Month: February 2021

Fear, Rats, G. Gordon Liddy And A Machine Gun Bikini

“Hold them back!  Do not give in to fear!  Stand to your posts!  Fight!” – Return of the King

I can jump higher than any fence.  Fences don’t jump very well.

When The Mrs. and I were newly married, and before the stork brought The Boy, The Mrs. and I had time to just do, well, whatever.  That often involved driving, and driving in that involved radio.  We listened, mainly, to talk radio.  We had to, because we had been banned from a gas station for listening to a song by The Who too loudly.

I guess we won’t get fueled again.

One day we were listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show.  For those of you who don’t know, Liddy was sent to prison as part of the Watergate break in during the Nixon era.  If I had just one word to describe Liddy, it would be intense.  I hear that Liddy was doing five hundred sit ups a day, but had to stop – he couldn’t take the ab use.

In particular, I remember one story of Liddy’s very vividly.  The dialogue below isn’t exact (this was over 20 years ago and I slept at least once since then) but it’s pretty close:

“When I was younger, I had a particular fear of rats.  It was a very, very strong fear.  I didn’t want to be afraid of rats, but I was.  So, to get rid of the fear, I killed one, cooked it, and ate it.  I was never afraid of rats again.”

If a relative passes away, you can get a free Starbucks®.  It’s your mourning coffee.

See?  Intense.  Also the kind of thing that made me glad that Liddy wasn’t afraid of me, since I have no idea if I’m good with ketchup.

On one hand, that level of behavior is bordering on insane.  On the other, it showed an amazing amount of self-awareness.  If Liddy’s goal was to go through life without fear, facing it was certainly the way to overcome it, although I’ll say the number of times I’ve come face to face with rats is exactly zero.  If that’s your top fear, you’ve gotten rid of most common fears.

I’ve related in the past how when climbing a really tall mountain I reached a ridge and looked down over, expecting that there was no way it could be as steep as what I had just climbed.  I was wrong.  Sheer cliff.  I was looking down very far.

Several mountain climbers caught the ‘Rona but didn’t give it to anyone.  Scalers aren’t vectors. 

I never had vertigo before, in fact I never had much of a fear of height at all.  But in that moment, I developed it.  From then on, whenever I could find a tall spot to stand on and look down, I would.  And I’d stay there until the vertigo went away.

It was a lot harder than just killing and eating the cliff.  It also took a few months, but the vertigo went away.  It’s mostly vertigone now, though I will admit that sometimes I get a chill when I watch Internet videos of people doing stupid stuff on very tall buildings.  Most of the videos seem to come from Russia, for whatever reason.  I’m betting it’s vodka, but it could also be . . . no, it’s vodka.

Bad pun?  Check.  Bikini?  Check.  Machine gun?  Check.  Russian hat?  Check.

Not all fear is bad, and not all fear is debilitating.  A lot of Evil comes from fear.  I used to think that all Evil came from fear, but that’s certainly not correct (Three Kinds Of Evil).

But a lot of Evil does come from fear.  Why?  Fear is fuel for Evil:

  • Fear leads to cowardice.
  • Fear leads to deceit.
  • Fear leads to anger.
  • Fear leads to hate. (Quote about the Dark Side®, there may be here.)
  • Fear leads to regret.

Cowardice might be the worst, though.

The reason is that cowardice is, at the root, a betrayal.  First, a betrayal of internal values.  Second, a betrayal outwards.  A perfect (but small) example is someone who is afraid of the consequences of disappointing a customer.  That leads to a lie to the customer.  Which leads to another lie, which will eventually end up with a very angry customer.

The Mrs. and I started our relationship with a strict “no lies” policy.  That’s why The Mrs. never asks me, “Do these pants make my butt look big?”  She knows I’ll tell her the truth.

“The pants?  No, the pants don’t make your butt look big.”

It was half an hour outside of Bakersfield when the catnip began to take hold.

Fear is natural.  A healthy respect for fires and firearms is a good thing.  But when any single fear?  That fear has to be confronted.

It has to be killed and eaten.  It can change the world.  Say, if you were afraid of undercooked bat . . . .

Consequences Of The Broken Balance

“Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow.  So if you could be here around nine that would be great, ummm kay. Ahh, I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ahh, we sorta need to play catch up.” – Office Space

Would John Henry have upgraded to the iPhone® 12?

There have been some pretty significant trends of dehumanization of the workforce.  It might seem like dehumanization is a story right out of 2021, but this trend isn’t new.  The legend of John Henry, that steel drivin’ man that raced a steam drill shows that the fear of machines replacing people and changing the way they work dates back at least as far as the 1800s.  At least John Henry’s performance review only ended with his heart exploding.

I blame Materialism, but more on that in a bit.

There are more and more jobs where each second of employee performance is analyzed and optimized and timed.  I’ve written (some) about this previously (How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*).

There are more people today working under deep surveillance at work than ever before:

  • Don’t perform as well as the computer metric says you should in customer satisfaction surveys?
  • Bosses that are upset that people get sick on Wednesday and never on Saturday or Sunday? And employees blame their weekend immune system.
  • Don’t move in the optimum path from one place to another to pick an item off of a shelf?
  • Bosses firing people with the worst posture? Well, we all have a hunch who that is.
  • Take too long per item to ring out a customer?
  • Not enough keystrokes per minute on the company computer?

These are jobs that are created that use humans as interchangeable parts – ones that wear out or are defective and that can be replaced.  Of course, jobs like this have existed since, well, jobs existed.  Mining comes to mind.  Building railroads probably wasn’t a ball of fun, either.  But in both of those, at least, the job had room for innovation, thought, and human ability.

These children actually worked in a coal seam.  Child labor laws back then weren’t a miner issue.

I think the biggest problem is that people have forgotten that businesses exist for the benefit of society – society doesn’t exist for the benefit of businesses.  In my younger, more libertarian days, I missed that point.  Even though I love freedom (still!) I was always skeptical of the power of big business.

Also, I was always concerned about businesses that produced nothing.  I didn’t have the framework to explain it then, but I do now.

Businesses exist for three reasons:

To benefit society by creating value.

A business can easily fall short of this if it’s an abusive monopoly or makes its profits based on political pull and persuasion – an example would be solar scams during Obama, and military scams, well, any time.  What’s an invulnerable weapon system?  One that has parts made in every Congressional district.  Even if the military doesn’t want it.

