One Of Our Biggest Problems: The Deflation Of Power

“My services are entirely inconsequential to them.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

I like my steak rare.  Like panda or bigfoot.

I’m writing this ahead of time, so as I type, I have had little information about what’s going on in the race, other than it tied in Dixville Notch and that Kamala narrowly carried Guam, which is okay, I guess.  Karate Kid XVIII was set in Guam, right?  Or was it on an orbital space platform?  I forget.

There has already been the smell of fraud coming from the 2024 presidential election – we got that in the last few weeks and discussed it on the most recent (pre-election) podcast and on this week’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  The simple answer is that having same-day, in-person paper voting of properly identified voters with public counts is the only way to avoid fraud.  Oh, and a purple finger dye would be a bonus.

Never order hay from Amazon®.  After a couple of days they’ll as for feed back.

The real problem, though isn’t fraud – the real problem is that elections in a free country shouldn’t be this consequential.  But yet, they are.  And I’ve discovered my underline, italics, and bold keys.  I’m dangerous now that I know a bit more about typography – it’s been a character building exercise.

What caused the election to be so consequential?  Deflation, and Inflation.

Let’s start with Deflation.

Back when the United States was just warming up, the powers of the federal government were very limited.  In fact, almost every law that existed was a law that existed at the state (or commonwealth, if you can’t spell ‘state’), county, or city level.  There was no federal law against murder.

In fact, why would there need to be a federal law against murder?  States could take care of that with their existing laws quite nicely, thank you.  And we also had lynching, which saved about three days off of the whole “catch-trial-hang” normal course of justice and the cost of a trial.  Federal government?  Why would they need to get involved at all?  We can find our own trees.

And presidents.  Being president meant that you were elected to administer the (weak) government of only 3.9 million people, which is approximately the number of people who share a single bathroom in Mumbai.  Now there are at least 334 million people living in the United States, increasing the power of the presidency by a factor of 85.

I couldn’t resist.  (LINK to Aesop)

But there’s more!  Back in 1800, the president would likely have been bored a great deal of the time, since there wasn’t so much to do.  There was no real standing army, so there was no military-industrial complex to feed.  There was no federal welfare.  There was no Department of Education.  In fact, there were only three departments:  State, Treasury, and War.  There was also an Attorney General.

And Washington, elected in April, didn’t bother to nominate people for those positions until September.  Summer break, probably.  Or maybe he was still hung over.  Regardless, the position of the president was so unimportant that Washington didn’t do anything for months, and yet the country kept going.

I’d estimate that the power of the president is 10,000 times, minimum, what it was back in 1800 between the number of citizens and the increase in power from the sheer size and complexity of the federal government.  Now, that’s what I call deflation!  Imagine going to sleep and finding your dollar was worth 10,000 times what it was the night before.

This was funny to either fans of 19th Century German opera or fans of 1990s Saturday morning cartoons.  And that’s about it.

And congressmen?  When we started, there was on representative for every 37,000 people.  Now, each congressman represents a staggering 750,000 people.  That’s a power inflation of over 20.  But it’s also a critical distinction.  Here in Modern Mayberry, I can pick up the phone and call the most politically powerful elected official (that represents about 37,000 folks) and expect a personal call back.  To be fair, he doesn’t know everybody, but he knows (generally) quite a few folks and I have sufficient stature to have made it to that “call this guy back” list.  I mean, who doesn’t want to hear from the village idiot?  It’s a very nice village.

Back then, congressmen were at least theoretically accessible.  Now?  The guy who’s gonna win the race probably knows my name, but there’s no way he could put my face together with it.  A congressman is 20 times more powerful (just on numbers) than he was back in 1800.

If that were it, it would be manageable.  But it’s not it.

In 1800, or even 1900, your single point of contact with the federal government would have been getting your mail.

During my last interview, the hiring manager asked me if I could perform under pressure.  I said, “No, but I know Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Now?  The federal government is now the most over-reaching and powerful governmental entity in your life (if you’re American).  From the moment you go to bed to the moment you go to sleep it covers every facet of your life.  You get up, use FDA approved toothpaste to brush.  Get in a shower of a size and volume determined by the EPA, with water quality defined by the EPA, after flushing a toilet whose volume is governed by the EPA.  That’s the first five minutes.  It doesn’t get better, but I’ll leave the exercise of getting into a car and the rest of the day to the reader.

Just on the population, those positions have become more powerful.  But add in the ever-increasing creeping of the federal government into every part of your life?  Every decision?  Every surface?  The power of an individual member of congress has easily increased by a thousand-fold.  This is deflation.

The federal government used to be the tip of the power pyramid, far away and not particularly important.  Now that geometry is upside down, with the tip being the base.  Local decisions are increasingly trivial at the city and county level, more consequential at the state level, but many of these are 100% constrained by federal mandates and power.

The elected official you can most easily reach has the smallest impact on your life.  You can’t hope to get the attention of a federal official or congressman because you’re too small.  You don’t matter.

Your power has inflated away,

  • first based on the increase in population diluting the voice of individuals where the number of elected officials remains the same,
  • then by making the power remote from you housed in unaccountable bureaucracies, and
  • thirdly, the inherent power of your community has been erased through the forced diversity by purposely injecting foreign communities to break up the traditions and community norms so that your power is even more fully fractured. Somalians don’t make Minnesota better in any way.  They are culturally alien and belong in (bear with me) Somalia.

