Month: November 2022

Woke, Broke, Wealth, and Agendas

“Been to Disney World, one too many times, have we, Captain Ron?” – Captain Ron

What’s the difference between an iPhone™ 14 and half an ounce of gold?  Half an ounce of gold will still be worth $1000 next year.

Once upon a time, there was a small business.  It was run by a man who wanted to make cartoons and money.  The cartoons were, mainly, for children, but he branched out.  He made wholesome entertainment for families for decades, had multiple television shows, and eventually made a theme park.  He was an avowed Christian, and was an ardent anti-communist.

He was moral.  He hated pornography.  And then he died and was frozen into suspended animation so his reanimated body could conquer the Universe from beyond the grave.

After he was put to “rest”, Walt’s Company was acquired and began to put out R-rated movies, as well as taking very, very un-Christian stances on, well, almost everything.

I’m talking, of course, about Walt Disney.  Were Walt unfrozen alive today, I think he’d be shocked at what his company had become.  I’ve had a beef with Disney® (the company, not the frozen founder) since before 2000 when they pushed hard to own all of their intellectual property until the heat-death of the Universe.

I have a problem with that, since I think that’s essentially stealing from the public domain, but I won’t go into that right now.  Beyond that, there’s the steering of the company into entertainment that Walt would certainly never have greenlit.

In space, no one can hear Walt scream.

Case in point, the latest film from Disney©, Strange World.  It’s being hailed as an “alt-family eco-drama featuring an openly gay teen”.  I’m out of the “raising pups” stage, but hearing that I knew it was going to be a flop.  Why?  About a million gays would go see it for the feelz, and the hardest of the hard-core Left who had forgotten to abort their babies.  That provides a stunningly small audience.

It is going to lose, by some estimates, up to $150,000,000.  The earlier Adventures of the Incredibly Gay Buzz Lightyear probably lost a similar amount.

$300,000,000 in losses between them.  I know people that work a whole month and don’t make that kinda cash.  So, the guy who was running the company got fired.  And then they re-hired the person that initially green-lit the bombs in question, Bob Iger, who had only left the company a little over 11 months previously.

Iger gets rehired, and in the first town hall with employees, says that he’s going to stay the course and continue the LGBT programming that has cost Disney™ $50 million a month for the last six months.  And it’s not like there’s no movie audience – Top Gun:  Maverick made $1.5 BILLION while Disney© was losing piles of shareholder cash.  Disney’s© market value in 2022 is pretty close to what it was 8 years ago – and that’s after billions in profits from Marvel™ flicks.

Hmmm.  Why is Disney© so committed to making “entertainment” that people don’t want at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars because Disney© doesn’t share the values of the parents of the kids the movies were made for?  It’s like going to Drag Queen Story hour and asking, “Why do men in lingerie want to spend hours in close contact with children under the age of six?”

Well, certainly Apple© is different, right?  I mean they have all the cool iPhones© and iPads® and iPods™ and no real new ideas since Steve Jobs died.  Certainly, they’re focusing on making money?

It turns out, they are.  Apple® is making a 30% cut off of everything bought through apps from their App Store©.  That’s loan-shark level cash.  But as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter©?  Well, I’ll let Elon describe it:

And not only that:

Either advertising on Twitter™ makes Apple© money and they’re voluntarily dumping a revenue source because of feelz, or advertising on Twitter® never made them money and they’re removing a woke subsidy.

I wonder which.  And speaking of wondering, why the heck is Elon still using an iPhone©, as noted on his Tweet©?

Stonetoss has a comment on the whole situation:

I guess losing Steve Jobs and turning the company over to a committed Leftist like Tim Cook would make Apple® less than a fan of any thoughts other than Leftist thoughts.  And Tim Cook is not at all afraid of Elon Musk – Apple is worth $2.3 trillion dollars, which is more than Elon has, even if he looks under the couch cushions.

Who is Tim Cook afraid of?  I think the Bee® nails it:

If Xi turns off the iPhone© flow, Apple’s™ cash flow will fail – it’s that simple.  I wonder if this would impact the way Apple™ deals with security on their phones?  Nah.  But Apple is still raking in the cash.

