“Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” – Batman Begins
H.P. Lovecraft walks into a bar, and the result was such that any man would be driven mad by the events that followed. Oh, and there was a rabbi and a horse.
When I was a kid, as I’ve established before, I read. A lot. At least an hour a day on the school bus. I’d read at home, too, since the nearest kid lived miles and miles away from Wilder Mountain, and occasionally Ma Wilder ran out of pork chops to tie around my neck so the dog would play with me.
Reading, though, held a very special place around our house, and was something that was revered by both Ma and Pa. One example? While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.
Game on.
What did I like reading? Science fiction was number one on the list, and horror was number two. (I also read a few fantasy novels, mainly Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open when I say most fantasy outside of Tolkien and Howard is just junk. Oops, I just did.)
Stephen King named his son Joe. No, I’m not joking.
The problem with writing horror is that it’s even harder to find good horror authors than it is to find good fantasy authors. Stephen King was just about the best – it’s important to remember that at one point the guy really could write a good story that was scary. I lost more sleep to ‘Salem’s Lot than any book, ever. Even though there were approximately twenty people in a ten-mile radius of where we lived, I was pretty sure that at least five were vampires when I was twelve. And most of the people were old – can you imagine the sound when the dentures with fangs sloshed around on their gums? And then they’d offer me hard candy after they exsanguinated me. I still shiver when I think about it.
I found Edgar Allen Poe disappointing. Not scary. I think it was his enormous head, which was counted as the ninth planet until astronomers had a vote.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment to me?
H.P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft had such a reputation for being scary. Sadly, the man just couldn’t write.
H.P. Lovecraft’s cookbook was called the Necro-nom-nom-icon.
I bought several Lovecraft books while I was growing up, and perhaps because of the prose in the format of “great creeping masses of undulating nouns that, if stared at, would drive a man to madness,” the stories just never caught my imagination. They weren’t scary to twelve-year-old me. I never felt that I’d die because of a “color out of space” or that creatures from the “mountains of madness” would ever threaten me, except for boredom.
As I got older, I discovered that there was one thing that Lovecraft was good at: amazing ideas. And when good writers finally took his work, they produced some amazing fiction and movies. I rented the VHS tape of Reanimator without knowing that it was a reworking of an old Lovecraft tale. It was amazing, though I don’t recommend it AT ALL if you’re a horror lightweight. Of people who figured out how to really bring Lovecraft to life, Brian Yuzna is the winner.
But Lovecraft’s ideas remain. Those are actually interesting to read about, even though he didn’t do a great job executing on them. Perhaps Lovecraft’s most famous idea is that of Cthulhu. What’s Cthulhu, besides the sound my toilet made after Pugsley flushed 142 novelty-size bars of soap (this really happened) when he was three?
I read a horror book in braille once. I could always feel when something bad was about to happen.
For those of you that aren’t familiar, Cthulhu is an Elder God – one of the creatures of the distant past. I’ll let Lovecraft himself describe Cthulhu
There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless [Chinese guy] had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
The really scary idea, to me, is that these Elder Gods are amoral. They couldn’t care less about men. We are, for the most part, as insignificant as the wrapper on a Whopper® to Oprah when she’s in an Oprah Whopper™ Frenzy© – trust me – keep your arms and feet away from the Whoppers™ when this happens.
Face it, we all knew that the Zuck wasn’t really from this time and dimension, right?
And, these Elder Gods couldn’t even live in our time, because the “stars weren’t right” and had to wait until the stars were right again. That was an especially creepy thought, because who knew when that was going to be? Was it next week? Next year? It was certainly going to happen, but when?
Lovecraft may be long dead, but our current economic situation makes me think that we’re living in what I’m calling the Cthulhu Collapse. It’s a collapse that’s out there, frozen as the guy who went to absolute zero – but don’t worry about him, he’s 0 k. Just because the Cthulhu Collapse isn’t living and breathing right now doesn’t mean it’s not real.
It’s just waiting for the stars to align. Here are some of the stars moving into position:
- In the fiscal year just ended, we had a deficit of over $3 trillion. This is more than all of the last three years. Heck I know some people that don’t make $3 trillion in a whole year.
- The overall public debt increased from somewhere around 75% of GDP to over 100%. Also in just one year. The current public debt is higher than the highest year of World War II, and we didn’t even invent a cool new bomb or 99,465 fighter planes. I’ll go on the record as saying that producing 99,465 prop-driven fighter planes would much more cool than bailing out a Wall Street firm. Any Wall Street firm.