No, creating value isn’t the same thing as government forcing money at a company.  Creating value is a much deeper concept – it’s where someone makes something and society gets better.  It doesn’t even have to be a physical thing, the words written by an author aren’t physical, but they create value when enjoyed by an audience.

Of course, physical items are awesome, too.  PEZ®, anyone?

Z3d looks like “Zed.”  Thank you for attending my Zed Talk.

To benefit employees by providing meaningful, necessary work.

When mass business first started, Henry Ford did an amazing thing:  he doubled the wages he paid his employees.  Why?  First, to get a good, stable workforce.  Second, to increase the productivity of that workforce.  Assembly lines were new, and getting a good workforce was crucial.

The experiment was successful, and helped Ford increase production while lowering overall costs.

Today, when you’ve got a good job, you know it.  You’re working on tough things that are right at the limit of your capability.  You’re engaged.  You’ve got support so you don’t sink.  You know what you’re supposed to be working on.  And you’re part of a team.

That sort of work is fun.

To allocate profits to shareholders and owners.

This is also required.  Winners make profits and get more opportunity to manage bigger businesses.  Losers don’t, and their businesses fold.  In a well-functioning society, those profits accrue to those who are creating value, which in turn allows them to create even more value.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a job (in business) from a company that had less money than I did.

The most profitable part of the lemonade stand I had when I was growing up?  Selling the antidote.

These three things are a delicate balance.  Too much emphasis on any one of the three is poison to the system:

  • Collective farms in the Soviet Union attempted to “create value” in society by creating awful jobs for people who had no real incentive to do a good job. Result?  Tens of millions dead, followed (much later) by the collapse of an entire country.  But the Soviets did develop an impressive system to stand in line all day.
  • Government, where often it’s set up for the benefit of the employees. What business would you go to where the customer (you and I) has to park farther away than the employee?  That wouldn’t happen at almost any business looking to make a profit.  But does your local police department save the best spaces for citizens?  Does your local DMV?  If so, you’re not the customer.  They are.
  • Hedge funds, high-frequency traders are an example of a business that does, in many cases, literally nothing to help the economy outside of extracting wealth. That’s it.  It’s a casino view of the world, where vampires that produce no value game the system for profit.

Why don’t hedge fund managers ever have problems with ticks or mosquitos?  Professional courtesy.

Imbalance in any of these features leads us to a dystopia.  Our current dystopia in the United States comes from the employee-centric Federal government.  Call it The Swamp or call it the Deep State, it’s all the same.

Even now, the function of some government agencies is so impaired as to be comical –  we have a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that wants to put Internet traders in jail and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that sells none of those things.  Also?  It’s nearly impossible to fire a Federal government employee.

Unless they’re on the Right.

Hedge funds and other Wall Street hangers-on don’t care about creating value for society.  They don’t care about employees of the firms they buy and gut.  They just want profits, and want them now, please.  Thankfully the SEC will regulate them.  What?  Oh, sorry, the SEC will protect them.  My bad.

Almost all of the horrors of the world are an imbalance between these forces, and each produces its own, unique dysfunctional society.

My friend told me that Biden was going to build a monument to George Orwell.  “Where??”  “Well, pretty much everywhere.”

The root cause for this imbalance is Materialism, the idea that only physical things matter, and a loss of the idea that there is a higher purpose.  Materialism is the very foundation of both Marxism and Libertarianism, and, when applied strictly, is the separation of morality from culture.

I can even prove that Materialism is in complete control in 2021:  Is there a higher crime in society than standing up against something that is morally wrong?  Well, in a world where the rule is “do as thou wilt” saying something is wrong is the highest crime.

I’d call that Materialist.  In fact, I’d bet $10 on it.

Reminder: No One Is Coming To Save You

“Wait till she finds out you’re 4’6 and peddle a Schwinn.” – Home Improvement

I had a boss once who could have worked for FEMA – he showed up late, and wasn’t any help when he finally arrived.

There I sat, in the middle of the highway, on my right side.  The back wheel of my single-speed bicycle had locked up as I had turned around to make my way back home.  I hadn’t been going that fast, since I was turning, so I wasn’t hurt at all.

Okay.  Get up, right?

I tried that, but my right leg was locked to the bike, under the bike, with my left leg holding the whole mess down.  It wouldn’t budge.

I looked down.  The reason my foot was locked to the bike is that I was wearing jeans – hand-me-downs from my brother where the cuff was so long it had dragged on the ground.  That ragged cuff on the inside of my leg was stuck between the sprocket, the chain, and the chain guard.

On a 10-speed, that wouldn’t have been a problem.  Just rotate the pedal backward until the jeans got loose.  Not on my blue Schwinn® Stingray™.  Turning the pedal backward just engaged the coaster brake – then it locked up like it was welded in place.

I looked around and assessed my situation.  It was getting dark – that’s why I had turned around to go home.  I was lying in blue jeans and a gray shirt on an asphalt road.  Oh, yeah, it was on a banked corner.  The cars coming from the east wouldn’t see me until they were right on top of me.

Then the obvious thought flashed in my mind:  “I could die, right here, right now.”

My bicycle couldn’t stand on its own.  It was too tired.

——-

When I was a kid, we lived at the edge of the forest.  The nearest kid to me was at least 10 miles away.  If I had started in the forest, I could have gone (in one direction) 45 miles before I would have seen the next paved road.

It was remote.  Oh, sure, there was a movie theater pretty close – only a fifty minute drive away.  And there was a supermarket not 15 miles away.

I think that growing up there really influenced the way I look at life.  First, I had to become comfortable with my own company.  Thankfully, there were monthly trips to the bookstore, and when I was in school the library had a great selection of thirty-year-old paperbacks that I could check out.

I learned to make models, to go hiking by myself, and make my own fun.

I once went to a car show in Mexico, but it was only for Fords®.  They called it the Ford Fiesta™.

Growing up in a place like that, one thing is certain – not only were you in charge of making your own fun, you were in charge of keeping yourself alive.  When I went hiking, even though I never went too far, all it takes is one rattlesnake to ruin your day.  They say the rattlesnakes where we lived were fast and could move at 75 miles per hour, but I never saw one driving.

Every trip we took into the forest was on us.  In the summer when we went to get firewood, we’d only be 10 or 15 miles into the forest.   That wasn’t so bad.  If the truck broke down, we could hoof it out and be home before Ted Cruz could make it back from Cancun.