For now.

We’ve discussed Disney® and Apple™.  But certainly a fashion company wants attractive people in their ads?

Well, Calvin Klein® has changed a lot in 30 years.

There are some people I don’t want to see in their Calvins®.  No!  Don’t take them off!

In the final analysis, some businesses make money just to make money.  Others make money just to fund their own ideologies, and I’m certain that’s the case with corporation after corporation.  I could go on, but will stop here so the post doesn’t get 2,000 pages long.

I think Walt had an ideology, back in the day, but it was one I agree with.  I do hope that Walt is eventually unfrozen in a thousand years and comes back with a vengeance and finishes that last cartoon he was working on.

I guess that would be the world’s longest suspended animation.

What World Do We Want To Live In? There Is A Choice.

“Is this the emergency services? Then which country am I speaking to?” – The I.T. Crowd

Why don’t Leftists like to talk about the future of what they’ll create?  It’s two in tents.

We are on a course to a new country.  Perhaps someone has a source for this quote (that I’m going from memory on):  It’s been said that every man dies in a strange country.  It’s not original to me, but it does contain a lot of wisdom.  As our country is aging, it is changing.  I’m just hoping it has better knees than I do.

But to illustrate the point, let’s take Pa Wilder:

When Pa Wilder was born, the income tax wasn’t even a decade old.  The meaning of a “state” was stronger then than now, though it was subsidiary after the Civil War.  Pa was born, grew up, and died living almost all of his time within a 30-mile radius, except for an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe from 1942-1945.

The rock band Flock of Seagulls never toured Iran.  Why?  Iran so far away.

When Pa Wilder passed away, the world had gone from the biplanes of World War I to a fully inhabited space station and regular flights to orbit, and occasional flights to the Moon.  The dollar had gone from gold to gimmick, and the question of freedom had gone from “why can’t I?” to “may I, please?”

The world Pa lived in growing up was one that was difficult.  If you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you had to find someone to raise it for you.  It is undoubtedly a fact that people died of starvation in the United States, and some certainly died because they didn’t have any money.

After the war, though, his generation had optimism.  It looked like there was nothing that mankind couldn’t do.  The atom had been split.  Rockets had touched space.  The largest rivers had been dammed and tamed and the only foe to be concerned about was the Soviet Union, and it looked like all of those people ate a diet of potatoes, onions, sawdust, and sadness.  A 1950s Hungarian joke went something like this:  “Definition of socialism:  the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.”

And, from the looks of him, he certainly could have nursed a drink.

The family had primacy.  And culture was built on the idea of that family, and policies at the local, state, and national levels were built around supporting the family and keeping it strong.

It worked pretty well.  Was there a cultural prohibition against being a tool?  Sure.  Was there an upper limit on the things that women could do in society?  Yeah, certainly there were few CEOs at the time that were women, and there were demarcations between jobs women would normally do, and jobs that men would normally do.  Men got the jobs that had higher stress, higher danger, and sure, higher pay.  Women got the jobs that conserved the culture, raised the young, and, yup, didn’t pay nearly as well.

It was a bargain made not to punish women or men, but as a nod to societal stability based on family hierarchy.

This is the America that was, and more than a few people on the Right look to this as the model of a successful society that creates the ability for mankind to make good on the promise of individual freedom, individual responsibility, a role for religion and celebration of individual success.

It is a world where equal chance based on merit is the goal, and winners of fair competition get the rewards.

Yup, pretty hard to take that to dinner, since each one required its own nuclear power plant.

This goal is soundly rejected by the Left.  They look for a model of America that can never be.  Their world is an entirely made-up concept of what they think the world should be.

What do they think?

  • Like Lake Woebegone, all children in their Leftist Utopia are above average.
  • Diversity is actually a strength.
  • Every deviance in sexuality is celebrated.
  • Every outcome is equal, regardless of effort, talent, or merit.
  • People have whatever they want, regardless of if they work or not.
  • Society owes it to everyone to take from the successful and make them the same as anyone else – equity is the goal.

