene or money management skills.  So, of course, I devoted my entire career to playing bad guitar?  NO.  I suck at guitar.  I will never be good at it.  But . . . I do math and science-y things really well.  I have the intuition on that stuff that Eddie Van Halen has for meth guitar.  Maybe not that good, but I found that the combination of the math stuff and the science stuff and the planning stuff and the intuitive grasp of physical systems and processes (with a dash of normal human empathy) pops me into the top 0.1% (hint, that’s the only place the money is).  That combination allows me to win where other people would lose (in certain situations).  And in one instance the application of those skills allowed an IPO to go through that netted a company a billion or so dollars.  Yay me!

And winning in situations like that makes me passionate about combining those skills.  So, am I following my passion?  Well, I’m following my success, which is a lot like following passion.  Except following my passion would make me bankrupt because my guitar is only slightly better than my singing.

So it comes down to . . . what are you good at?  I mean, really good at?  Not what you’re passionate about.  Let’s face it:  you can be passionate about drinking bourbon, WWE, MMA or anthropology, but none of those things are helpful unless you’re part of the 0.1% AND you can figure out how to win/make money with that skill combination.

Can you make money with it?  Most things you’re good at don’t pay any (really any) money at all.  You’re in the top 0.001% of the world at trimming nosehair?  No.  Next.  Your skill should translate into actual income.  What does the best person in the world at what you’re good at make?  Can you live on 1/10 of that?

Okay.  You’re good at it.  It’s a rare skill.  You can make money at it.  Good money.  Now your challenge?  Get better at it.

Most people take a decade or more of really hard work, over 10,000 hours, to become world class at a skill.  Generally, the longer they execute the skill and the more they work at it, the better they become, peaking in their forties or fifties.  These aren’t physical skills – those peak about 24, and take a big nosedive once you pass 30 or so, and if your skill is there, strike quickly – age will pull you away faster than you anticipate.  What I’m talking about are mental skills that are honed by experience.

Passion?  No banker will lend on that.  They’ll lend on experience, skill, and excellence.  Be passionate about those and the world will allow you to snowmobile in Colorado in winter . . .

People will call you lucky.  Just smile and ignore the sweat.

Key Economic Indicator Higher Than Colorado Pot Smokers

pe ratio

(from http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/ on 10/31/17)

The Shiller P/E ratio is shown above.

What is it?

Shiller (who won an actual Nobel® Prize, not a fake one like I made in my 3D printer) analyzes the value of stock markets.  One key metric he came up with was his Shiller P/E ratio – it reviews the price of the stock divided by its earnings, but rather than for a single stock Shiller looked at the largest 500 stocks on the US markets – the Standard and Poors (S&P) 500.  It’s sort of a proxy for how big business is doing in America (and, to a lesser extent, internationally, since these stocks are very big and typically have significant foreign revenue).  Read the above paragraph forty times if you’re having trouble sleeping.

Now you know what it is.  Normally I’d be all snarky here and mention how it’s exactly the sort of straight line that Johnny Depp could walk on a Saturday night, but I’ll just leave this short post here.

You don’t need a Nobel™ to read this graph . . .

Warren Buffett’s Investing Secrets, F-Troop, and Amazing Bigfoot Investments

“Well if there were no Gods then anyone can do anything and nothing will matter.  You could do as you like and nothing would be real.  Nothing would have meaning, or value.  So even if the Gods don’t exist, it still necessary to have them.” – Vikings

DSC03968

Even Bigfoot appreciates the climate in Margaritaville.

It was reported (quite a while ago) that Jimmy Buffett of “Margaritaville” fame and Warren Buffett of “Having All the Money” fame were related.  However in 2007 they spit into a tube (well, separate tubes, one tube would be gross) and had their DNA tested.  The results showed that if they were related, it was more than 10,000 years in the past, as Warren Buffett was related to Scandinavians and either Iberians or Estonians.  Jimmy Buffett was related to the Dutch, sunscreen, tequila and salt.

I’ve always regretted that they weren’t related, since my ideal restaurant would be the Buffett Buffet™.  All you can eat cheeseburgers (from Jimmy) and Coca-Cola® from Warren (who owns a large chunk of the company Coca-Cola™).  The television screens would alternate between surfing, bartending shows, and a stock ticker.

But this post is all about Warren, and only slightly about Cheeseburgers in Paradise©.

Warren Buffett is smart.  You don’t start with (relatively) small amounts of money and end up with billions by luck, unless you’re Mark Cuban, who is the only person on planet Earth who sold a company with 330 employees for enough stock to make him a billionaire.  Thankfully he has a billion dollars, so he can hire people smarter than him.   (Yes, he has more money than me, but, really – aside from being so lucky?  He’d be a wonderful bartender.)