I had a girlfriend that got tired of my astrology puns.  It Taurus apart.

In the winter when we went hunting, that was another story.  Pa Wilder packed survival gear, food, and extra warm clothing.  With what we had, we could have survived, but it certainly wouldn’t have been comfortable – sleeping in cold weather would have been in-tents.

The vehicle itself was four wheel drive – with a winch.  One cold November we got not one, but three flat tires.  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive a car with multiple flat tires up a snow-covered mountain trail road, but it’s not something that generally works.

It does, however, work when you take a winch cable from tree to tree, pulling the car up as you drive it up.

It worked.  I think I was 12 or so when this happened.  It made an impression.  There was no one there to help us.  If we didn’t get out, our lives were at stake.

It was on us.

And that was the primary theme that we had, living at the edge of the forest, at the edge of civilization.  If we didn’t save ourselves, no one else would.  That’s why we had the fireplace, wood stove, and all of that sweet, sweet firewood:  no loss of a generation plant hundreds of miles away would stop us from being warm.  Water?  We only had a supply for a few days, but the river was only a half a mile or so away.  In the summer, a pleasant walk.  In the winter?  Well, there was plenty of snow.

“I’m, I’m not a cat, your honor.”

Life was always about survival.  Life was about always having a Plan B.  Our pantry was stocked, our freezer was full, and Pa Wilder had enough powder and primers to last a lifetime.  Sometimes we lost our power for a night, but we never had to worry – we had candles, and we had enough firewood to last until Hillary Clinton grew a conscience.

Sure, we expected the light switch to work when we flipped it – we weren’t in Venezuela.  But we had a backup plan, and that backup plan didn’t require government at any level to help us.  It couldn’t, and if it tried, being so remote, we’d be among the last people it would try to save.

Time and again, I’ve been proven right.  Outside of snowplows and preventing the Soviets from invading, the government really hasn’t been much help during any emergency I’ve been a part of.  Private companies (like power companies) have done far more to help.

Lenin put “?” behind traitors – and would ask himself, “Did they question Marx?”

The attitude of preparation and self-reliance has driven me towards the Right.  I don’t want every service that government can give me if it means that government controls everything.  No matter what pretty picture is painted, the end result is the same.  Wal-Mart® is better at feeding people in disaster areas than FEMA ever will be.

Thankfully, ordinary citizens are even better than Wal-Mart™ at disaster recovery.  Preparing for a disaster beforehand is generally not that expensive, but if you wait until the disaster is unfolding, it might not even be possible.

The biggest lie a government tells you is that it will take care of you if disaster strikes.  Governments can’t – they’ve proven that time and time again.

———-

As I was lying against the cold asphalt in the dimming light, I knew no one was coming to help me.  I pulled my leg as hard as I could.  I heard my jeans rip.  My leg was free!  I got up, and carried my bike to the side of the road.

What do you call a bike tire repairman?  A spokesman.

About two minutes later, a car passed me as I pedaled homeward.  Had I been sitting in the middle of the road, could he have stopped?

I don’t know.  But I do know that if I had waited to depend on him seeing me, the answer wasn’t mine – it was his.  By taking action, I made that possibility disappear.  And I got home before Ma Wilder missed me.

The best person to save me, was me.  The best person to save you, is you.  Act early and prepare.

Rush Limbaugh, Rest In Peace

“I’m your host, Rush Limbaugh, with half my brain tied behind my back – just to make it fair.”

Rush Limbaugh passed away this week.  It’s a credit to him that Microsoft® knows that I spelled his name right, and didn’t put a squiggly line underneath it.  He was big enough of a public figure that autocorrect programmers had to reckon with his fame.  Word®.

His fame came with money – a lot of it.  If the math of those who do such math is correct, he died with half a billion dollars in his bank account.  It doesn’t look like he spent all that much of what he made.  Sure, he had private planes and a mansion, but his main vocation was talking.

And, oh, how well he talked.

I first recall hearing him talking on a tinny AM radio station one lunchtime and saying . . . “Who is this guy?”

Was he always right?  Certainly not.  No one whose job is to talk to the American public for fifteen hours each week is always right.

But Rush Limbaugh was unique.  He fought back against Leftism with new weapons:  razor sharp wit, and razor shop logic.  Did he ever hesitate or was he ever at a loss for words when confronting Leftists?

Never.

His regular segments were (especially in the early days) examples of irreverence.  He didn’t make fun of the homeless in his Homeless Update.  He made fun of those who would infantilize humans through assuming that people who were homeless were the mental equivalent of children.

Rush did make fun of feminists, probably because he knew they were so sensitive that they’d react like a polar bear with a sunburn.  And the feminists did react – Limbaugh was the first one to trigger every feminist in the United States in the same week.

For me, he was proof of another thing:  that people on the Right can be funny as heck, and there’s a huge amount of humor potential when you punch Left.

When I grew up, there were exactly three stations that we got over our antenna up on Wilder Mountain:  ABC®, NBC™, and CBS©.  We got PBS® too, but nobody over Sesame Street™ age counted PBS®.  On the major networks when I grew up, the writers and actors and producers and executives of the major networks were Leftists, just like today.  The sitcoms and dramas featured Leftist values (mainly).  Most shows spewed proto Social Justice Warrior DNA into every episode.

The worst were the Very Special Episodes where people who were supposed to be funny spent 30 minutes (including commercials) learning Very Special Lessons.  Comedy was written by Leftists.  And that comedy was, itself, a demoralization operation.

It was so prevalent I recall thinking in eighth grade, “Is all humor inherently Leftist?”

I later discovered P.J. O’Rourke and was happy to note that the answer was, “no,” at least when it came to the written word.  Funny is funny.  And funny was not the exclusive domain of the Left.  In fact, funny is now the enemy of the Left, because funny exposes uncomfortable Truths.  In a world where Leftists praise boys running in track meets with girls and insist that there is no physical difference?

The humor writes itself.

Rush Limbaugh proved that what P.J. O’Rourke did for the written word could be done with the spoken word for fifteen hours a week of (generally) excellent broadcasting.  Until Limbaugh discovered golf.

Because he was Rush Limbaugh, he could spend an hour talking about golf to 20,000,000 Americans, 19,000,000 of whom had never picked up a mashie or a gimlet or whatever the clubs are called and still not lose the audience.