Whereas I can love the ideas they have as ideas, the truth is that the world cannot be that way.  Some children are below average.  People who live and work with people that aren’t from their culture typically have lower trust, disharmony, “cultural tension” and conflict.

Oops.  Turns out that if you worship the Moon God Gorto and think child sacrifice is okay, Baptists might not be the best folks for the cubicle next to you.  And most people won’t applaud if you have sex during Thanksgiving at the table – I won’t explain how I know this.

The Mrs. tried to tell me to not fix my rifle with Super Glue®, but I stuck to my guns.

And outcomes aren’t equal.  There are winners, and there are losers.  Merit matters.  Talent matters.  Work matters.  If we remove the competition between winning and losing, and celebrate every loser like a winner?

You get a society of losers.  You get a culture of losers.  And who else but a loser would demand what Elon Musk has without doing what Elon Musk as done?  It’s a culture that is built on envy of what others accomplish and greed for what others have.

It is a culture that celebrates and encourages failure.  Even Leftists admit it.  I had a discussion with an acquaintance.  He’s a leftist.  My conjecture was this, “So, should we wait a few years to start your socialist empire until we have a cancer cure and maybe some better technology?  I mean, if you look at Socialist cultures, they aren’t really good at creating things.”

“You’re right, it would be better to wait a few years.”

Sure, there’s been corruption since the first human, but not every society is the same.  And societies like the 1950s in America had less corruption than any communist society, ever.  And, I would argue that society was far less corrupt than society today.  The outcomes were better – in most places, a locked door wasn’t required.  The outcomes of society have drifted negatively in many ways.  You could name them, so I won’t go into what would be a very, very long list.

Who had the biggest gender reveal party ever?  Japan.  In 1945 they had a Little Boy.

There’s more to this, but now, the Left is attempting to drive this world towards a future that is based on nothing but a theory that is no more sophisticated than a three-year-old’s version of what the world should be.  Is it any wonder that as we get closer to those fever dreams, things get worse?

As that author I can’t remember said, we all die in a strange country.  I’m just hoping that it stops sucking.

Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time.  I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons:  don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday.  It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night.  As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year.  Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject.  Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special:  memes that are on sale.  They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another.  So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale.  Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

 

Thanksgiving Thanks, 2022

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

I knew an Irishman who used to sell lawn chairs.  I’ll never forget Paddy O’Furniture.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I would share a few things that I’m thankful for.  These are in no particular order.

  • I’m thankful that almost every single one of my problems is self-inflicted, and has a clear way to solution. I am where I am because of who and what I am, and I can change everything I don’t like, when I want to.
  • I’m thankful for being with The Mrs., because either of us with other people would be just an unending misery for them. I believe the Geneva Convention specifically lists being married to either The Mrs. or to me as a Crime Against Humanity.
  • I’m thankful for Elon Musk and the amusement he creates by stirring the pot. Do I think he’s on our side?   But I think he irritates enough of the people who hate us to make me laugh, nearly daily.
  • I’m thankful for friends. I have a Polish friend who is a sound tech.  And a Czech one, too.  And a Czech one, too.

Or if I opened a trampoline in Prague, would the Czechs keep bouncing?

  • I’m thankful for standard time. Daylight savings time is the tool of the Devil.
  • I’m thankful for the “ringer and vibration off” switch on cell phones. And I should use it more.  There’s something to be said for uninterrupted focus time.  When going out to dinner, we often ditch our cellphones at home.  This leads to this crazy thing called “talking to each other.”
  • I’m thankful that The Boy is home from Midwestia State U (located right next to Wassamatta U) and that he and Pugsley talk for hours when they’re together. A loyal brother can be the closest friend as you move through life.

I recently bought a toilet brush.  Long story short:  I’m going back to toilet paper.

  • I’m thankful that I got up late today, and that I’m writing this early.
  • I’m thankful that, right now in this place and time, my family is safe, and we are together. This is why Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday:  there isn’t the stress from presents, merely a time to give thanks and be together.
  • I’m thankful for decongestants. I’d tell a joke about me having a virus, but I’m worried you might spread it.
  • I’m thankful that I live in a time that has the greatest access to knowledge of any place and any time in history, allowing me to read the thoughts of the greatest men who ever lived and the ideas that influenced our civilization and showed us what truth is, almost at a whim. Oh, and there’s also CNN®.
  • I’m thankful for cheese.

