May 2022 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Memorial Day, 2022

“This day does not belong to one man but to all. Let us together rebuild this world that we may share in the days of peace.” – The Return of the King

Antiaircraft battery on Corregidor, 1941/1942

The Mrs., Pugsley and I went out to the local cemetery this weekend. The Mrs. had bought flowers for her grandparents, and was decorating their grave. I have never once done this. First, the graves of my relatives are very far away. Second, my family never did this – we generally tried to honor the dead by remembering them.

Pugsley and The Mrs. were walking along the cemetery road looking for a grave of a relative that The Mrs. couldn’t quite find. They had taken off cross-graveyard and left me to bring the car up to the location that The Mrs. thought the grave might be. As I drove along behind them to catch up, a gravestone caught my eye.

I stopped the car and read the inscription. The headstone was big, ornate. On it, there was one letter larger than the others, and it wasn’t a first or last initial, it was the first letter in the rank of the deceased. Reading on further, this particular gentleman had died on May 5, 1942.

The place was Corregidor. Corregidor is a small island at the inlet to Manila Bay, in the Philippines. It was established as a fort around World War I. Needless to say, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Corregidor was at some point going to be attacked.

The siege of Corregidor started on December 29, 1941. After the fall of Bataan, the Japanese focused on Corregidor, bombing and shelling it. Finally, the Japanese decided to land an invasion force on May 4, 1942.

The fighting was ferocious, and the troops defending Corregidor, especially the Marines, gave more than they got.

As of right now, I don’t know exactly when or how the officer in the Modern Mayberry cemetery died or what his branch of service was. What I do know is that the monument notes that he isn’t really buried there – his body still lies half a globe away. He was buried in the Philippines after being killed in action.

I can only imagine Modern Mayberry back in 1942. To be clear, in May of 1942 the United States had exactly zero real victories against the Japanese – they were still expanding in the Pacific. The Germans still had a shot at victory if Case Blue worked out for them, allowing them access to the oil of the Caucuses.

When the officer died, it wasn’t looking good for the United States, at all.

Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day, and the earliest recorded date I can find for it is 1861 during the Civil War. Originally it applied to those soldiers that died in war. It now applies to soldiers who died during service.

The mystery officer in Modern Mayberry’s cemetery certainly died during war. And as I drove by, I did notice a small American flag next to his grave. The American Legion had already been there. But I can only imagine the situation that led to his tombstone being where it is. No family nearby.

It was 1942 and he certainly would have been one of Modern Mayberry’s first dead from World War II. Perhaps his parents till lived there. Perhaps he had been a standout on the football team, a local hero. Why weren’t they buried next to him? Perhaps they moved away later.

These are questions that I don’t have answers to. There is no tombstone for a wife, so possibly he never married, or never had children, but again, I certainly don’t know. These are mysteries that, perhaps, I will never be able to solve.

That’s okay.

Tomorrow, I’ll take flowers down to put on his empty grave, and spend a few minutes thinking about the man buried half a world away from that tombstone, who died nearly exactly 80 years ago.

Why We Are The Luckiest People, Ever.

“Keep a memory of me, not as a king or a hero, but as a man. Fallible and flawed.” – Beowulf

Donate one kidney, you’re a hero. Donate six, and all of a sudden you’re a monster.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived.

“Why, John Wilder, you must be insane! Look at what’s going on,” you say. Well, the nice men at the sanitarium said that the whole “insane” thing was in the past, especially since the surgery. The doctor said the lobotomy was a no-brainer.

But really I believe that we are lucky.

When you look at the state of society, we see an amazing breakdown. I chronicle that breakdown, week after week with this blog. We see our government falling apart. We see it brimming with fraud. We see our lives mocked and insulted.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

Functional cultures run on shared values. The values built over hundreds or thousands of years of hard-fought experience on how to make that culture work? To make a stable government? These are all being subverted.

Discarded.

On purpose.

In a time like that, it’s easy to give in to depression. It’s easy to give in to despair.

Seriously, though, why would you?

We can’t lose. Why?

My boss calls me the computer at work: if left unattended for ten minutes, I go to sleep.

We have the whole world against us. We are called horrible names because we have beliefs rooted in those timeless values. Even though they hate us, they’re more than happy to take the fruits of our labor – to tax and to take our productivity. Despite that, at every point our politicians again and again take the road that gives them power – a road that is rooted in evil and lies.