The man had the gift of making a continuous stream of engaging radio – which is hard to do.  With radio, you have to work to keep the attention of the audience.  Rush was a natural at mixing hilarity and ideas, but without ever getting to the point where he thought he had followers who would do his bidding rather than an audience that was there to be entertained.

I went through phases of listening to Rush.  When he started on golf, I listened less.  When my job took me away from his regular broadcast times, I didn’t listen at all.

When we moved to Alaska was perhaps the longest time I never listened to him.  In Alaska, the politics of the Lower 48 seemed absurd.  Sure Limbaugh was on the radio there.  And, yeah, I could have listened to him.  But for the most part in Alaska, the Lower 48 was what we called “Outside” – it was a world that was of only passing relevance.  Heck, the Chinese were there measuring Alaska to see if their furniture fit (it does), so we were more worried about having to learn to eat medium-rare bat and teach the Chinese how to play hockey than we were about petty squabbles in a land so far away.

But when we moved back to the Lower 48, national politics became significant again.  And Rush re-entered our lives.  In one way I miss the freedom of not caring about the Lower 48.  In another, I always knew that there would be a battle for freedom of thought, expression, ideas, and Western values, so coming back put us back in this space.  I probably wouldn’t be writing this if I were still in Alaska.

I just wouldn’t care.

But enough about me.  Rush was big enough that, in 1992, I think he was a major factor in making sure that George H. W. Bush wasn’t re-elected.  His honest criticism of H. W.’s “conservatism” was enough to make his listeners understand George was a Leftist who would conserve nothing.

He was the single biggest nemesis of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  He bothered them at a personal level.  Bill Clinton sat in Air Force One and blamed Rush Limbaugh for division in America on a radio interview.

No, Rush didn’t divide America, he gave the Right hope.  Would Bill Clinton have been impeached without Rush Limbaugh?  I don’t think so.  Rush was the leading edge of the wave of a new media – a media that wasn’t controlled, wasn’t a bought and paid-for version of the combined DemoPublican establishment.

In the last decade, I probably listened to him once or twice a month, at most.  Even so, his voice and ideas reached millions.

He talked about speaking into the golden Excellence in Broadcasting microphone.  No one of his talent will pass this way again, at least not in my lifetime.

In passing at 70, he gave me one final gift:  a reminder of our mortality.  Despite the money, despite the fame, despite the influence, we will all return to our Maker.

What you do with that time?  It’s up to you.

Dittos, Rush.

Texas Power Outages, Global Warming, And At Least One Bikini

“You want a prediction about the weather?  You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

Pugsley said it was so cold in the house that it was at absolute zero.  I said, “That’s 0K.”

It has been cold.  Really cold.  The good thing about that is that I like the cold.  It’s rarely cold enough for me – even now my fingers are nearly numb blocks of flesh mashing the keyboard and only occasionally hitting the right key.

Almost cold enough, but as I reach up I find that I still have feeling in my jaw and cheeks, so I’m not quite there.

But Texas is.  Today at lunch The Mrs. and I were discussing that it was colder in Anchorage, Alaska than in Houston, Texas.  That made me think.  And then I ended up wondering if it was too cold for Jeff Bezos to sleep in his undies, or if he needed his pajamazon?

Okay, back to Texas.

When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house.  The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.

If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.

And that’s just one problem.

The bigger problem is that Texas is supposed to be an energy source.  Oil gets pumped there, sure.  But the pipelines for all of that natural gas that is produced in Texas?  All of those pipelines head out of state.  Texas is silly with natural gas, and produces far more than it uses.

Natural gas has historically been used to heat houses.  It’s relatively abundant, quick and simple to ignite, and generally relatively cheap*.  It’s great for hot water heaters.  It’s wonderful for forced air heaters, like we have here at Casa Wilder.  Heck, in the 1970’s (I read once) they passed a law that restricted the use of natural gas so that its convenient, safe heat could be used by homeowners voters to heat their houses.

And one oil company was going to make renewable crude from insect urine.  It think it was BP.

But somewhere that philosophy changed – mainly when natural gas became abundant with fracking, and when Global Warming® activists became obsessed with coal.  Natural gas puts a lot less carbon into the air than coal per Btu (kiloparsec).  So, it became common to build industrial plants that used natural gas for heat, as well as power plants that used natural gas instead of coal.

Natural gas is pretty nifty when you use it for a power plant.  That same property of nearly instant heat is there, so if you use natural gas to drive an engine, for example, you can pretty efficiently use that fuel to generate electricity quickly.  To start up a coal electrical generating plant takes a long time.  To start up a natural gas electrical generating plant?

Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.

When The Mrs. and I met, I felt quite a spark.  Who knew she had a Taser®?

But what happens when all of those Texas houses, not built for cold, crank up the natural gas heater?  What happens when the people who use electricity to heat their house crank that up at the same time?  And, what happens when all of those wind turbines that are supposed to be generating electricity become electricity sinks, since many of them have electric heaters to prevent the gears and bits from freezing up and breaking?  And the wind isn’t blowing?

The system fails.

An aside:

As I wrote this, I realized that my heater hadn’t gone on for, oh, seven degrees.  The internal temperature in the house had dropped to 57°F (2°C).  Not good.  As I went to my trusty heater, I found it flashing a series of codes over and over again like an autistic R2-D2™.

In the past, this was a failed part called a “flame roll out sensor” which appears to fail much more often than the penny I replace it with.  Just kidding!  I use stripped wire.  Also kidding.  I really don’t mess with the heater more than changing the filter every decade or so (Pugsley changes it twice yearly) and flipping the breaker on and off and then poking about the insides like an Albanian strip-mall lawyer trying to fix a copier. 

Which, oddly enough, works.  I know that there is some sort of computer logic that was finally satisfied – such as, “the gas is no longer explosive enough to launch Wilder into space in the most pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk since Wilder founded a company named Space Y.”

I make jokes about air conditioners, but not heaters.  That’s not cool.

My guess?  The gas pressure dropped a bit.  Which never happens, except in February, 2021.  I’ve never seen this particular error code, except the one time that I missed the exhaust portal near Yavin 4.

So, we have Texas, proud producer of natural gas, and now, neurotic consumer of natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas generating stations that need . . . natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas homes that need electricity to run the electric heaters (our house in Texas was one of those).