- The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve® (which is neither Federal nor a reserve, discuss) has increased by $3 trillion. Wonder where all that money went? PEZ®. That must be it.
- For those of you keeping score on our home game, that’s a total of at least $6 trillion in additional money sloshing around. This year. No wonder they didn’t have enough cash left to pay to make coins.
The shortest horror story so far? 2020.
- Gross Domestic Product has dropped by 5%, at least. That means the economy produces less than it did last year, by at least $1 trillion. But real math says you have to subtract the deficit and the Fed balance sheet gains, so my money says that the economy really dropped by 35% last year if you drop the financial steroids that have been pumped into it. But a plane isn’t like an economy, since planes only crash once.
- At least 80,000 small businesses shut down between March and late July, 2020. Small business’ fail, a lot, right? This number is at least 36% higher than normal. One report I heard said that more than half of San Francisco’s small businesses closed so far this year. The theaters are re-opening as libraries filled with novels that have been made into movies – they’re calling it paper-view.
- Businesses that are staying in business don’t need to rent (as much) real estate anymore. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to have the wagie workers go home and work than rent the 37th floor of the Hastur The Unspeakable Tower in downtown Chicago. Or was that the Chase® Tower? I get confused when I compare monsters of unspeakable horror and fictional creatures that Lovecraft wrote about. Regardless, the lowered occupancy rates have knock-on effects. Lowered car and transport consumption. Lowered gasoline consumption. Lowered tire use. Lower number of excuses on what you were doing late on Tuesday night. The result? Even lower GDP. Even more lost jobs. Lost lingerie sales for mistresses.
- As Federal funding (giveaways) to businesses dry up, businesses are cutting workers, permanently. In many cases, these are very good jobs. The bright side of having your financial life collapse? I heard about a guy who lost his wallet and then had his identity stolen. The crook sent him a note in the mail: “It sucks to be you.”
Do I think the economy is in serious trouble? I do. I’ve said that for years, and this is nothing but an acceleration of trends that were already in place. The general consensus is that the printing presses should go into overdrive to print more money to give to people: this is nearly the only thing that nearly every politician agrees on in 2020.
The Mrs. wants me to make more money. Turns out you need a special paper for that.
Part of the problem is that so much of the money is sloshed into the stock markets in ways that aren’t at all clear. This is on purpose. How many dollars have been pumped into the market to keep it stratospheric? It’s not a coincidence that this is the year that the billionaire class has seen the biggest gains ever in their wealth. Elon Musk alone gained enough money this year to buy Albania. I’m hoping he reforms the Albanian Navy – their submarines have to resurface every two minutes so the rowers can breathe.
So, even though Lovecraft’s ideas are great, his stories aren’t scary. But when the Cthulhu Collapse hits, after the stars align?
Lovecraft put it this way:
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Horror movies don’t scare me. What scares me? Looking down at my phone and seeing five missed calls from The Mrs.
See? Not scary.
But the Cthulhu Collapse? That’s something that’s scary. Have fun getting some sleep tonight – I hear the stars are simply lovely!
Lovecraft seemed like a brilliant but deeply disturbed individual who was incapable of fully expressing his ideas in written form. I imagine that chatting with him would have been equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
What is really horrifying about what you described is that the number of people who have any clue about what is going on is so tiny. We can get caught up in our online circles and think this is common knowledge because we self-select for people who already mostly are on board but if you stopped 100 people on the street and asked them about this stuff, I would guess zero would have a clue. However people know something is not right. I sold a handgun to a guy last weekend, older man and his wife who seemed like very nice people in their 70s. He had never owned a gun in his life but here he was buying one because he could tell something is wrong and something very bad is coming. He might not know what or why, but he knows.
That’s a fair point – people might not have thought it through (toilet paper, anyone) but they can sense that something wicked this way comes . . . .
John – – Lovecraft lovers and other survivors will be saying in five years, “Yah know, looking back at 2020……now those were the good old days…”
Now that, my friend, is scarier than anything Lovecraft ever wrote.
But you might be spot on.
Some thoughts on why we are we still functional:
1.) We still have the reserve currency. Our deficits are the world’s surpluses. That’s why we got away with our sleight of hand in 1971.