And the world? Many in the whole world have fallen for the lies, utterly. Timeless values are overturned in the span of less than a decade. In 2000, if young boys were dancing nearly nude in the streets, dressed as women, taking money from men, there would have been arrests.

Now, the pictures are printed and celebrated.

This is not evil, this is the Evil of books for children, of such a caricature that they’re nearly comical. Charles Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Joe Biden? Soros? Really? They’re so over the top Evil that central casting wouldn’t send them to a serious movie – they’d be given roles as the Wet Bandits from Home Alone.

Pictured: Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

Their tactics are no better. They brag about being tolerant while using the power of government and media to ruthlessly suppress any opposing voices. They use the levers of government selectively – citizens visiting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is the worst thing that ever happened. Riots in the streets causing billions in damage, theft so brazen that stores pull out of major metropolitan areas? They celebrate that. Congress is used, again and again, to pass laws that push society away from values, destroy the family, and increase the power of the government over the governed. Oddly, anarchists and Antifa® applaud that, and celebrate things that even thirty years ago would be called tyranny.

They hate us. They are attempting to use the education system to make children hate the very culture and society that allowed the prosperity that they’re leeching off even now. They want to erase the history that built this nation and the heroes that tamed a frontier and invented entire industries.

Galileo said that everything falls at the same speed. He never saw Biden’s stock market.

Why do you think they want to destroy and desecrate our monuments? Why do they hate our flag? Why fill the media with propaganda?

They want parents to fear children in a mirror of the Soviet era. They want to turn wives against husbands. They want to split the atom that makes up society, the family, and replace it with the state. Even religious institutions are rotting from within as the values of the Current Year replace the values that have proven themselves for over 2,000 years.

I started drinking brake fluid – it’s okay, though. I can stop anytime.

That, my friends, is why we’re lucky.

Our backs to the wall, the entire world against us, we owe our enemy nothing. We stand by our beliefs. We stand by God. We stand by our families, our wives, and our children. We stand by the future that we are even now building. To win, we will need to show virtue, courage, and strength greater than any generation that has ever lived.

We will do so.

We are in a place to bring heroism back to our world. The future will remember us, not as the remnants of a world gone past, but as the founders of a world reborn. They will speak of us for a thousand years. They will write stories about us. They will write songs about us.

That is why we are lucky.

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World: Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park? A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s. In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend. He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead. He didn’t. Ma Wilder flatly refused. She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening. I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life. And especially the stock market. The stock market is really built on hope. Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”. This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up. The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt. On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks. If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment. Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo. Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues. In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works. But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time. You get the upside of growth. You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with. Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver. Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually? The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy. Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies. Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk. On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed. The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything. People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame. Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences. It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home. The best way to do that? Switch from beer to wine. When people start to lag? Swap out to vodka. Then, for a final shot? Pure grain alcohol. Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking? The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat? Neither did she.

That’s where we are. The booze has been pulled away from the table. At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point. Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years. Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024. I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending. And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008. Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared. How can I tell? It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month. I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high. If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live. The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens. The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over. Will it be this year? In five years? In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know. But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis. The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

Monkey Pox: COVID 2.0??? A story in pictures.

“No can do. I am itching all over with Angela-pox.” – The Office

I guess the Ukraine is waning. Time to pull out Monkey Pox®?

As we find ourselves at a time where action in Ukraine mainly consists of sending Zelensky more money so he can eventually recycle it to the Biden family, it appears to be time to (spins wheel) bring out Monkey Pox™ as the villain of the day. This post will mainly be memes. First, Monkey Pox©.

Note: none of the memes are mine today (except maybe one that I originally did and then recopied from another website).

This, though unconfirmed, is the scariest bit. Which in normal times, would make it unlikely. When Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement is in play? All bets are off.

So, the planned “exercise” on Monkey Pox™ was written about in March 21, and has nearly exactly the same initial date as the actual Monkey Pox© reports here in 2022? Huh?

At least it’s a break from the war in the Ukraine.

Thankfully we didn’t treat masks like we were members of a cargo cult, right? And we’ve learned since last time, right?

Here’s hoping the mask part is over. And as it goes, that leaves the jab.

Death is so much worse without the Jab, right?

It would be hard for any logical person to support forcing people to take the vaxx at this point, especially given the data. But hey, is it really about keeping people safe?