A Pomeranian puppy looked Medusa in the eye – he became pomegranite. 

  • I’m thankful for living in a time and place where starvation is unknown, though the Left keeps wanting to put it back into play.
  • I’m thankful that The Mrs. talked me into buying the chair that I sit in to write these posts. I had to get rid of my old recliner.  Me and my old recliner?  We went way back.
  • I’m thankful for beer. It actually made one of my friends smarter, you know, Budweiser©?
  • I’m thankful for hard exercise, where when I’m done, I know I’ve given it my all. I try to use the workout the actors who played the Marvel® superheroes use, but I get Thor just thinking about it.

I accidentally hit my Nokia® with a hammer, and took it to Best Buy™ so the Geek Squad© could fix it.  Best Buy® said they don’t work on hammers.

  • I’m thankful that the WD-40© fixed the front doorknob. I promise this really worked – it’s non-friction.
  • I’m thankful that Pugsley and The Boy are sons I can be proud of, strong and with their own opinions for their own reasons, and with exactly the character that I had hoped for. It wasn’t easy, and no matter what I do, German children will always be kinder.
  • I’m thankful for Ma and Pa Wilder, who, though gone, helped me become the man I am today. There was a time when I had a difficult relationship with them:  when I was born, I didn’t talk to them for two years.
  • I’m thankful to have lived through some of the most interesting times in human history, and having seen amazing advances in technology. And Chia Pets®.
  • I’m thankful for the first sip of hot coffee on a cool morning. I’m thankful for the last sip of coffee on a hot day.  I guess words cannot espresso how much I like it.

What was the subtitle for War and Peace?  Tsar Wars.

  • I’m thankful for the troubles I’ve had in life, because those have made me better. When I was young, Ma Wilder called me a pirate when I was learning the alphabet, since I always got lost at C.
  • I’m thankful for the talents that I was born with, because those gave me capacity. In fact, I have one talent that I’ll brag about:  I can always tell what’s inside a wrapped present.  It’s a gift.
  • I’m thankful for winter. Winter is the time of year when things are quiet, and I can think.  Sometimes I work on math, which makes The Mrs. say that I’m cold and calculating.
  • I’m thankful that I don’t have regrets, and go to sleep soundly. I often sleep without pajamas, which seems to bother them at work.

And I’m thankful to spend time with you folks every week.  Happy Thanksgiving!!

There’s a Twitstorm a Brewin’

“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here. Apart from you guys.” – Silicon Valley

The Mrs. didn’t want to go to a fortune teller because they always looked so depressed, but we settled on a happy medium.

Twitter© has officially unbanned Donald Trump.

It’s unclear if Trump will ever return to the platform that, arguably, he used better than anyone else.  That being said, Elon Musk, who made the decision based on a Twitter® poll, made it clear that he thought The Don could not turn down the offer (I actually verified this one, but not all Tweets© are verified).

I’m not sure if Trump will return.  I think that the number of followers that he has is simply huge, and that’s enticing for him.  But a contract that he signed notes that if he’s going to use social media, he has to use the Truth© platform first.  After six hours, he can use the other media.  I’m not sure he’s that good at waiting, and honestly, the power of the Twitter© platform is the instant gratification from watching the responses and likes showing up.

We’ll see.  The number of followers (over 80 million) is probably too much for him to ignore.

But this has some folks up in arms.

All of the letters of the alphabet have been declared hate symbols by the ADL© except for the letter C.  Why? The other letters are not c.

Some folks are really upset.  I think this one is a parody, but, who knows?

Juneau he’s gonna be disappointed.

And even the Mayor of London can’t resist making the point that his speech is the speech that shouldn’t be banned:

If Sadiq Khan, so Khan you.

And though Musk isn’t going to unban Alex Jones, he is bringing back Project Veritas©.  These folks don’t upset the Left as much as Trump does, but they are still Enemies of the Left.

I hope Veritas© does some investigations into hammers – that would be hard-hitting stuff.