Why?

I went to the Air and Space Museum.  Disappointed, since it was just an empty building.

A pyramid that stands on its point is inherently unstable.  They know that.  It’s also inherently unfree.  You know that.  The solution is simple, but will take time and effort:

Devolve power away from Washington.  Move power to the states.  This is inevitable, and will happen because of that instability, because the undeniable weakness of the federal government is showing.  A single man like Donald Trump was able to thwart the lawfare, the biased media, the entire Deep State, and even his own party’s hierarchy.

All it takes is one man, and where one will stand up, others will follow.

Make America Great Again?

Yes.

The first step is, though, is to Make the Presidential Election Inconsequential Again.

And, maybe, ship Kamala to Guam if they like her that much.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Date With Destiny

“You hear that, Mr. Anderson?  That is the sound of inevitability.  It is the sound of your death.  Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.” – The Matrix 

I heard that Epstein got a clue to the inevitable – the last guard he tried to fist-bump left him hanging.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 6

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – A Date With Destiny – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Big Fraud – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (link below) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

A Date With Destiny

Like most people, I believe that I have free will.  Whether that’s true or not isn’t my call, so it’s certainly at a least a pleasurable fiction that I maintain.  Free will, however, only applies to our choices, and doesn’t apply to our circumstances.  Every person reading this is going to die.  We pretend like that’s not the case, but I assure you it is, and there is no way to make a choice that will avoid that fate.  Death is inevitable.

So, that’s one example.  Another example where free will and choices don’t matter is when uncontrollable forces have been unleashed.  For instance, if I drop a stripper off of the Empire State Building, there’s no way I’m not getting glitter on my shirt.  It’s inevitable.

I think we’re at the same place with Civil War.  It’s inevitable no matter who “wins” this election.  That’s not to say that it might not be postponed for a bit, but like death and stripper glitter, it’s coming.

Why am I so cavalier in saying that?  Well, it’s obvious if you look around.  The things that are most likely to cause civil war are tied to what’s going on in the country.  Here are your indicators:

  • Popular immiseration. This means that people are miserable.  Inflation and declining prospects have made most young people miserable, and tortured them, to boot.  Generations ago, a bright young man could support his family by being the local butcher or running the local sporting goods store.  Now, he has to go to college, study, maybe get two degrees, and have his wife work to get the same lifestyle the guy selling letter jackets had.
  • Lower birth rates and later marriage age. I recently heard (though I don’t have a source) that when the age of first marriage exceeds 28, civil war is inevitable.  Every single time.  We’re at 30.
  • Too many elites. Just like all those young dudes are going to school for years in the hopes of being able to maybe one day buy a house, maybe, there are at the same time too many billionaires competing for power.  Bloomberg, Trump, Cuban, Gates, Musk are all looking to see who can rule.  There isn’t enough room for all of them, and their dissention forms the core of the leadership for civil war.
  • Belief that the system is fraudulent. Sure, we’ve all expected that the system is rigged, but 2020 was a slap in the face to election integrity since the very GloboLeftistElite that denounce anyone who doubts the validity of the election OPENLY BRAGGED about twisting the system in the pages of Time® magazine in 2021.  I’ve heard of more election fraud before election week than in any pre-election period, ever, and don’t doubt that more is taking place behind the scenes.  A fraudulent system that is brazen provides the casus belli for that civil war.
  • A failing economy. This ties to immiseration, but the economy has been juiced for so long with such amazing amounts of money that it is mathematically impossible to unwind without amazing amounts of pain.  And pain causes . . . civil war.
  • Unpopular wars. Who wants to die for Ukraine?  For Israel?  For Taiwan?  For South Korea?  Yup, thought so.  Yet there are rabid hawks on both sides that are willing to drag a thoroughly unwilling populace into a war they cannot win.
  • The fact that there have been at least two attempts on Trump’s life shows exactly how stable our society is right now.

Folks, I cannot stress this enough:  this is inevitable, and only the timing is up for grabs.  I’ve said before (in 2018 or 2019, I think) that 2025 was the first opening date for Civil War 2.0.  I’ll stand by that, but I don’t think it’s likely.  I still put the range as 2025 to 2040, with the most likely range being between 2030 to 2035.  Big nations have a lot of inertia, like a train after you shut down the engine, keep going for a long time.  But not forever.

Finally, this is not a wish, since I believe that everyone underestimates how gruesome this will be.  I anticipate that China and Russia would gladly airdrop weapons to both sides when they’re not heading to their microwaves to make popcorn while they watch.  But, just like throwing a trash bag full of vegetable soup into a jet intake, we all know what’s going to happen.

It’s destiny.  Oh, and speaking of Destiny, she’s up next on stage 3.

Violence and Censorship Update

Obviously, there are things we can’t talk about openly because the consequences are too dire so that people were censored off of YouTube® for trying to report this.  Until the lies break:

What happens when FEMA is on the side of the disaster?

And anyone who isn’t lawfully here?

Ahhhh, diversity.  Bringing in Afghans to do killing Americans won’t do.

Trump Derangement Syndrome:  It’s real.

Looks like Kamala only wants to allow certain speech.  Anyone here surprised?

And NPCs on Reddit are with her:

And if Trump is Hitler®, then soon enough:

And speaking of the media, I wonder if they coordinate with the Kamala campaign?