2.) A massive inheritance of oil and natural gas. That also helped us with the 1971 vanishing gold standard magic trick.
3.) The high speed internet has allowed us for some time to conduct business for a lot less cost. SARS-2 forced the hands of those managers and executives who insisted their employees be present in an office in a big city. Big cities, expensive real estate really aren’t necessary for a lot of expensive corporate functions. That’s a lot of fixed cost and variable cost that can go away.
4.) Automation / robotics also allows us to save money by not paying as many people.
5.) We never needed all those restaurants, movie theaters, clothing stores, etc. We need some. The excess are dying, and when they die, the commercial landlords and their lenders also take a massive hit. But eventually the ones with a real high net worth can borrow at ultra low rates to get through this rough patch.
6.) Hyperinflation in the cost of retirement (credit to Jim Grant). To live off the interest on one’s savings, let’s see $50,000 / 0.0001 or 0.01% as advertised by many banks and money market funds = oh dear, better keep working.
So this configuration works, but it leaves a lot of relative deprivation (credit to Charles Tilly, Ted Robert Gurr) through advertising, social media. This makes for a lot of frustration from people left behind because of reasons 3-6.
So why the oncoming troubles or civil war?
Because those frustrated people left behind or forced to work often participate in social media where AI engines encourage extreme content because the advertising payoff for the social media companies becomes even higher with extended engagement.
So relative deprivation plus social media based extremism = ugh.
We’re headed for civil war because the Left has been making war against America since before any of us were born.
Most of us are just now waking up to this simple fact.
Correct, it isn’t because of social media algorithms, but because of a struggle that has been going on since early in the 19th century and as you say, more and more people are waking up to it.
Yes, agreed that Marxism has been a problem since the 1850s. The Communist Manifesto and Capital have been there for all to see, along with poor results in country after country where this doctrine has been attempted. Social media has amplified the audience for this doctrine and provided tools for the coordination and implementation by its followers.
But what made the last few years so “exciting”? Did a bunch of well-informed readers all of a sudden discover the pending problem in the US (and other nations), or did the social media menace help push people to extremes they might not have been otherwise?
The former. The mainstream media has always been monolithic but social media has given voice to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have an outlet and in turn has exposed people like me to the reality that I am not alone in having thoughts that are considered Thought Crimes. I imagine John and I are not that far apart geographically but 25 years ago we would have virtually no chance of contact, so we and most of his readers would be in our own little bubble. If anything, social media companies are doing their best to avoid an extremist thought, at least on the right.
Replying to Arthur Sido 10/14 6:25pm since I’m out of [Reply] buttons.
Glad you qualified your last sentence with “at least on the right.”
I could find lots of communists or wannabes by simply setting up an account on Twitter and searching for all accounts that have the little hammer and sickle icon in the profile (not gonna bother looking up the Unicode value for it) and then following those accounts. There are easily hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.
Eh, I think it goes back to every Eve who said, I wanna, and every thirsty Adam who rationalized taking the high time preference.
High tech half-civilized degenerates like Marx and Rousseau do it classier, but it is an old, old, story.
I get what you’re saying, but there are important differences between Marxism and simply living off the efforts of others without contribution or a philosophy of immediate gratification.
For example, Marxism seeks to remake the man through comprehensive education and environment. It’s not enough to just rule, one must re-shape one’s subjects usually involuntarily.
Also for Marxists, terrorism is an acceptable lifestyle because they usually seek to smash an existing order. And they do things to undermine the ability of the “bourgeois” state to defend itself, such as attacking the police (hmmm… sounds familiar).
There oughta be a law – wait there is… the “Communist Control Act (68 Stat. 775, 50 U.S.C. 841-844)” -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
The reserve currency is key. We have been able (in many ways) to export our inflation. How long will/can that last? And when the rubber band breaks – it alway snaps and stings.
It’s interesting that you chose the phrase “when the stars align.” I was recently turned on to a website by a guy named Ben Davidson (sp?). He has a theory that every twelve thousand or so years, the solar system passes through the the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. He calls it the galactic current sheet. He says when that happens, the sun accumulates so much cosmic dust and plasma energy, it flares. He calls this a micro-nova and it’s output drastically affects Earth. This is what partly explains the frequent mass extinctions. He says there is astronomic proof in nearby stars it is occurring now and that we are due for a big solar event sometime in the next hundred years or so.