I would have thought that, in addition to having the vaxx, that the Germans would at least want people committing suicide to spend a few months making panzers or something.

What was it that The Who said? We won’t get fooled again?

Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history. Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement. Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen. It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good. It doesn’t mean beneficial. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy. Comedy is when something unexpected happens. So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen. And I have evidence. And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence. Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue. I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed? Amusing as can be. Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID. Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China? Yeah. People fell for that. In the end, it became a meme. Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.” Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener? He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing. Even more amusing? If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice. Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing. What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy. Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough. When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term. And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be. Mike Pence was boring, mostly. Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials. Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so. To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine. The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over! We have World War III!” The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk. Pretty much everything he does is amusing. Twitter® is hilarious. Beating NASA with 1/1,000^th of their budget even more. And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing! He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination. It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See? Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating. And that “men” can have abortions. Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah. Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History. He called it the Crazy Years. The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down. Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t. Why? After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good. The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark. It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years. We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay. We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only. In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral. Be virtuous. Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed. Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why? It’s right. And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

5 Things Biden Has Done For Us???

“Here’s to failure!” – The Producers

When a cow runs out of milk? Udder silence.

I was flipping through my phone and an article caught my eye. In this case, it wasn’t about the story, “Woman Mistakes Menu Prices For Calories” (an Actual Story) but instead it was “5 Good Things Biden Has Done For All Of Us”.

I was a bit surprised by the title, but, hey, I could go with that. What did the author (a long-time water-carrier for the Left) have to say? It’s no surprise that nearly every adult who hasn’t had a prefrontal lobotomy or isn’t a committed Leftist (but I repeat myself) has been disappointed by Biden. And that was from a really low bar of expectation so that “speaking coherent and complete sentences and not doing anything” would have been considered a win. However, this article title was the equivalent of, “Smallpox And Native Americans, The Bright Side For The Sioux”.

I’m worried that my smallpox joke is old, and that people just won’t get it anymore.

What did they credit droolin’ Joe with? First, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. This will add over a trillion dollars to the debt. Why should that matter? Well, the last time I checked, inflation was over 8% by the “official” numbers that likely understate it by half or more. Spending another trillion probably won’t destroy the economy that much faster than the other crap Joe’s messing up, or will it?

Sure, the roads could always use more funding, but most of what I’ve seen would benefit the large urban centers with the types of large government plans that Leftists love. I, for one, am thrilled that the government is going to fund electric charging stations and freight rail, you know, things that private companies could and should do instead of having Washington fund it.

Don’t worry, if the government makes electricity stations for cars, they’ll be free of charge.

Second, the Leftist hack had the guts to credit Biden for the economy. Yeah, I know, it was tough to type that without laughing. I won’t try to explain the tortured pretzel logic. It was similar to everything that a Leftist ever creates: a huge explanation of why something isn’t what it really is, like why babies are dangerous or murderers are really the victims.

The economy is a wreck. Even without inflation, the stock market is crashing, the jobs that are being created are awful, and we’re importing record amounts of stuff. Oh, sure, we’re exporting, but it’s mainly free stuff to the Ukraine and marketing of Hunter Biden’s valuable “services”.

I’m betting it’s like sauerkraut, smoke, and six-day old sweat.

Okay, what’s third on her list?

NATO. I’m laughing at that one. Leftists spent decades wanting to tear down NATO because it was in opposition to the place they really loved, the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is the current bad guy, the Left loves NATO like Nancy Pelosi loves vodka.

I used to like NATO, but that was when we had an existential crisis brewing with the Soviet Union – it was them or us. It served its purpose and the Soviet worldview based on world domination lost. So, why do we need NATO? Oh, sure, Russia. The same Russia that’s currently spent 82 days gaining approximately six acres in the Ukraine?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of a strong defense, but I’m just not sure what NATO defends against right now. But, hey, they have 62 acres of office space in Brussels right next to some pretty cool chocolate shops and a cool gay NATO flag.

If the war keeps going like this, Russia might want to join NATO for protection against Ukraine.

Fourth on the list is child poverty. I can understand Biden’s desire to avoid child poverty, since it makes their hair brittle and not smell so appealing. On a serious note, the way he’s doing this? The way the Left does everything: pouring more money that they printed into it. The irony is that the short-term, minor reduction in poverty will be utterly dwarfed by the size of the economic destruction that the unending streams of free money cause.

The last thing on the writer’s list?

Diversity.