Never forget, they have plans for you.

Biden/Harris Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again, and peaking upwards as interest rates are starting to spike.  Hmmm.

But not all people are miserable:

And some are too stupid to be miserable:

But people can’t afford McDonald’s anymore.

 

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is up significantly, and this should be higher given that Venezuelan gangs are turning parts of US cities into no-go zones.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is down a bit.

Economic:

The economy took a huge drop – I think the hangover from all the juicing is coming.

Illegal Aliens:

The latest numbers are simply lies.

The Big Fraud

Regardless of what follows, go out and vote.  It makes fraud slightly harder.

Signs of voter fraud in advance of the election are through the roof.  Here are a few:

This is illegal:

Ooops, that was election fraud from the last election.

Oh, the Colorado Secretary of State (above) also left nearly all of the voting machine passwords unprotected on the Internet.  But it didn’t stop Democrats from suing to keep noncitizens on the voter rolls.

There are more issues, likely into the hundreds by now.  At some point it should become clear that this is a humiliation exercise meant to drive home that you have no power.  They can lie and cheat to your face, and “What Timmy gonna do?”

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much, Ricky!!

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1844861906361909266
https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1847669300422639725
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1844125924301984148
https://x.com/TrendingEx/status/1843359191077138512
https://x.com/NoahPollak/status/1847006345662550219

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1852394961330692486
https://twitter.com/i/status/1845646215452496049
https://x.com/i/status/1850126594418815417
https://x.com/i/status/1845866508259627261
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/some-mass-shooting-survivors-want-more-good-guys-guns

ONE GUY
https://archive.is/eB7iD

BODY COUNT
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt
https://archive.is/hfs5Y
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1844839172907123183
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1849634400851341410
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2024/10/10/non-english-speaking-students-are-overwhelming-pa-schools-and-racking-up-millions-for-small-towns-data-show/

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/i/communities/1848518910653415584
https://x.com/PeterBernegger/status/1850565226690654556
https://x.com/scrowder/status/1850924883678498871
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1849977065925189699
https://catholicvote.org/millions-of-christians-religious-people-say-they-are-not-voting-in-november/
https://x.com/emmagcawood/status/1850522383863390392
https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/1850611709549146405

CIVIL WAR
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/10/22/quiet_before_the_storm_151815.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/185053/civil-war-reenactors-virginia-play-acting-expect-war
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/25/dc-residents-leaving-election-week-00185313
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13933435/MSNBC-host-claims-Trump-family-preparing-civil-war-former-president-warns-America-faces-enemy-within.html
https://slaynews.com/news/clinton-strategist-james-carville-trump-arrest-males-color-elected-calls-armed-uprising-harris-loses/
https://x.com/DrewHLive/status/1820859923787591846
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/06/firebrand-leftist-jamie-raskin-said-congress-must-disqualify-trump-predicted-civil-war-conditions/
https://tomklingenstein.com/is-the-left-preparing-for-war-if-trump-wins/
https://truthovernews.org/p/democrats-plan-for-color-revolution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/23/cold-civil-war-cultural-secession/
https://news.yahoo.com/news/hurricane-relief-workers-forced-evacuate-102606823.html
https://studyfinds.org/america-verge-of-world-war-iii/?nab=1
https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-top-3-predictions-for-post-election-america/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-trump-american-civil-war-b2634731.html

MANIFESTO
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747

It Came From . . . 1988

“What’s going on, Andy?  Is this what you want to do with your life?  Sleep all day long and hang out with the Criterion brothers?” – Funny Farm

How do I get a movie from 1988 to show up?  Just say Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

FYI – site getting hit last night by . . . something.  Can’t respond to comments from the last two posts, so I will when I can.

 

I was wrong last month when  I mentioned I had only one year to go in the 1980s, there are three.  This one is 1988, and, going back through the list of movies I found, 1988 wasn’t particularly a great year.  Although the corporatism that started to kill movies in the 1990s had started, it hadn’t hit fully.  Some movies were still just fun.

As usual, the list isn’t in any particular order, my descriptions of plots are sketchy, and these aren’t necessarily the best movies, they’re just the movies on the list.

Beetlejuice – The original.  Tim Burton makes the most beautiful movies, but unless someone is there to stop him from following his worst impulses, the movies are also very stupid.  Someone kept Tim in a box, and he got a great performance out of Michael Keaton as the titular character, and Wynona Ryder was in it before she started being a nutty shoplifter.

Dead Heat – Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo play two cops in a buddy cop movie.  The big twist?  They’re dead and have been reanimated by a mad scientist so that they can commit zombie-cop robberies.  The math seems to be a bit off on this one – if I could reanimate people, I’d probably be looking for a Nobel® Prize rather than committing petty heists with Joe Piscopo.  Is it a comedy?  Well, one of the character names is Roger Mortis.  So, maybe, but the actual cop part gets in the way of the actual movie.  The nice thing about this is that it got made even though it’s arguably awful – it’s awful in a good way, as in, “Let’s try this crazy idea” rather than awful in the 2024 “let’s make a woke corporate movie and preach girlboss leftie themes and if people don’t like it let’s call them racist” way.

The same hairy dude was in every generated image.  Who knew that PEZ® and beards were related?