The system fails.  Power goes out.

But the Germans are going to build a car in Texas.  It will be called the Audi Neighbor™.

Thankfully the cold won’t last forever.  And this is a cold that, in some places, has broken records that were 122 years old, so it’s not the usual sort of winter storm in any respect.

But it does show us the limit of our systems.

Dang.  The heater is working again.  I can feel my fingers now.

*One source I saw showed spot prices up 24,000% (LINK), from $4.00 per million Btu last week to $999 yesterday.

Courage: The Biggest Present A Parent Can Give

“Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich, tasty courage.” – Futurama

The French never go on holidays, only retreats.

The biggest pleasure of being a father is the education of my children.  This opportunity varies.  Pugsley and The Boy are the sons of an increasingly rare commodity in 2021:  they are children of an intact family.

The Boy and Pugsley are the children of me and my wife, The Mrs.  That’s rare because many, many children are raised by families that are broken or blended in 2021.  Or, raised in a home with no natural parent.

Like me, an adopted kid.

I was fortunate.  Even though I was adopted, my parents, Ma and Pa Wilder, were a common front.  Pa Wilder knew he could enforce discipline with the same effect as Ma Wilder.  That’s an aside, but it’s important.  Men learn how to be men from their fathers.  No matter how brave and stunning a Mom is, no Mother is, or ever will be, a Father.

The plus side?  Every bag of chips is family-sized if you’re adopted.

So I feel especially good that I’ve had the opportunity to raise my boys with the full backing and support of The Mrs.   The idea that Pugsley could play me against The Mrs.?  Or vice versa?

That would never happen.

Even if The Mrs. and I were diametrically opposed, the idea that we would overrule each other in front of a kid?  Nope.  There was no way that The Mrs. and I could be split.  Even if we disagreed – that disagreement would be kept to ourselves until we had a knife fight to determine who was right.

What, you don’t do trial by combat at your house?  If you’re a first timer, make sure you have a suture kit available.  They’re cheap, and neither The Mrs. or I go for the eyes, so we have that going for us.

Raising boys isn’t easy – the only thing it’s easier than is raising girls.  From my experience, every boy passes through a gate – a gate where they engage in a fight with their father.  This gate is narrow.

With each of my boys, the fight was one I considered existential:  to make them men worthy of being called a man is a process.  And it consists of fighting the impulses that are natural to a boy.  Every 12 year old considers themselves the wisest man since Solomon, and considers their father the dullest man since Mr. Bean®.

Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive?  Because she was a woman.

I have thought about it, and the most important message have I fought (in some cases for years) to put into the skulls of my sons is simple:

  • That courage is important.
  • That courage is useless unless in service of virtue.
  • That virtue is useless unless in service of a Higher Good.

I know, I’ve tossed around several posts about virtue that don’t explicitly state that a Higher Good is important.  Virtue is important.  But virtue must have a Higher Good to be, well, Virtue.  (Atheists that are regular readers have a Wilder Exemption Card – you’re not Evil like the other ones.)

Tonight, Pugsley and I sat in the hot tub at Stately Wilder Manor.  Pugsley is currently in the mindset where he would love to own a Mustang® Shelby© 350 or a Lamborghini™ Huracán Performante®.  Thus, he has discovered Top Gear™/Grand Tour©.  These are shows that are hosted by three British guys:  Richard Hammond, James May, Jeremy Clarkson.

A hammer has lots of uses:  it can pay for a taxi ride, a dinner, or a can of Monster® energy drink from 7-11©.

Jeremy Clarkson is the big, brash guy.  He’s also an amazing presenter.  For reasons that will become apparent if you watch it (and you should) Mr. Clarkson put together a documentary on the Victoria Cross.

It’s here.

The idea of watching men be courageous is important.  It’s perhaps more important now than at any time in our history, because there has been an attempt to systematically erase courage.

Why?

The answer is simple.  Courage is an individual action.  The idea that individuals have a place in society is the anathema of the Left.  It’s the anathema of Globalism.  Everyone is a simple cog in the machinery of the world.  You exist only for the glory of the collective.

Leftists (and Globalists) feel the world doesn’t need or want individuals with courage.  The world needs individuals that do what they’re told, when they’re told to do it.  No other action is acceptable – only the action approved by the collective.  The convenience store clerk must be fired when they commit the crime of heroism to save a customer.  Individual heroism?  Courage fighting against evil?

Completely unacceptable.

I heard about this guy who donated a kidney and was a hero – so why is it that when I donate five I’m charged with a felony?

The world has, in many respects, moved away from individuals.  Have an adversary?  Hit them with missiles from a Predator® drone that is piloted by a guy sitting in a video game chair half a world away.  Where is the heroism in that?

There isn’t any.

Okay.  Maybe a little heroism. Just as much heroism as there is in properly filing documents associated with statistics of average foot size of Vietnam veterans from Vail or Valdez or Valdosta.  So, not much.

What’s required for heroism?  What’s required for courage?  This is especially irritating, since most definitions of courage floated on the Internet are filled with corporate weasel words.  It seems that properly filing a TPS® report when the temperature of the office was not exactly between 72°F and 74°F (2.3 kg and 3.7 dl) would qualify for the definition of modern courage.  Yes.  Everyone wants to live in a mall.

I got into a fight changing levels at a mall.  It escalated quickly.

Honestly, most of the definitions I find of courage on the Internet make me feel that the weasels that have tried to define it are the opposite of courageous.  They’re tepid things that promote the most mundane and boring of actions to the exalted level of “courage.”  Go to work and do your job?

You’re a hero.  You’re courageous.

I reject that.  I would say that courage requires these elements:

  • First:   Actions that are true heroism are done without regard to self.  One Victoria Cross nominee was denied the award because the plane he was piloting (while he was bleeding to death) would save him, too, if he landed it properly.
  • Second: Devotion to duty and those around you.  This, particularly, drives modern Leftists nuts.  The first devotion must be the Leftism, whatever that means on any particular day.  Devotion to a higher power?  Devotion to the people around you?
  • Third: Personal danger.  It may be as small as the idea of being embarrassed (for tiny amounts of courage), but for actual courage?  Let’s be real.  Standing up on a top of a hill when surrounded by 6,000 screaming enemies and throwing grenades until you run out?  That’s courageous.  The stuff that most people peddle today as courage . . . isn’t.