He’s got many videos on his youtube channels explaining his theory. I know thats not what you’re talking about but it struck me as oddly serendipitous that you used that phrase just when I was binging on his videos.
Anyway, his website is suspiciousobservers.org and his youtube channel is suspicous observers if you want to check it out and have a few hundred hours to spend trying to follow his reasoning.
Hmmm. Conventional wisdom is that it takes around 225 million years for our Sun to make an orbit around (the gigantic black hole at) the center of the Milky Way, not 12,000 years. So far the Sun (and Earth) have made around 20 galactic orbits since they have existed.
https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/docs/HowFast.pdf
A major an unexpected discovery several years ago is that the gas halo around the Milky Way is spinning at roughly the same speed as the dust/starry disk – it was expected to be stationary.
https://www.space.com/33615-milky-way-halo-spinning-dizzying-speed.html
Of course, Vera Rubin measuring the spin rates of galaxies in the 1970s is how the whole current scientific mystery of “dark matter” got started – a discovery for which she deserved a Nobel Prize that she will now never receive because of her death several years ago…
https://astronomy.com/news/2016/10/vera-rubin
But to pull back our focus from galaxies to stars. Lovecraft was certainly right – the stars can align to affect the Earth. Just this week there was announcement of a 53Mn “smoking gun” verifying the long-suspected nearby supernova that went off a few million years ago…
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-supernova-exploded-dangerously-close-to-earth-2-5-million-years-ago
…and possibly caused our subsequent unprecedented (in the geological record) spate of ongoing ice ages. We currently in the middle of a temporary warm period before the next round of glaciers hit…expected in a few more tens of thousands of years.
Until then, you are free to roam around the cabin and worry about COVID and CW. Just try to keep it all in (cosmic) perspective, as Lovecraft himself did. 🙂
Davidson’s theory has to do with the solar system’s movement up and down in relation to the galactic plane, as well as passing through waves set up by the galactic current sheet, in connection with cycles in the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. The 12,000 year cycle is based on geological records of magnetic excursion events related to the Earth’s magnetic field.
I’m familiar with them! I emailed them some time ago for a post (looking for a quote) but never got a response . . . would be nice to get a very simple synopsis of what they think. I’ve seen several of the videos.
Speaking of extended engagement, reach out and touch Biden voters on the Biden list! Be a robocaller from the safety of your own couch. Yep, they left it wide open so anyone can sign up.
Hilarious thread: https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/So-I-signed-up-to-make-calls-for-Biden/5-2378406/?
Oh, my! I might have a new hobby!!!
Great post, as always. I liked Lovecraft’s works as a kid (especially his novella, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”), but I approached them more as dark fantasy or science fiction than horror. He was friends with Robert E. Howard (and several other fantasy authors of the same period–he seems to have been quite the mentor), and you will see elements and ideas from the Cthulhu mythos show up in some of Howard’s works, including several of the Conan stories (see, e.g., “The Tower of the Elephant” and “The Vale of Lost Women”). Although his own writing may not have achieved wide-spread popularity in his own time (I suspect he is more popular now than he was during his life time), he is easily one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century.
The really scary part of a monetary collapse is that it is not just the United States: virtually every nation on Earth is grossly overextended, as well as their citizens and businesses. China’s economic position, for instance, is even worse than our own. Japan has taken interesting steps to reduce it’s national debt by having its central bank buy back debt and retire it. I’m not sure that the shareholders of the Fed would ever agree to that, but they may end up not having a choice.
I second Keith’s comments about the Suspicious Observers channel on YouTube. Ben Davidson has an Earth Catastrophe Cycle playlist at that channel that summarizes his main ideas concerning a recurrent super-flare/micro-nova event with our sun and it will catch you up quickly. Davidson’s historical interest has been space weather and the connection to phenomena on Earth, including earthquakes and terrestrial weather. He does a daily news show that goes over space weather and top science articles related to topics he discusses on his channel.
It will be ugly here but imagine what a collapse of the U.S. economy would mean to places like China that depend on selling consumer goods to America?
I don’t need to imagine
I live in NZ, and we are economically dependent on China.
I love Mr. Howard. That man could write.
Ben Davidson . . . have to look intoit.
We operate a small organic teaching farm near the outskirts of Eugene Oregon.
