Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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

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

From Issue Number One:

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

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

Front Matter

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

Violence and Censorship Update

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

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

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

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

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

Response to Z-Man

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

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

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

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

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

And you thought Thanksgiving at your house was tense.

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

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

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

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

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

Which explains why we’re in our current mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated Civil War II Index

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

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

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

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

Pretend I made a graph and this is it.

John Mark/RamZPaul Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

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

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

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

From Ricky:

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

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

From last spring:

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

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

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

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

Also from Ricky, variations on a theme:

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

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

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

And also from Ricky:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An avalanche.  The slope collapses.

Avalanche humor – it’s snow joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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