One definition had, “has to be scared.”  Nope.  Sorry.  Pissed off is close enough.  I imagine that 50% of the people we’d all agree are courageous were just plain mad.

There are lots of examples of people who showed great courage simply because they were angry.  They had lost friends.  They were unwilling to take one step back.  Fear isn’t an element of courage – fear is the enemy of courage.

“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap?  There’s an animal kind of trick.  A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

That’s courage.  Bonus points if you can name the book.

The Mrs. said she wanted to spice up the bedroom.  I hope she likes paprika.

Here’s the big lie, the thing that they want you to believe:  the era of courage is over.  The ideas of individuals don’t matter.  The actions of individuals don’t matter.

As long as humanity survives, the actions of individuals will always matter.  As long as fathers teach sons, the era for courage isn’t over.

That’s why I play this game.  Courage matters.  Virtue matters.  A Higher Power matters.  Those are the things that make men.  That’s why I love this part of the game.  One way a man lives on are in the values he leaves to his sons.

Every time I have the opportunity to help my boys, I know I’m winning.

Always remember:  We’re not done.  This isn’t over.

Purpose, Virtue, Starlets, And Inexplicable Comments About Italy

“I disagree with what you said about the underlying theme of chapter eight in this book. It’s really not about man’s struggle with double-sided tape. It’s a metaphor for the Mesopotamian social hierarchy during the Bronze Age.” – Homestarrunner

The easiest way to get gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals?  Kleptomania.

One theme I keep returning to in this blog is purpose.  I have a friend (you’re shocked, I know) and we talk from time to time.  One observation that he’s made is that they’ve done studies of people who have won medals in competitions like the Olympics®.  You’d think that the person who was happiest was the person who won gold.

It’s not.  It’s not the person who won silver, either.

It’s the person who won bronze.

Third place?  Well, they know it wasn’t a fluke that they didn’t win.  There is that “second place” guy who pops that illusion bubble.  But they made it to the big show, and, heck, they’re third.  Not bad!

Bronze is the Libertarian Party of medals.

The person who wins silver is usually very, very unhappy.  Why?  Every minute of the day they have to wonder:

  • What if I had worked just a little harder each day?
  • What if I had listened to my coach?
  • What if I hadn’t spent the night before the Olympic© finals at the strip club drinking tequila shooters with Crystal and Svetlana?

Little things like that begin to nag at them.  Plus they get Brady Cake:

Tom Brady is so old . . . he won his first Super Bowl® while the world was still in Standard Definition.

So, gold medal winners should be happy, right?

Some really aren’t happy.  They’ve climbed the mountain.  They’ve spent, in some cases, tens of thousands of hours in practice at the highest level.  They’ve skipped going to parties when others were having fun.  They lived, in some cases, like monks to climb to the greatest levels of human performance.

Some of them get there and ask . . .

  • Is this all there is?

Those folks who ask that question were working for the wrong purpose.  Their idea wasn’t to be the World PEZ® Flicking Champion, it was someone else’s idea.

So they went with it.

Don’t say this three times fast.

You can see those folks, especially a few years after the Olympics®.  They’re the ones that are on the third DUI or are the 4’6” gymnast that looks like they’ve swallowed a refrigerator.  Which, I will say, does make tumbling easier.  If you call rolling “tumbling.”  Meghan McCain does, especially if it’s toward a buffet.

So, what about those people who win a gold medal and are just fine?  What’s different?

They have purpose.  Their sport was only a part of their purpose, and was only a part of what drove them.  They are centered, and the biggest part of their purpose isn’t achievement.  Achievement is a byproduct.

The folks who win and don’t self-destruct have a purpose, and a purpose rooted in virtue.

To be clear, very, very, very clear:

  • Virtue does not guarantee victory. At all.

Virtue (and a purpose rooted in virtue) just makes victory bearable.

Why do so many early twentysomethings mentally implode when they achieve fame and stardom and immense wealth?  That’s an easy question – they find themselves in a world with no real restraints.  The real question is why don’t more starlets become headlines?  I’m pretty sure Miley Cyrus isn’t in a good mental place.

In Europe, she’s known as Kilometery Cyrus.

In one respect, not being wealthy and famous is a great substitute for willpower:  you can’t end up dead in a hotel room in Thailand surrounded by heroin, empty take-out boxes of food, bottles of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and vats of industrial-strength skin cream if you have to get to your steady job.

A mortgage and car payments have probably saved a lot of dads uncomfortable phone calls from the Italian Government as to why their 22-year-old was found “improving” the Sistine Chapel painting.  Thankfully, back then they charged the fines in something called “lira”, which is just like money but is instead made of colorful Christmas wrapping paper.

An aside, things to trust Italians on:

  • Food.
  • Wine.
  • Car body design.

Things not to trust Italians on:

  • Anything you need tomorrow.
  • Anything electronic or electric.
  • Anything where the oil or engine coolant is supposed to stay on the inside.
  • Anything remotely resembling fiscal discipline.

Italians are great at soccer – you change sides halfway through.

And, apparently, never trust John Wilder to wander off on a tangent on a Friday post.  I’ll get back to virtue and purpose, and promise not to wander too far again this post.

I’ve written several posts about Virtue.  It’s been a common theme.  Here are a few:

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python

Ben Franklin and his Thirteen Virtues

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

So, have a purpose.  Live your virtue.  And when you have high achievement, when you win the gold, when you achieve amazing business success?  You’re ready to deal with it.

I’ve heard of a village in Africa where they’re dealing with a drought and thirst.  I hope they “Get Well Soon.”

But let’s say that you don’t win the gold.  You don’t have amazing business success.  Virtue allows you to be ready to deal with that, too.

Or you could just win a bronze medal and have a mortgage?

Nah, go for the virtue.  You’ll eventually pay the mortgage off.

The Funniest Article You’ve Ever Read About Bon Jovi And The Everything Bubble

“Yeah, it was like, even though Bubbles was Bubbles, he was two people at the same time as bein’ Bubbles. He was trying to be this other person that wasn’t Bubbles, but he was still Bubbles.” – Trailer Park Boys

What was Schrödinger’s favorite Bon Jovi song? Wanted Dead or Alive.

Euphoria. The name even sounds good. It comes from the Greek “Eu” meaning “quite slippery and frictionless” and the Greek “phoros” which means “wet”. A direct translation is “Slippery When Wet,” as noted by the great Italian philosopher, Giovanni Bongiovi.