Predictably, some Leftists have left Twitter™ and gone to other platforms; Mastodon® is popular.  But the Leftists are upset that their Leftist ideas don’t get an invulnerability pass like they got on Twitter©.

Why can’t mastodons clap?  Because they’re extinct. 

Some Leftists are just upset that Elon has $44 billion in the first place:

And some called Musk a hypocrite for banning folks for breaking a simple rule he’d put in place:

The Chinese military was banned from using Apple® watches due to them being a security risk.  One soldier cried, “But my eight-year-old daughter made it for me!”

But I’ll leave the last word to Kevin Sorbo (of Hercules and Andromeda fame)

Defeat? Never.

“Okay you people – sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning, and if we’re not back by dawn?  Call the president.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I hear that Rob Halford became an eastern monk, which I guess makes him a Buddhist Priest.

Back when I was in high school, I started a quest.  It would probably be a trivial quest in today’s world with the Internet, and tens of millions of songs available all from a single search.   However, back when I was in high school, the only people using the Internet were computer nerds at colleges or places like Los Alamos sharing nuclear bomb design info and ASCII porn.

Is this how Los Alamos beat the Soviets?

There was exactly one rock and roll radio station that reached the lofty heights of Wilder Mountain, and it was a good three-hour drive from where I lived.  Heck, the nearest record store was a 45-minute drive.  But I heard a song . . . and loved it.

I had no idea who the artist was.  All I knew was that it had guitars that sounded like jet fighters coming in for an attack (metaphorically) and a heavy metal singer with pipes to growl low and also hit the high notes.

This was not helpful.  My bumbling attempts to hum the song to the record store clerk probably sounded like a toddler attempting to instruct an Albanian goat herder on how to repair a Junkers Jumo-004 on an ME 262.  My incoherent rambling eventually convinced the store owner that I could probably be sold a lot of records on my quest to find the goofy song.

What happens when a plane full of Leftist lands?  The Jet turns off but the whining continues.

She was right.  On one particular winter day, I bought two cassettes.  Memo to the young:  a cassette was an attempt to put a part of the Internet on a skinny magnetic tape and take it with you.  Sort of like WIFI but with a really, really low transfer rate that cost over $7 for 42 megabytes.

I listened to one of the cassettes on my forty-minute drive to Stately Wilder Manor.  I don’t recall what the first cassette was.  It was okay.  The song I was looking for, however, wasn’t on it.

When I got to Wilder Mountain, I decided to listen to the other cassette.  Pa Wilder wasn’t home.  It was November, and snow was falling gently across the valley, as I looked toward the volcanic cone that dominated the view above the mountains that surrounded the valley.

I put in the cassette.  I hit play.

A single guitar hit an E note that crunched and then was followed by 41 seconds of guitar solo that made my brain implode.  The first second was enough, the next 40?  Pure passion.  My father’s stereo, which before that day was primarily concerned with playing Dean Martin and Johnny Cash, must have been surprised.

I know I was.  Then?  Another driving song, this time about a sentient A.I. encased in an orbiting surveillance satellite.

The two satellite dishes on my house got married.  The ceremony was awful, but the reception was amazing.

What?  I was in heaven.  The cassette was Judas Priest, the album?  Screaming for Vengeance.

The theme of the music was unabashedly masculine.  It was fueled by testosterone and optimism and defiance.  It was, in short, everything I loved in life.

What was my ethos at that time?  Full speed.  Every moment in life.  When I played football, I played football.  Every ounce of my being was focused on the next play.  The cleats digging into the turf, the snap as the center delivered the ball to the quarterback, my sudden sprint, and the exquisite feeling of my shoulder pads digging into that quarterback’s belly as I impacted him at full speed.  Life was a game to be played at full speed.  When a football game was over, win or lose, the idea that I would have left anything of myself or held back an ounce of myself?  I never felt that after a single game.

Win or lose.  Everything I had.

And that was the ethos.  My focus was on doing everything that I could humanly do during the game.  If we won?  Excellent.  If we lost?  There was no room for regret since I had done every single thing I could for the team.

Amazingly, here that was, in music.