I could go on and on about this one, but Diversity as used by the Left means, “not a white guy who likes girls” – anything else is Diverse. I have no idea why diversity is listed as a strength, but everyone keeps saying that, which is like asking “do you walk to school or carry your lunch?” It’s nonsense packaged as being self-evident. Is there any possible way that having sex with men helps the comically named Pete Buttigieg a better Secretary of Transportation? Is there any reason that having more women in the White House is a benefit, I mean, outside of paying them 30% less?

No.

What does Diversity mean to me? A lot of different things.

The end result is this: the Left is grasping at straws – any straws. Anything and everything that Joe Biden has done has turned into failure. Not small failure, but the worst type of humiliating, debilitating failure. It’s funny when it’s just him and Hunter, but in this case we’re paying the price. On the bright side? At least Hunter has something to do . . . .

24 Random Thoughts In May

“Well, Brian, you’ve lost your bet. I, or rather my alter ego, Zac Sawyer, am currently the most popular boy at James Woods High.” – Family Guy

Pugsley wants to dress as COVID this Halloween, but I told him that doesn’t scare anyone anymore.

It’s a Friday in May, so why not some random thoughts?

Nothing worthwhile happens without discomfort. The things that I have found to be the best for me, personally, started with things that were at first glance tragedy. When times are dark, look for the lessons. They’re there. Be grateful for the difficulty – it’s how we grow. I believe it was either Jon Bon Jovi or Norman Vincent Peale that described the process of birth – I paraphrase: “You’re warm, comfortable, and life is great. Then there’s pressure. For the first time you have to use your lungs. Bright lights. For the first time in your life, you’re cold.” When it sucks, remember that something is being born. You get to determine what it is.
I like James Woods in Vampire$.
A great day at work is when you’ve been given worthwhile challenges that are just at the edge of your ability to solve, and that consumes your entire being, focus, and skill in doing them. The day ends, and it seems like mere minutes have passed. Men need challenges – they need the great game. Without that, a little bit of our soul dies. Play a game worthy of being played.
I like James Woods in Videodrome.

The Mrs. was watching TV last weekend and screamed, “Don’t go in the church, it’s a trap!” Pugsley asked me if she was watching a horror movie. “No, just our wedding video.”

Almost all of the time something makes me mad, it’s not personal. Most people don’t care about me at all. People are like cats and generally act in their own self-interest, and don’t really care who gets hurt.
I think my cat would eat me before my dog did, if it came to that. Unless I was covered in gravy, in which case the dog would be all in.
The biggest fights are over the smallest things.
Never get into a heated fight with your chiropractor. Then you’ll have to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.

What’s the difference between an IRS agent and Styrofoam®? Burning Styrofoam© is bad for the environment.

I’ve done almost everything in my life that I’ve really wanted to do. The main reason I could was because I decided I would do them. Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Henry Ford is dead, so I guess he didn’t think he could live forever. But he was right. And it’s (probably) not too late to do something amazing and important.
One thing Henry Ford didn’t succeed at was being a brothel owner – it was filled with Ford Escorts.
People only understand money within a certain range of orders of magnitude. For most people, $100 million is essentially the same as $100 billion or $10 trillion. These aren’t the same thing. But everyone understands what $7,354 is. This is more important than you might think.
I’m ashamed to admit I donated to the Taliban. I paid taxes.

I got banned from the airport the other day – apparently calling “shotgun!” when you get on the plane is bad form.

The most important economic unit is the family. Why? The family is a unit based on trust, and should be nearly independent of government oversight. That’s why the Left wants to do anything it can to distort and destroy the family. One of the first things the Left did when they took over Spain before the Spanish Civil War was to abolish marriage. This is not a new goal.
Postmen on vacation in Spain should visit Parcelona.
Passion for life and passion for a mission in life is crucial. Otherwise? It’s just one step away from being a Non-Player Character.
Would a video game where you went back in time to kill Adam be a first-person-shooter?

How does bigfoot keep in shape? Sasquats.

One of the biggest gifts is time to focus. The distractions of everyday life (including the great work in 3. above) sometimes pull away from the bigger picture. Take time to take stock.
I tried to set up a retreat for adults to give them time to focus. Perhaps “Concentration Camp” wasn’t the best name to use.
I have lived through the most prosperous period in the history of mankind. The one conclusion I can reach from that experience is prosperity alone doesn’t make people happy, and might make them a little crazy.
A crazed murderer might try to offer corpses for free, but I call that a dead giveaway.