One data point in my favor in stating that Warren is smart would be that he graduated from the University of Nebraska at the age of 19, and then went off to Columbia (the college, not the country).  Why Columbia (the college, not the country)?  He knew that Benjamin Graham taught there.  Ben Graham is known as the “Father of Value Investing,” and Buffett wanted to learn from him, and took his class.  After finishing at Columbia, he wanted to go to work for Graham, but Graham said no.  Buffett went back to Nebraska to be a stockbroker.

One day, Graham called and said that Buffett could come to work for him – he was being called up to the big leagues.  The next day Buffett killed all of his customers (no witnesses that way) and went to New York to work for Graham.  Okay, Buffet didn’t kill anyone.  That we know of – this isn’t Game of Thrones.

So, when Buffett got the job with Graham, he learned a lot.  Eventually Graham had enough money and wanted to spend the rest of his life on, well, whatever he wanted to spend it on (PEZ®, pantyhose and elephant rides?), so he shut the company down.  Buffett was, by most standards, pretty well off, and decided he wanted to move back to Omaha and open his own value investing shop because he missed all of the corn and the corn smells.  Buffett’s various ventures were pretty small – in 1990, his company (Berkshire Hathaway) was worth $7175.  Per share.  Recently that same share would cost over $260,000, and Berkshire Hathaway’s total value is over $440 billion dollars.

Warren Buffett has done okay.

He’s also known for being pretty frugal.  I know you’re happy I added frugal to that last sentence, because otherwise you’d just think that I thought that Warren Buffet was pretty.

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I personally think that this picture is pretty, even if Game of Thrones® has made dragons the good guys.

Warren has lived in the same house since the 1950’s, (it is a nice house, but not that nice), drives a car for years at a time (rumor is he bought a hail damaged one because it was cheaper), and recycles Pringles© canisters into air conditioning ductwork for his house and saves the trays for TV dinners to use to microwave Oscar Meyer® hot dogs.

Me?  If I had as much money as he does, I’d probably buy a new car every time mine ran out of gas (I kid, I drive my cars forever (LINK)).

I was watching a video while exercising (I work out for only for you and I study for only for you, Internet!) and heard Warren state “ . . . if I could invest as a small investor today I think I could . . . I know I could make a 50% return.”

That was a pretty powerful statement, since I certainly count as a small investor by Mr. Buffett’s standards.

Why can’t he do that?  He’s got billions of dollars he has to invest, so he has to do big deals.  There are a lot of good deals you could do with a few million dollars, but very few good deals in the billion plus region.  Turning the company’s $440 billion into $660 billion in a year is hard.  He could turn $10 million in to $15 million in a heartbeat.  Small deals are easier since there are so many of them.

Warren’s advice to investors is simple:  buy a low overhead (low fees) index fund (an index fund is a fund that is created to match an index, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500).  If you can’t do what he does and value invest, this is the best way to get a good return.  And that’s good advice (in my opinion) for any small investor that doesn’t have the time to do the required research.

Let’s repeat that:  Warren Buffett says you should buy an index fund.

But me?  I know Warren didn’t get all of those Pringles® cans by investing in an index fund.  What did Warren Buffett do to get really rich?

What research did Graham and Buffett (reminder:  not Jimmy Buffett, but Warren Buffett) do prior to investing?

  1. Good Leadership, Good Business – Graham and Buffett were looking for leaders that had experience, capability, and great integrity. Warren can call CEOs and talk to them and give them the sniff test.  You can’t, so this is harder for you.  The business also has to be a good one. (More on this later.)
  2. Low Price to Earnings Ratio – The price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio) is how much you have to spend to get a dollar of the company’s earnings.

Before the 1980’s, the rule was a company that had a price to earnings ratio of over 20 was ALWAYS overpriced.  But the rule back then was to take the P/E and subtract the current prime interest rate.  Today the prime interest rate is ~1%, so using that old rule, a P/E of 19 would be acceptable.  Right now it’s difficult to make a return on capital because so much money is flooding everywhere . . .

Why was the rule like that?  It was assumed that you could either get returns from saving your money or from investing it.  Currently there is no benefit from saving it with historically low rates, so the P/E has continually wandered higher.

Alone, however, P/E tells you nothing.

  1. Low Price to Book Value – The book value of a company is how much all of its “stuff” is worth. In theory, if a company has a price to book value of less than one, you could buy the company (price), sell all of its stuff (book value), and come out ahead.  In theory.  If you have ever driven past a boarded up factory (and you have) you know that the book value just might be overstated.

Again, like P/E, Price to Book tells you nothing.