This music and most of the music I have loved since then was fueled by one concept – it was fueled by the idea that, in this life, there are winners, and there are losers.  But there are no victims.  I was responsible for my preparation.  I was responsible for my effort.  I was responsible for me.

If I won?  Wonderful.  If I lost?  Yeah, it stung.  But if I gave it my best, and lived up to my own values, I still won.

I took a survey of what soap people used in the shower.  95% of them told me to get out.

Again, winning was and is important.  But a loss of a single day was nothing.  Winning could and would come.  And I would live my life, on my terms.

Have I been cheated?  Yes.  Have I been wronged?  Yes.  Did I stand toe to toe with my boss and tell him that I wouldn’t sell my honor and principles to him for any reason?

Yes.  And did I pay a price?

Duh.

Do I regret it?  Not for a minute.  Not for a second.

There are moments in life, where honor and values will be tested.

Heck, that was in this music, too.

In this world we’re living’ in, we have our share of sorrow
Answer now is don’t give in, aim for a new tomorrow

Also in the music?  Questions of deep philosophy.  The eternal battle between Good and Evil.  Oh, yeah, and hot chicks.

Eventually, this changed and fell out of fashion.  I think it was Bush.  Or maybe raising the drinking age to 21.  Or maybe drugging generations with lithium and Adderall®.  Or maybe the new “zero tolerance” lifestyle, where fighting for Good and being right still resulted in a suspension.

Or maybe all of that.

Kurt Cobain was depressed at 13.  Guess that was his midlife crisis.

Music based on honor and testosterone and optimism eventually fell out of favor.  I can even give you the date:  September 21, 1991, when Nirvana launched Nevermind.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

That abomination of learned helplessness replaced this from Judas Priest:

Thousand of cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We’ve found the place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there
To ram it down, ram it down
Straight through the heart of this town
Ram it down, ram it down
Razing the place to the ground
Ram it down

One of these makes me feel like slitting my wrists.  The other?  Fills me with the idea that none of us are alone.  We have power.  We are . . . going to win, no matter what the damn odds are.  Judas Priest is still touring.  Kurt Cobain?  Not so much.  I guess it proves that one person can handle only so much Courtney Love.

Fast and furious, we ride the universe
To carve a road for us, that slices every curve in sight
We accelerate, no time to hesitate
This load will detonate, whoever would contend its right

I refuse to accept defeat.  The idea is against every fiber of being in my body.  I realize that I will not win every battle.  And I am going to listen to music, and I am going to take in media that tells me the truth, but I shall never, ever, despair no matter how dire the situation.  My family?  They come from heroes.  So does yours.  Never, ever, give up.

I always took a piece of paper to a wrestling match.  That way I could beat The Rock.

I’m not going to stop until I stop breathing.  And I won’t relinquish my honor to any man.  And I am responsible for every aspect of my life and my situation.

Oh, I did find the song I was looking for, a year later:

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming

But that’s another story, though the song remains the same.

The Potemkin Economy

“By noon, the submarines Ranger and Potemkin will have reached their designated firing positions. Within minutes, New York City and Moscow will cease to exist. Global devastation will follow, and a new era will begin.” – The Spy Who Loved Me

What do you call a reality show about people with lobotomies?  Mindless entertainment.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski is famous mostly for what he didn’t do, but more about that in a minute.  What Potemkin did do, starting in 1774, was conquer most of what is southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, and Catherine the Great a bunch of times.  The land he mostly took from the Ottoman Empire, but Catherine seems to have invited the conquest.  And apparently, Grigory didn’t do it right, because she made him do it again.  And again.

I mean a bunch of times.  Catherine had a succession of lovers that would put Kamala’s body count in 1992 to shame.  Okay, the summer of 1992.  Okay.  August of 1992.  Okay, August 11, 1992.  By noon

But when Potemkin wasn’t kicking Ottoman butt or . . . well, the other thing, what he did do was found city after city along the Black Sea coast.  You just might have heard of Kherson?  Yup.  Potemkin founded and named that city.  He was even buried there until Putin dug him up and took him back to Russia recently.  It’s certain he wasn’t the last Russian to retreat.