Willow – Not to be confused with the new Disney® series that was so bad that they vowed never to show it again to get a tax write-off, this is a story of a dwarf who comes from a village of dwarves and gets into a typical sword and sorcery adventure.  Think of it as someone who wanted to do a Tolkien movie but didn’t have the film rights.  It ended up being a fairly sweet and charming movie, and one of Val Kilmer’s best performances, ever.  I liked it more than most people.  Bonus:  Joanne Whalley.

Big – Tom Hanks was getting ready to break out as an actual actor, and Big was a stepping stone for that direction, where he ended up playing a kid that made a wish to become an adult.  But he was still a kid in his brain parts.  Nowadays, this movie would have difficulty being made because Hanks (as a kid in an adult body) has sex with Elizabeth Perkins.  Yeah.  That didn’t age well.  I haven’t checked on Elizabeth Perkins to see if she aged well, but, then found she was a brittle old feminist.  Sigh.  Looks like Tom dodged a bullet.

Funny Farm – This was an absolute box-office bomb, as I recall, but it is one of my favorite movies of all time.  It’s essentially Green Acres without the Hungarian accent, but I just love that story, so I can watch nearly endless variations of it.  In this case, sportswriter Chevy Chase gets an advance for a book, can’t write it, and steals his wife’s book, exhumes a dead body, tries to set a booby trap for a drunken mailman, and determines that he can live life without being a tool to everyone around him.  Unlike the real Chevy Chase.

Is that Susan Sarandon in the middle?

Bull Durham – I put this on here primarily because it is a very good (not the best, but very good) baseball comedy.  The Mrs. loves it, so, contractually I’m required to watch it when she watches it.  It loses points for having Susan Sarandon associated with it and for being a bit too focused on the romance side of the equation.  Best parts?  Coach banter and bringing the word lollygagging back.  Lollygaggers!

Die Hard – I don’t need to describe this one, since it’s a Christmas favorite.  This move turned out perfectly, and was, perhaps, the zenith of 1980s action-adventure movies if you don’t count Predator™ and Terminator©.  The twist?  Putting an “everyman” into the role of hero.  Remember, it’s not really Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off Nakatomi Tower!  It is the best end for a movie, Hans down.

Is that Nakatomi Tower in the background?

A Fish Called Wanda – What if Monty Python® never broke up and did more movies?  This is as close as you’re going to get to that dream.  Fun and funny, and Kevin Kline absolutely steals the show (and an Oscar™) as Otto, a CIA hitman who quotes Nietzsche and believes “the central tenet of Buddhism is every man for himself”.  Who knew Buddhists were libertarians?  John Cleese plays John Cleese, and Jamie Lee Curtis, sadly, stays mainly clothed.

Vibes – Cyndi Lauper as a psychic stuck with also psychic Jeff Goldblum?  Why not?  The plot is odd and absurd, with Cyndi and Jeff travelling to the Andes.  Yes.  The movie involves all manner of silliness with the main focal point to set up odd situations where quirky-girl Lauper can bounce of straight-man Goldblum.  Is it one of the best movies of Western Civilization?  No.  But it did make me laugh.

Tucker:  The Man and His Dream – I’m not sure how much of this story is true, but it sounds like Tucker Carlson was trying to make a car after World War II.  I’m not sure how this happened, but I think it might have something to do with time travel and Donald Trump’s uncle, John G. Trump, who was an electrical engineer and physicist, and the guy they brought in to steal evaluate Nikola Tesla’s notes so Trump could give them to Elon Musk.  I think.  Regardless, it was a pretty good movie about a car that certainly sounds like it would have been pretty good, though Tucker Carlson eventually gave up the dream and was later a journalist.  You might have heard of him.  Two thumbs up.

Young Guns – How much Bon Jovi do you need in a 1980s western?  Just a little bit.  It also stars the Sheen/Estevez brothers.  So, it the singer and actors were all in need of blow driers, but the movie has also been hailed as relatively historically accurate tale of the life of Billy the Kid, with the exception that Kiefer Sutherland is actually only three feet tall, so they had to use a lot of perspective shots.

Oh, yeah, brother!

They Live – John Carpenter took a short story from 1963 and remade it into a politically biting science fiction film where aliens infiltrate and take over American society.  Space aliens, not the aliens that eat ducks from the park.  Anyway, the film is famous for an amazingly long street fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David (not to be confused with David Keith).  It is notable that the alien overlords are significantly nicer than the current Biden/Harris administration, so there’s that.

Scrooged – Another huge Bill Murray hit, and probably the definitive A Christmas Carol adaptation of my lifetime.  Bill stars as a success-obsessed executive who takes the place of Scrooge.  In a meta turn, he wants to do a live version of A Christmas Carol on Christmas for the ratings after saving Karen Allen from the Nazis.  And it pulled in plenty of cash, making over $100 million on a $32 million budget.  Not bad.

The Naked Gun – After Airplane!, there was a short-lived television show called Police Squad.  It was hilarious, but most people don’t have a sense of humor so it was cancelled.  Instead, the Zucker brothers resurrected Detective Frank Drebin and made a movie that made tons of money, and probably drove O.J. Simpson to murder since the script showed how easy it was to get away with murder.

This is way better than the original poster and has 100% more Nakatomi Tower.