If you’ve ever been to a college party you’ve seen the application of euphoria over common sense, especially in the hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. It’s at that time that the liquor has hit several partygoers like a Canadian baboon on a yak crotch. They have ambition. They have a limitless lack of common sense.

There is no tomorrow! Party on!

And euphoria has had several pleasant outcomes: more than one happy accident of a child has turned up nine months after the euphoria ended. Let’s face it – if every child was planned, there’d be six or so people living in the United States.

Justin Trudeau’s parents decided they don’t want kids anymore. Who is going to tell Justin?

Euphoria has even allowed people to exceed what they themselves ever thought possible. When throwing common sense to the wind, sometimes the outer limits of human performance are defined – we find out what it is that we can really do.

More often than not? We end up flat on our faces. That can be its own victory, but it’s often part of a longer story.

The real interesting part is when euphoria meets money. That’s when we get stupid, and we start convincing ourselves of crazy things.

The biggest crazy thing of my life was the Dotcom Bubble. That was amazing. Companies were formed in days and then ended up being “worth” ten million dollars a week later, without ever producing a product. Heck, it wasn’t just producing a product – they didn’t even know what product they were going to produce.

Spanish coders like to use Si++.

Several of my friends were caught up in the front end of one Dotcom venture. They were flown to a kickoff party. The band at the kickoff party? Hall and Oates®. Sure, Hall and Oates™ were 20 years past their prime, but, still, the kickoff was for the idea of installing some fiber optic cables.

It wasn’t even that large of a project. I’m not sure if they ever built any fiber optics. But when I asked if I could be at the party my boss said, “I can’t go for that.” (Sorry jokes aside, they really did hire Hall and Oates© for the party.)

How much oat could Hall and Oates haul if Hall and Oates hauled oats?

Another friend sold his website for a total of $50,000,000. The website was making a profit – about $1,000 a month. Of course, the kicker was that he sold his website for $50,000,000 in Alta-Vista® stock that he couldn’t sell for a year.

Oops.

Don’t cry for him – he didn’t have enough money to retire, but he had enough that he took three years off to hike and relax.

Euphoria makes people do crazy things.

The second crazy thing that happened in my life was the Housing Bubble. When I was looking for one loan, I was told that I qualified to borrow ten times my annual income.

“Why would you offer me that kind of money? I could never pay it back.”

The Loan Officer responded, “Yeah, I know, but you qualify for it. So the computer tells me I have to offer it to you.”

We all know how well that ended.

Thankfully they allowed me to finish the “Alan Parsons Project” I was working on.

Through this, Citigroup® has maintained a panic/euphoria model. The idea is that there is a way to measure what investors think about the market. Are they panicked? Or are they as giddy as drunken freshmen at their first college kegger.

If investors are skittish, the idea is that stocks are a bargain. People are afraid of stocks and would be happy to sell them to you. It’s the idea of buying when blood is in the street.

But if investors are euphoric, then the prices for things are too high. How high? Double-digit high.

Looks like party central!

Right now, Citigroup’s® panic/euphoria model is flashing “Slippery When Wet and Three Tequila Shooters.” It’s higher than the Dotcom® Bubble. It’s much higher than the excesses of the Housing Bubble.

It’s the Everything Bubble. And investors are still three sheets to the wind, knee-walking, too-loud singing, drunk.

This makes sense, too. Presidents love to pop the bubble in the first year of their first term. It’s not like people will remember the pain three years from now, if they’re able to manage growth and restart the economy. Besides, you can blame the pain on the last guy.

I guess he swallowed a few on that “steel horse” he rides.

There is ample incentive for Biden to crater the market. There is ample incentive for him to crater employment, too. In both of those things, he can restart the clock and claim growth from worst that 2021 or 2022 brings to us.

If we’re lucky, all we get is a hangover. I don’t think anyone wants this baby.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Bridge Too Far?

“War, war, war!  This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream!” – Gone With The Wind

No change this month.  We’ll see what February brings . . .

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

We remain in the gray zone between step 9. and step 10.  I thought seriously about rolling back the clock to five minutes to midnight.  Violence is down, since the Left has seriously decided to clamp down on their useful idiots of BLM® and Antifa™.  The Right has (so far) not been any sort of a serious threat to anyone.  The hijinks that took place at the Capitol was closer to the football team painting something naughty on a water tower than any sort of real insurrection.

But then I reviewed the stories that I’m covering this issue.  Nope.  The Left wants to calm down the Far Left, but only so it can turn its full attention to the Right.  The pressure will continue.

The Right offers nothing to the Left.  It is comprised of nationalists – people who worry more about the nation than a group of foreigners.  The Right doesn’t hate the foreigners – it just worries about Americans first.  And the Right, more today than ever, worries about wanting a free capitalist system to make the lives of Americans better – not a free capitalist system for the sake of the system itself.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) 650 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.

In this issue:  Front Matter – A Bridge Too Far – Violence And Censorship Update – The Scouring Of The Shire Armed Services –  Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Full Power Of The State – 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) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

A Bridge Too Far

Operation Market Garden in World War II is the origin of this particular phrase.  The idea was a quick run to Arnhem to open up the main portion of Germany so that Berlin could be taken by December, 1944.

It failed.  It was an (overly) ambitious airborne assault on a series of bridges that would have allowed for an attack into Germany – Eisenhower approved it, not because he thought it would work, but because it was a part of a general offensive.

I hear most bridges speak Span-ish.

A Bridge Too Far would be an apt description of the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act.  Thankfully, the chances of this travesty being enacted are small.  This act, however, is a dream list of Leftists everywhere:

  • Universal gun registration.
  • Psychiatric tests, including input from your ex. We all know how stable those relationships can be.
  • $800 fee for “insurance”
  • All magazines of greater than 10 rounds would be illegal.
  • Huge penalties for noncompliance.
  • And so, so, much more . . . .

I won’t go into more details, because, as I said, this particular bill won’t become law.  I think that even the far Left in Congress knows that passing this would be a de facto declaration of war on 80 million-plus American Citizens.

Just because it fails this time, don’t think that this isn’t exactly what they want.  It may be a bridge too far now, but their general offensive will continue.