One video I watched while climbing on an infinite staircase to nowhere showed a screening method for value stocks that was alleged to have come from Warren Buffett:

  • Pick the Price to Earnings ratio,
  • multiply it by the price to book value, and
  • if the number was less than or equal to about 30,
  • the stock was a candidate.

Simple, right?

It is (and it’s overly simple).  Because what stocks have low P/Es and low Price to Book?

  1. Great, Undervalued Companies in Great Markets and
  2. Failing Businesses in Crappy Markets.

How do you tell the difference?  Sometimes you don’t.  Buffett will go on at length, if you let him, about all of the failures he’s had in picking companies.  But he had a consistent strategy that he followed for years that obviously resulted outstanding returns.  And he didn’t pick only small companies – Coca-Cola® was one of the companies he picked that produced amazing gains for Berkshire Hathaway.

So, how does a company like Berkshire Hathaway measure up on the value score?

  • It has a P/E of 20, and a Price to Book of 1.5. This would result in a score of about 30, so it would be within Warren’s window.  According to Warren, Warren is a value!  Also, Berkshire Hathaway has a credit rating better than (really) most countries.

What about . . . Tesla?

  • Tesla has never made any money, so its P/E is infinite. Its price to book is 12, so, 12 times infinity is  . . . still infinity.  Probably not a Buffett candidate?

And Honda?

  • Honda, maker of the best-selling electric car has a P/E or 8.6. It has a price to book of 0.77.  That means it scores an amazing 6 or so on Warren’s scale.  Wow!

So, let’s also look at a company that no one understands, Amazon:

  • It has a P/E of 120.  A price to book of 20.  That’s an astonishing 2400.  Again, probably not a “buy” rating from Buffett.

But is Honda a good buy right now?  Or not?

The only way to tell is to go back to Buffett’s first point.  But you and I can’t call up the CEO of Honda and expect to get real answers.  Warren probably could.

But we have help fortunately:  Joseph Piotroski, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago came out with a list of criteria that are objective and that anyone can find in the annual report of any publically traded company and named it the F-Score, which I really hope was based on the 1960’s show “F-Troop.”  I’d go through the list, but it’s much easier to pop up a link.  So here’s the (LINK) to Piotroski’s criteria.

ftroop

I think that Agarn was a horrible value investor . . . did you see the episode where he traded the blankets for a handful of small marbles that were supposed to bring Custer back from the dead?

Source- mycomicshop.com

Profitability

  1. Return on Assets (1 point if it is positive in the current year, 0 otherwise);
  2. Operating Cash Flow (1 point if it is positive in the current year, 0 otherwise);
  3. Change in Return of Assets (ROA) (1 point if ROA is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
  4. Accruals (1 point if Operating Cash Flow/Total Assets is higher than ROA in the current year, 0 otherwise);

Leverage, Liquidity and Source of Funds

  1. Change in Leverage (long-term) ratio (1 point if the ratio is lower this year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
  2. Change in Current ratio (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
  3. Change in the number of shares (1 point if no new shares were issued during the last year);

Operating Efficiency

  1. Change in Gross Margin (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
  2. Change in Asset Turnover ratio (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);

The lower the F-Score, the crappier the company.

And it, when combined with the screen above the Piotroski F-Score produced a return 7.5% higher than any other Value Investing test.  So, does Honda suck or not?

I don’t know.  But I’m going to check with the help of Dr. Piotroski.

But the biggest failure in Value Investing is to allow your emotions to rule.  Markets are driven by emotion:  Elon Musk is awesome, so I’ll buy Tesla!!!!!

Tesla might be awesome, but there are way too many Tesla fans for the price to be rational.  Part of finding value in the market is understanding that you want to buy at the lowest prices.  When are the lowest prices?  “When blood is running in the streets.”  When people have given up.  When people are running scared.  At that point, amazing companies can be picked up at incredible values.

In April of 2000 I was thinking of buying Microsoft®.  I had generally been a pessimist, but, at a certain point, I was finally ready to give up being a pessimist.  I was talking to a broker and then . . . the Dotcom Bubble burst.  If I had bought Microsoft© back then?  It would have taken thirteen years to be at breakeven.  And that’s not including inflation, which ate away at the buying power of the dollar.

But can I still get a Cheeseburger in Paradise?  Sure!  Jimmy Buffett will even have a Margarita with you if you have the proper parrot apparel.  But don’t expect Warren Buffett to pay for it.  But he will take your discount coupons so he can use them to get some suits he bought in 1983 altered.

 John Wilder has no positions in any stock mentioned, and won’t take any for the next week or so, until he can calculate the F-Score of Honda.  Especially Tesla – he’s not buying that though he loves Elon.  John Wilder is NOT a financial advisor.  And he’s had wine tonight.  Don’t trust him.