Jokes about murderers aren’t funny unless they’re properly executed.

A study I read once said that most people, regardless of their wage, wanted to make about 10% more and they’d be happy. 10% more is a dream. Happiness, once you can pay your bills, comes from inside – I was once in debt (outside of my mortgage) by the amount of money I made in a year. I was very, very happy.
When I was in debt with a negative net worth, I told Pa Wilder that I felt worthless. He responded: “Son, don’t worry. You’re less than worthless.”
The best decisions are made in the daytime.
Maybe James Woods should only star in horror movies from directors with a last name starting with the letter ‘C’ and starting with the letter ‘V’?

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant. I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans. During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration. I can taste it.”

Taste it. Yes. Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig. “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like? Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive. A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems. I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts? Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I? When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .” Yes. He said that. Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought: “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people. They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev. And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”. In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing). Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured: White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman. Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is. How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy. The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet. Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree? It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy. Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”. Really. That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option. The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare. Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too. Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs. Why do that, to help people? No, the aim was revolution in the United States. And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing. It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible. Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change. They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Ministry of Truth, and Socially Coming Apart

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

TEN

My day was great until noon. Then I woke up.

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

I’ve kept Clock O’Doom at the same location. For now. 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 – Ministry of Truth – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Abortion and Conflict – 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, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 690 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Ministry of Truth

We now have a Ministry of Truth. Oh, I’m sorry – it’s the Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Why? Presumably because people say things the Leftists don’t agree with.

I’ve heard that calling a groomer “groomer” really makes them mad.

The leader of the board that determines what is true and what isn’t?

Nina Jankowicz.

Nina, if you’re unaware, is the poster child for insufferable Leftist blather. She is, first, a low level, stooge for the Left. Her expertise in all things disinformation allowed her to opine that Hunter Biden’s laptop was expressible only in the holy high words of the Left: Russian disinformation. Russian disinformation was, according to the legend of the Left, the only reason that St. Hillary wasn’t elected.

Sadly, this Nina has no luftballons.

Now, ordinarily I don’t mind such creatures – their trajectory is predictable – they write a book, take a position washing dogs for their political masters, and then gracelessly drift away. These sorts of political vampires are what make writing fun.

But Nina’s different. Nina wasn’t hired by the political bits of Washington, she was hired by Homeland Security. What’s the difference? The Department of Homeland Security is primarily a law enforcement agency. It’s (sort-of) okay having a reptilian partisan hack at the cabinet level, but infesting law enforcement with Leftist partisan robots is a step too far, especially when Resident Biden is talking about Ultra MAGA, or whatever the voices in his head were telling him that afternoon.

At least, though, the mask is off.

Violence And Censorship Update

It’s been fairly quiet on the political violence front, at least recently. We do have plenty of Censorship news.

Okay, this isn’t real.

For the first time ever, got some good news up first:

Twitter®. If you had a wheelbarrow, you could have made a fortune mining salt from Leftist tears. The very same Leftists that were overjoyed that they controlled Twitter® aren’t exactly thrilled by the idea that they won’t control this platform. Here’s some salt to share:

It’s even better to mine the salt from a famous person.

Twitter isn’t done censoring, though. They censored info about the FDA containing info from the FDA.

DuckDuckGo® had to counterbalance the loss of Twitter© – they decided that the only news sources they would handle would be trusted. I’m betting Nina will love that.

And never forget that having an opinion that the Left doesn’t like is punishable by violence.

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 again flat. Perhaps turning back up in May or June – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a little in April. Much more in June?

Economic:

I had bet the economic numbers would be worse, and I was wrong. If the stock market slide continues, though . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Again.

Abortion and Conflict

The draft abortion decision by the Supreme Court is out. It shows a huge divide in the country. An example of the salt to be mined is here:

There were even a few words from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The United States is hopelessly divided. An example?

This was thought of as a negative result that would make people on the Right mad, rather than the desired result. Tinder® and all of the rest of the hook-up culture has been horrible for the people involved, especially women. I spent some time watching a YouTube® of a pro-life march at a college in some city. The pro-life folks were kind and polite, but the people on the other side of the issue were mean, angry, and wouldn’t listen, at all.

The idea of a rational discussion and debate with the Left is nearly impossible. The objectives are 100% out of sync.