Working Girl – This movie should have been the sequel to Die Hard where Sigourney Weaver teams up with Bruce Willis to defeat the German space aliens in a musical with Bill Murray singing the theme, backed by Bon Jovi and Lou Diamond Phillips.  If only.  I honestly don’t remember this movie at all, so my plot is probably superior to the real thing.

There it is.  What did I miss?

The Pre-Election Spectacular Podcast: Voting Irregularities Edition

Streams will show up here at 9EDT, that’s in just over 30 minutes!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • War and Stuff
  • On This Day
  • Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • Two Minutes of Guns In 60 Seconds
  • ThinkRealFast
  • I Heard It On The X

More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War.  This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective.  And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place.  So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff.  In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war.  Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes.  And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle.  To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London?  If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production.  At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies.  We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford.  We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair.  Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there.  And airplanes?  They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those.  And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British.  It worked.  By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda.  In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types.  At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers.  That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint:  It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls.  Oh, and worthless university degrees.  Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers?  Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq?  Perhaps not.  Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now:  LED displays.  They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace.  A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States.  If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted.  The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made.  Is 1,000 a lot?  In billions of dollars, yes.  In fighter planes, no.  Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day.  Is that a lot?  Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles.  If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours?  Probably.  But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit.  How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems.  Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No.  Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States.  And by Europe.  Combined.  And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse.  That was a good argument, in the past.  China now sells more to developing markets than to the West.  When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years.  China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States.  Oh, strike that.  Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States.  When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things.  This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged.  Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it.  But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest.  I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end.  It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory.  We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way.  This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence.  Hmmm.  Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south.  Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes.  Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?

The Last Refuge Of The Left: Tritler

“Because it’s Hitler’s harmonica.  You can’t play Hitler’s harmonica.” – Rat Race

Why do we drink water?  Well, because we can’t eat it.

All memes today “as-found”

Sometime in 1990, Mike Godwin came up with Godwin’s Law:  “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

As this note indicates, this is five years before the World Wide Web made WWW a prefix that we can all now safely ignore, but Godwin pointed out what’s been happening in our society since at least 1964:  anything a GloboLeftist doesn’t like is Hitler starting (I think) with Goldwater, and certainly with Nixon.

I guess Mussolini was pretty good in track in high school.  They called him “the fascist guy in Italy”.

It really is an analogy that deserves to die.  World War II ended (does math) over 79 years ago.  The knee-jerk reaction seems to be the go-to to absolutely anyone and anything that disrupts the ability of the GloboLeftElite to do what they want.  What does it mean?  It means whatever the GloboLeft want it to mean.

In the last week, the GloboLeft and GloboLeftElite have launched their own Operation Tritlerossa comparing Trump with the Austrian in over 5,500 stories in one week, according to the prolific Tyler Durden over at ZeroHedge®.  Now, if there’s one thing I know about Austrians today, they’re far too busy with their boomerangs and kangaroos and didgeridoos to worry about world domination.

I can attest, though, that the media is all-in on this final putsch, er, push as they have been in the past.

Yup.  Finding those took about two minutes.  The really funny one is that Hillary seems to forget that in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted the nomination for president in Madison Square Garden, back when Bill could still work a Bush over. 

Beyond that, though, the reason for this insane analogy is that the GloboLeftElite have nothing left to attack Trump with, creating a character I call Tritler.  I tried it without the “r” but that leads to weird internet search results.

Kamala cannot look to competency, because Kamala is the result of the ultimate in GloboLeftElite power plays:  Obama didn’t want someone smarter than him because his ego wouldn’t allow it.  Joe fit the bill perfectly.  Biden didn’t want someone smarter than him because Jill wouldn’t allow it because he was insecure.  Kamala was the single most unpopular candidate on the Democrat slate for the 2020 election, dropping out because she was less popular than both Bernie Sanders and gonorrhea.

Kamala left the race before a single primary vote had been cast, and in this case entered the race after the last vote had been cast.  Kind of poetic for the first anchor-baby president who didn’t even bother to go to high school in the United States.

“Elections have consequences” man doesn’t understand where the division came from.  Huh.

So, should she run on her record?  Well, that would be, as a GloboLeft foot soldier would say, “problematic”.  As far as I can see, her record has been to attend some meetings that weren’t very important and to keep out of the way.

Okay, her policies?  Well, Kamala can’t articulate much beyond “I’m not Donald Trump” and what she has listed (less inflation, more houses) are more the wish list of a dim toddler who is trying to look important and smart around the adults even though she can’t quite figure out what the conversation is.  I don’t know if she’s just that dim or if she’s spent her entire life in a bubble where she never had to defend a position other than describing that her favorite one was missionary.

I wonder if this is A.I.?

To be fair, Donald spent his first term doing what Donald does:  trying to make deals.  In some cases, that was appropriate.  We don’t need a war with Kim Jong Un, and neither does South Korea.  Would it be better if North Korea was free?

Sure.

That’s not the job of the United States, though.  That’s the job of the North Koreans.  Trump saw a way to take an isolated country under a despot and move them closer to normalized relations.

In other cases, it was inappropriate.  There was a clear mandate for reduced immigration, yet the wall he built was stymied at every instance by the Democrats while Trump negotiated for a deal.  Ironically, Kamala made fun of Trump in the Fox® interview for not building more of the wall.

Huh?

Once again, The Bee called it.