I am the least political person you could meet.
I have zero-zero-zero interest in politics or politicians.
*****
I grew-up on a farm.
My four grandparents lived next door.
My days started at 3am in the kitchen with the grannies and aunts.
Around 7am, I was in the orchards with my grandfathers and uncles.
My days ended at sunset.
*****
The fiction of New York city or frisco or hollywood is as alien as the bamboo invaders from DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.
The federal reserves bankers are less real than a yuge salamander crooning ‘my precious’ over and over.
My time is better invested among our goats and chickens and dealing with our local accounts.
*****
I visit with elderly shut-ins.
Yesterday afternoon, the bunch of us — without masks (aka ‘face-masks’)!!! — got together in somebody’s living-room at a 55-n-older trailer-court to watch the first episode of the Netflix serial THE WIRE.
We agreed Baltimore could be nuked to bedrock, and a week later, the rats and roaches would be right back doing the same.
On a shorter scale than the eons of They, THE WIRE is ‘Lovecraftian’.
And, of course, Lovecraft is a goofier version of Loki and Odin.
After THE WIRE and cleaning the television set of all the rotted produce we gleefully chucked at it, we scanned around for another fine example of the best televisionprogramming our culture can create.
We settled on THE MAN IN THE LAST BOOTH AT THE CAFE.
Sadly, we quickly ran out of rotted produce.
Premonitionally channeling today’s Most Excellent Wilder, the bunch of us trundled our wheel-chairs and granny-walkers over to the library in the club-house.
For some ‘paper-view’.
Baltimore.
Nuked to bedrock.
Vote Kim!
https://youtu.be/wBebl5fqzCA
Love The Day of the Triffids. It’s actually on my “recommended” list. I even read the comic growing up.
Baltimore? When I visited in the 90’s it already looked like a war had been lost there.
We could test our bombs, you know, to be sure.
I am not a fantasy fan by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, but, I have to agree with you Mr John about Tolkien and Howard. the only two authors of fantasy that I have read. I tried to read others and threw the book across the room due to the poor writing, grammar and syntax. Sci Fi is getting that way, people encourage these no talent, no idea wanna-be-writers and so the drek gets published. Earth is truly doomed, doomed I say for all the bad, crummy writing.
I was wondering if it was me. But then I picked up some old science fiction? Some great stuff is still out there.
But it’s not winning Hugos.
We are currently rewatching Babylon 5. Holy cow, the themes and events could be taken directly from this year’s headlines. Plague, growing evil, government conspiracies, a vice president who blatantly plots to usurp power after the election, spy agencies running things behind the scenes, newsweasels actively supporting The Narrative by unsubtle manipulation…
It’s really true. I’ve been rewatching it some nights while I blog. Really well done, even 20 years out.
Also amazing how many of them are dead.
I realize that this is the WiWeaWian equivalent of skim-until-offended… And the Daughter Product and I agree that flushing interesting objects (like my…sob…Palm Pilot) down the head is the 3-yr-old modus vivendi
But 142-? 142-! Bars of novelty soap?! Who has that?
(IOW we laughed ourselves silly)
It was awful. For whatever reason, the builder put in wall-mount toilets. Oh, my. Those are horrible to take off. I ended up breaking one to get the little bars of soap out, but epoxied over the hole.
Seemed to work.
NEVER BUY A HOUSE WITH WALL MOUNT TOILETS.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t heard any comments about how little our government will gain in income taxes next year. Meaning there will be much less discretionary funds for schools, roads, public healthcare and much much more. Regardless of who wins the White House next month, there will be much less. So vote the person who has proven to be the most qualified to handle that.
I’m pretty sure private bank accounts will be pinched at least some. “Because its an Emergency !!” Stealing is stealing and when they say only the rich will be taxed, we all know that is BS. The only reason they pick on the rich is no one wants to pay taxes – always someone else.
At the Fed level? I don’t think they care.
But at the state and local levels? That will get very, very interesting.
“While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.”
Ha. I thought I was the only family like that. Many of my friends didn’t have bedtimes at all, apparently, and also didn’t read. I still remember the question in 5th grade French class “what time do you go to bed?”. I had to answer 7:30 and then try to backpedal through the laughter that “I could stay awake and read”.
Ha! Yeah. I was a weasel, and fought Ma Wilder to a 10pm by fifth grade. I usually read until 11 or so.