Violence And Censorship Update

Time Magazine® (LINK) is happily showing off, step-by-step, how a group of unelected hardcore Leftists from unions coordinated with Leftists in Tech, Hollywood® and:

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

Viral smears includes, of course, actual reporting of (for instance) Hunter Biden’s corruption and dissolute lifestyle – where “they” got The New York Daily News© kicked off of Twitter®.  The idea was that there was no rule that they wouldn’t try to change (Constitutionally or not) in order to make sure that Trump would lose.  Or that the system was set up so that they could manufacture enough votes for Biden to win.

What’s worse than 1,000 conspiracy theorists?  A real conspiracy.

Censored?  You and me.  And it’s ongoing – one Tweet® that included a direct quote from the Time© story was identified by Twitter® as disinformation.  Let that sink in.

It would be wrong, apparently, to think there was a secret conspiracy to defeat Trump.

Even when the conspirators spend 6,500 words in Time Magazine™ admitting it.

The Scouring Of The Shire Armed Services

The Secretary of Defense has just issued a 60 day stand down to combat “extremism” in the ranks.  What’s extreme?  No one has said.  It could be a Tweet® that is now no longer in favor that a soldier made years ago.

So far, the III-percenter® logo has been identified as “extremist” and has been identified as something that has to go.  No tattoos, no t-shirts, and I’d assume no posters.

The Left is afraid – a large percentage of those arrested related to the Capitol Hill incident (so far) have been veterans – 14% was a number that I saw.  Of those, 8% were Marines, so the article I read said, “Of special concern are the elite units.”

So, the purges will start.

What ideologies will be purged?

  • Social Justice™? Certainly not!  Despite the fact that it requires communism to implement, it’s the current ideology of the powers in charge.
  • Black Lives Matter©? Absolutely not!  How could an ideology that has the support of the entire Fortune 500© be wrong?  Besides, those weren’t riots, they were peaceful protests.
  • Antifa®? What wrong with being Anti-Fascist?  Huh?  What’s fascism?  Fascism is whatever is to the Left of Antifa™.

Nope.  Not those.

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 lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures, or I would be, if they published any this month.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and to no one’s surprise, violence jumped again in January.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability jumped significantly – getting Trump out has not made things better.

Economic:

January showed a major jump.  I’d expect a market crash sooner than later – politically it’s best to get those out early in an administration.

Illegal Aliens:

No data this month.  Has FedGov decided to stop publishing it?

The Full Power Of The State

I’ve documented above how the Left is taking over or already has taken over communications, social media, the military, and the voting process.  That’s not enough.

Recently, the Bank of America® was requested by the FBI to provide information on its customers.  What sort of information?  Well, all of it, if the customer met this very broad list:

  • Customers confirmed as transacting, either through bank account debit card or credit card purchases in Washington, D.C. between 1/5 and 1/6.
  • Purchases made for Hotel/Airbnb RSVPs in DC, VA, and MD after 1/6.
  • Any purchase of weapons or at a weapons-related merchant between 1/7 and their upcoming suspected stay in D.C. area around Inauguration Day.
  • Airline related purchases since 1/6.

And, no, not everything had to click to get you on the list, but still, 211 people managed to make the list.  Bank of America™ wasn’t required to give this information without a proper warrant.  But Bank of America© did.

At least one citizen was questioned by the FBI based on this information.

The FBI even has a patron saint:  St. Francis of CCTV.

So, now it’s not only the Federal government’s amazing ability to listen to you, follow you on social media, and track your every movement.  Now they enlist banks to participate in closing the loop.  Unless you pay in cash, they have a list of every transaction you make.

So, pay in cash?

Have you tried to do that with a rental car?  Have you tried to do that with an airline ticket?  Tried to check into a Holiday Inn Express®?

They might take cash, but they’ll need to see a credit card, first.

How else would you leave a perfect record for the FBI?

LINKS

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

PUNDITRY

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/01/american-civil-war

https://www.thearticle.com/is-this-the-last-battle-of-the-american-civil-war

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-01/capitol-riot-trump-four-corners-sarah-ferguson/13098356

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/news/2021/01/19/494758/united-states-early-days-domestic-insurgency/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/how-close-did-us-come-successful-coup/617709/

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/512483-second-us-civil-war/

 

POLLS

 

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/07/US-capitol-trump-poll

https://www.axios.com/poll-america-falling-apart-4a13376f-f962-46e3-8e2c-174d396f25d1.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/many-people-united-states-believe-cold-civil-war-survey-2021-1

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/02/01/civil-war-during-trumps-pre-riot-speech-parler-talk-grew-darker/4297165001/

 

POLITICS

 

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/congressman-paul-gosar-oath-keepers-militia-civil-war-jim-arroyo-11529183

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/09/we-are-perilously-close-to-a-civil-war-it-is-our-job-to-stop-it/

 

PREPARATIONS

 

https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/some-republicans-call-for-second-civil-war-citizens-take-arms.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/boogaloo-prepare-civil-war/617683/

https://www.ajc.com/news/militia-alliance-in-georgia-signals-new-phase-for-extremist-paramilitaries/UD2JMQV5A5EABHHAKBQZBK2IVY/

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/increasingly-militant-parler-refugees-anxious-qanon-adherents-prep-doomsday-n1254775

 

(SECRET) POLICING

 

https://summit.news/2021/01/20/leftists-call-for-new-secret-police-force-to-spy-on-trump-supporters/

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/viral-trumpsnewarmy-video-is-liberals-at-their-craziest-and-scariest-aee81d5deeb1

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/this-site-posted-every-face-from-parlers-capitol-hill-insurrection-videos/

https://facesoftheriot.com/#

 

PERSPECTIVES

https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-robespierre-chose-terror-12935.html

https://blogs.prio.org/2021/02/can-we-predict-civil-war/

https://theweek.com/articles/960957/worstcase-scenario-americas-immediate-future

#AlexandriaOcasioSmollett, The Caption Contest

“Shake, a hoax is a humorous or malicious deception. And this is clearly not that.” – Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Okay, I’m sick.  I had written one scathing bon mot after another in my head today about this subject.  But I’m sick.  I’m going to bed after I post this.  Instead, we’ll have a fill in the blank caption contest.  Let’s keep it PG, folks.

CAPTION A: _________

CAPTION B:  _______________

CAPTION C:  ________________

CAPTION D:  __________________

CAPTION E:  _______________

CAPTION F:  __________________