So, the GloboLeftElite can’t run on ideas.  They can’t run on issues.  They can’t run on competence.  That leaves one thing:  to run on hate and fear.  I don’t think anyone is in particular fear of Hitler’s ghost right now, so all that leaves is that weird combination of Tritler.

The accusations are nonsensical, but, when you’re out of arguments, all that’s left is to play the Trump is Hitler card, just like Godwin noted back 35 years ago.  And if you disagree?  You’re just as bad as . . . Kamala?

Deep Thoughts And Dank Memes About Halloween And Strippers

“When the fear takes him, and the blood and the screams and the horror of battle take hold, do you think he would stand and fight?” – The Return of the King

I have a cookbook that mentions ancient evil monoliths:  the Necronomnomnomicon.

Most memes “as-found”, maybe an edit or two here and there..

When I was a kid, it seemed that Halloween was really about the kids.  I would dress up (usually) as a vampire, until I got older.  As I got older, it seemed that Halloween tipped from being a holiday for children to an excuse for younger adults to have drunken parties in costumes like “slutty elf costume” and “slutty Handmaid’s Tale costume” and “slutty presidential candidate”.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that Halloween is about the darker side.  Ghosts and witches and monsters have been a part of the celebration since Pharaoh Bubbahotep got his chariot license.  You’ve probably not heard of that Pharaoh before – after they mummified him they kept him under wraps.

The time of Halloween is certainly in line with being a harvest festival – I mean, it’s after harvest in the northern hemisphere, and there’s plenty of evidence that some version of Halloween was observed in ancient times.  Whether or not the Christian holiday of All-Saints Day (November 1) was a takeoff from this is up for grabs, but the trappings and idea of this being a time focused on dead humans is undeniably thousands of years old.

At college, I told my advisor I wanted to take a class on how to be a mime.  He said, “Say no more.”

But, again, a harvest festival.  In the northern hemisphere, plants are dying at this time of year, leaves are falling, and it begins to get cold and dark.  This is the foreshadowing of winter, a time where the planning and planting and preparing pay off in order to tide families back to spring when the world comes alive again.  What better way to celebrate the idea of dead people and the impending bitter winter than by having a party, getting drunk, and dressing like a “slutty Seal Team Six” member?

Trick or treating itself has been practiced for (at least) five hundred years, including costumes and begging for food.  Ultimately, though, the idea comes back around to the idea of what happens to the soul after death – the year becomes, essentially, a proxy for the life of a human, with Halloween marking the time when death is contemplated.  And it’s scary to think about death.

Many people like to be scared – that’s one reason why horror movies are so popular.  In my dating days, I noted also that the scarier the movie I took my date to, the more amorous they became afterwards.  Keep in mind my sample size was mainly limited to girls who would eventually become strippers, but nevertheless, it’s still data.  Like grandma always said, “Write what you know, Johnny, even if it involves bad decisions, teenage lust, and women with daddy issues and narcissistic personality disorder.”

That meme makes me feel like a Djinn and tonic.

So, just like Pavlov’s dog, I began to associate scary movies with good times.  But I liked them before that, even as a young kid I’d stay up late to watch B-movies in black and white on Saturday night and feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when the sound of the house settling at night would happen in the dark behind me.

Is working on your abs for forty minutes daily a waist of time?

Part of horror for me, though, was the idea of the supernatural.  I recall reading Stephen King before he morphed into a parody of someone’s GloboLeft lesbian wine aunt with Trump Derangement Syndrome and the first book of his to profoundly disappoint me was Cujo.  Why?

It was about a dog with rabies.  That’s it.  No evil spirits.  No Walkin’ Dude.  No vampires.  Just a stupid dog with a stupid disease.

So what?

Bad things happen, I get it, but horror to me wasn’t Michael Myers attacking teenagers in the night while wearing a William Shatner mask inside-out.  No.  It was him getting up after taking damage that would kill a dozen men and relentlessly pressing forward.  He wasn’t a man – he was a force beyond anything natural, much like my deodorant.

The other part of the horror trope at the time was that the Final Girl, the one who faced down the supernatural bad guy, was virtuous.  Who got killed?  The kids drinking and making out.  Who lived?  The clumsy virgin.  In essence, these horror movies were morality plays showing that the wicked were punished and that the virtuous were rewarded, a lesson that thankfully went over the heads of the eager and enthusiastic frolicsome fräuleins.

Those morality plays made sense, and the plot, like a tune, had a melody that was familiar and pleasing.

I guess they couldn’t party in the living room.

Again, for me the element of the supernatural was crucial.  One of the things that I realized over time is that the element of Evil implied that there was Good, too.  The dark, Lovecraftian world where ancient brooding evil ones who didn’t even pay any regard to mankind in an unfeeling universe hadn’t crossed my mind yet, but that was before I had even met my ex-wife.  But a movie like The Exorcist, was based on the existence of Evil.

And that Evil wasn’t aloof and uncaring.  No.  That Evil was intensely interested in humanity.  Intensely.  In fact, humanity was the focus of that Evil in a war that we could only see the edges of, one that was being played out in realms we had only the barest perception of.  The Exorcist implied all of that, but also more than implied the existence of the other side:  Good.  With a capital G.

If Cthulhu made cheese, would he call them “LoveKraft Singles”.

I know that moral relativists hate the idea of this duality of Good and Evil, preferring to live in a world not of black and white, but one filled with shades of gray.  Or grey.  Or . . . now why am I thinking about gravy?

Regardless, lots of people were scared by the embodiment of Evil shown in The Exorcist.  I was comforted.  My love of horror isn’t about a fascination with death and Bad things – quite the opposite, it’s about a fascination for life and Good things.

And most of those girls I dated aren’t strippers anymore, which is a good thing given their age, that they’re now saying: “Sorry, we’re clothed until further notice.”

The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes

“I am opposed to the women’s libs.” – Revenge of the Pink Panther

If I write a novel about the different shades of the color blue, is that cyans fiction?

Note: No podcast tomorrow. I’ve got a work thing that will take me right up until showtime, so I won’t have time to create the quality notes that drive the show, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until next week for the podcast that listeners describe as “usually punctual”.

While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for.

I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now:

The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

My brake pedal, though, wants therapy. It’s tired of being depressed.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke.

Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”.

Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.”

I hear that AOC occupied a fertility clinic. Being a communist, she wanted to seize the means of reproduction.

I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

This one woman said she was a trophy wife, but her ears stuck out and the previous winners’ names were all tattooed down her back.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband.

In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve.

All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

I weigh a fraction of what I did in school. An improper fraction, but still, a fraction.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in.

The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Yup, that’s an Alpha Widow.

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism.

It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end.

Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before . . . oh, too late.

Violence: The Starting Point Of Civilization

“I don’t like violence, Tom.  I’m a businessman.” – The Godfather

I tried to be an architect, but they didn’t like my library design.  It only had one story.

Violence is something that society has been built to avoid.  Historically, violence has been much higher – I recently wrote about the Yanomami people and how half of their men died in combat up until recently.  This is an ugly fact.

One of the myths that has been force-fed to us is that native peoples are nice and peaceful and reverent.  I had heard that people like the Blackfoot tribe “used ever part” of the animals they killed.  But that same tribe would kill them by making a herd stampede over a cliff, mashing themselves as they fell – it’s what’s called a “buffalo jump”.  Yes, I imagine they used a lot of the buffalo, but I’m fairly certain that practice resulted in a lot of waste just by the sheer nature gravity and the rocks below.

Likewise, the Aztecs were worse:  they sacrificed 4,000 actual humans for one party in 1487.

I know the Aztec priests worked hard, since the high priest said, “I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to get where I am today.”

Yet, now the world is much safer, though places like the United States are getting less safe by the day.

Why?

Not enough violence.  At least, not enough violence in the right places.

While Western Civilization certainly didn’t start the idea of laws, they’ve been embraced wholeheartedly since laws work.  Although the number of laws in our current system far exceeds the number we need for a functioning society, laws are still important.

But laws are just words.  Ultimately, enforcement of the law means that someone has to be willing to employ violence to follow up on the law, up to and including killing the violator.  That’s where the sheer number of laws gets silly.  Should we really face imprisonment for a broken taillight?

Yes, I know that’s not the penalty, but try not paying the fine and see what happens.  Eventually, people with guns will come and put you in jail and if you resist, they will shoot you.  The reason I think we should consider very carefully what laws we as a society have is that ultimately the threat of violence is what underpins them all.  The Feds ended up putting dozens of people to death at Waco over novelty paperweights.

That is, of course, a ludicrous overuse of force, done by bureaucrats so that they could justify their funding at the congressional level.

I think we can agree, though, that laws are necessary.  And laws gain power through their enforcement.  If a law isn’t enforced, it loses all of its power.  If the penalty is too small, then the law will be ignored.  As I read once, “If a law is only punishable by a fine, that means it’s legal for a price.”

If you stop a Catholic service with a squirt gun, does that make it a Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Likewise, if attempted murder is punishable by six months in the slammer (I recently read about a murderer who was out after that length of time for attempted murder), the penalty is less severe than the fifteen years that a man received in Iowa for burning a pride flag.

If there is no penalty for crossing the American border and then taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, why, people will do exactly that.  And why stop at one apartment building?  Martha Raddatz of ABC® seems to think that five is a perfectly acceptable number of apartment complexes to be taken over by criminal Venezuelan gangs.

This is the outcome of the propaganda that “violence is never the solution”.  Violence, or the threat of violence is often the only solution to many problems.  An example is if a thief is attempting to break into my house and do Heaven knows what.  My answer isn’t to politely state that what the thief is trying to do violates the laws.

I bought a substitute thesaurus, and it’s really bad.  Really bad.  Just, bad.

Nope.  In order to protect my house and family, I may have to use violence at that point.  Certainly, it will be a reluctant use, but the reason why homes don’t experience much burglary around here is because people have guns and burglars know that, and also know that juries around here are made of people just like me.

The law doesn’t keep houses in Modern Mayberry safe, the threat of violence keeps people safe.

But all the world isn’t Modern Mayberry.  Places like Chicago or Baltimore have ongoing violence levels that are at multi-decadal highs.  Why?

The criminals have gotten the message that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want.  And if someone tries to step in and protect citizens?  Well, like the Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny, who restrained a potentially dangerous man in a way he thought would keep everyone safe, they’ll be put on trial.

Yes, and the trial is expected to take six weeks.  At $1,000 an hour for lawyers, that’s $40,000 a week.  Or $240,000 for all six.  Maybe he’s got a coupon?

Is a lawyer required to name his daughter Sue?

Regardless of if Penny is found guilty or not, his trial sends the same message as New York has always sent to its citizens:  you’re not allowed to protect yourselves.  Criminals threatening violence have the upper hand.  Just ask Bernie Goetz, who decided he refused to be a mugging victim again.

We’re at the point where the criminals will start using violence – not because they have any political objective, but just because no one is stopping them, and those who would attempt to stop them are punished very visibly.

The way forward is obvious.  At some point, decent people will have no other place to flee, and will have to stand and fight.  When I review history, the pattern is pretty clear that civilization does return, though it does take the reestablishment of violence to get us there, and probably a few more buffalo jumps.

I had a bison steak the other night, and asked the waiter for the buffalo bill.

And it’s been 200 years since the last organized buffalo jump, I here.  I guess that makes it a bison-tennial.  And maybe Penny can get an Aztec lawyer – they get right to the heart of the problem.

The Mrs., CPAP, Visa, and Me.

“MasterCard®!  Visa©!” – Twelve Monkeys

My brother-in-law played tuba in high school.  He was really into heavy metal.

The Mrs. spent a few days in the hospital at the start of the year.  I was particularly pleased that she waited until January 1 so that the deductible for the year was met, and I will be particularly cross if she has to go back next year.

I mean, she should have some compassion.  The deductible is a lot.

Several good things and a mystery came out of the hospital stay.  The mystery is why she was there in the first place.  I mean that.  The symptoms clearly required hospitalization, and the symptoms typically mean that some of her organs would be permanently damaged.

Nope.  After being there, the organs that should have been damaged (her philtrum and her uvula) were just fine.  The doctor, who seems quite competent, says that that means that her philtrumitis was something quite different, and wants to catch her right at the onset this year if it happens again.

The whole “stiff upper lip” thing may be why Bill Clinton hates Great Britain.

It will happen again, because it has already happened twice.  I’m just hoping it happens before a new deductible year, but I don’t know if she cares enough so that we can save the $1,500 deductible.

The good news was that they were measuring her the oxygen content in her blood, which the doctors and nurses seemed to thing was important for some reason.  “Can’t walk without passing out,” they said.  Heck, Pa Wilder told me to just walk stuff like that off, or rub some dirt on it.

Anyway, I have faith we’ll get her philtrum sorted out in time.  But during the time, it was also determined that The Mrs. has sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is where, when a person is sleeping, that they stop breathing.  This is, according to experts, not good, because unlike me, The Mrs. is unable to absorb enough oxygen through her skin to live.  Such weakness!

One sure sign of sleep apnea (from my experience) is loud snoring.  In the case of The Mrs., seismic monitors were set off in every town in the United States named “Springfield” when she slept.

Don’t give off Bundy vibes.  Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

But “slept” is really not a great term for what The Mrs. was doing:  the doctor said that prior to the sleep study she was having dozens of incidents where she stopped breathing – per hour.  That tends to make whatever sleep she was getting be interrupted every few minutes.

Except that she never knew it was happening.

When they kicked her out of the hospital, they gave her oxygen.  Now, the oxygen helped her, but she still stopped breathing.  Finally, a sleep study was scheduled.  Because Modern Mayberry is two hours from Mt. Pilot, we took her there for the study on a Friday.

The next day she was bouncy and in the best mood I’d seen in years.  The CPAP (Continuous Proton Angstrom Predictor) that they had hooked her up had allowed her to sleep, deeply, for the first time in five years (my guess).  She felt great for days afterward.

I bought The Mrs. a huge diamond ring.  She asked why I didn’t buy her a car instead, but I told her they don’t make fake cars.

After feeling awful for so long that she didn’t know she felt awful, feeling great was like a drug.  In fact, she was counting the days from when she had the sleep study to when the doctor would provide a prescription for her to get a CPAP (Cobalt Piston Analog Platypus).

Finally, the day arrived.  We drove an hour and a half (the other direction from Mt. Pilot) and found in a little strip mall where the people were ready to give The Mrs. the coveted CPAP (Corndog Popcorn Apple Plate).  We got home, and The Mrs. plugged it in, popped on her mask and went to bed.

And The Mrs. slept.

And got the best night of sleep at home she’d had “as an adult.”  I think The Mrs. was exaggerating, but she loved her new CPAP (Capering Party Animal Platform).

Now’s the time to admit that, even though I do have several superpowers, I have a CPAP (Constitutionally Protected Ammo Pouch) as well.  One day over seven years ago (note that this is beyond the statute of limitations) The Mrs. said I stopped breathing.  I read about it, and, um, a day later I had “acquired” a CPAP (Criminally Procured Automated Prosthesis) by finding the equivalent of that liquor store that sold booze to six-year-olds.

I imagine he can’t even walk when he’s sober.

Sleep study?  Doctor visit?  Insurance?  Why?  I have a Visa®.

Today, as The Mrs.’ doctor reviewed the data from her CPAP (Crucially Precious Artificial Planet) I casually mentioned that my CPAP (Chronologically Primeval Ancient Apparatus) was seven years old, and I might need a new one.  Gradually my unorthodox procurement strategy came to light.

“Well, John Wilder, you’ll need a sleep study, or your insurance won’t pay for a new one.”

“I have a Visa®.”

“Oh, cool.  I’ll write you a prescription whenever you need a new one.”

See?  The Wilder Way wins again.