But mostly, we remember Potemkin for the phrase Potemkin Village.  Where did that phrase come from?

Why did the old lady fall in that well?  She didn’t see that well.

Catherine the Great, somewhere between lovers, decided to have a Lord of the Rings-type trip to go see what Potemkin was up to down south, and maybe have Potemkin put something in Mount Doom, if you know what I mean.

That was based on the idea that Potemkin had a lot of the Novorossiyan (approximately the southern area that Putin held before the Russians began advancing to the rear last month) villages built and rebuilt so that he could fool Catherine about how prosperous the area was.

Well, not really.  First of all, Potemkin didn’t have to impress Catherine, they’d known each other forever by this point, and she really liked him even though whenever they weren’t together they were boffing enough other people to make Paris Hilton blush.  What everyone does agree on is that Potemkin had folks paint some of the village buildings, and they did build a few fake ones, but those were mainly to show Catherine what the area would look like.

So, despite personal bravery, solid administration, building an entire fleet, and being a diplomat worthy of any of today’s age, we remember Potemkin for something he really didn’t do.  To be fair Potemkin was the guy that conquered most of the area that Russia and Ukraine are fighting for right now, so there’s a good argument that they should just give it all back to Turkey and be done with it.

Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.

But it came to my mind when I started thinking about the economy we find ourselves in today – in many ways, it’s a Potemkin economy.  FTX®, that wonderful stealer of money and funder of Democrats?  It was a financial Potemkin Village.  There was nothing really there, ever.  A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5 and the rest of the crew literally printed their own virtual currency, and then grifted their way through piles of cash from nations and celebrities and even their own employees.

A Potemkin Village?  Sure.

And now Elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud.  First, there are fraudulent users.  We don’t have the full number of bots that Tweeted™, but it wasn’t a small number.

Second, there was an algorithm that was built to push the Leftist agenda by artificially drawing people’s attention to things they weren’t organically interested in.  As soon as Musk stopped the algorithm in Japan, for instance, politics stopped trending and anime and Godzilla© and sushi topped the list of things that Japanese people were actually interested in.

Third, the advertisers weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  Rather than being advertisers that were interested in, oh, say, advertising to customers, they’re fleeing the platform.  Why?  Because they weren’t interested in selling products, they were really interested in social posturing.  They’re leaving in droves – the economic engine of Twitter® appears to have been built on corporate virtue signaling.

Burgers.  Right.  That’s what they’re selling.

Fourth, the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement.  How bad are these people?  They’re upset that they won’t have free food from in-house chefs.  They’ll have to pay for lunch.  Maybe they’ll have burgers?

As Potemkin himself might have said, “North Crimean Canal”.  Oh, sorry.  Potemkin might have told those disappointed Twitterites©, “Crimea River.”

There are more examples out there.  By definition, these Potemkin Companies look fine to casual observation until something breaks down.  Facebook© started as the darling of the Internet.  Then Zuckerberg decided that he’d spend the rest of his life staring out of the world through virtual reality, and spent $36 billion dollars on “the Internet, but with stupid goggles”.

Facebook® discovered a man was building a bomb.  The dilemma:  inform the FBI, or send him ads for digital timers?

Sure it makes sense to Mark who took the movie The Matrix as a how-to manual, but pretty much everyone else thinks it is . . . stupid.  But the scary thing for Mark is it’s making people look at what he really owns.  Some folks think it’s just the next version of MySpace©, because the teens have abandoned it and it now consists of businesses trying to sell stuff, mothers trading recipes for what to do with their children’s Adderall© for a quick buzz, and the NSA desperately trying to track everyone.

I guess Facebook© has a lot of servers and stuff, but is their model a Potemkin Company?

And how many other Potemkin Companies are sitting out there, in plain sight, but just not yet recognized?  My bet is that there are a lot, especially in the financial sector and tech sectors.  One principle that I’ve seen apply again and again is Wilder’s Rule #32:  what can be built really quickly can collapse a lot quicker.  If Zuck can make $100 billion in four years, he can lose it in four weeks.

The valuation of almost everything in our economy is subjective – it has value because we give it value.  Amazon™ was worth $180 last year at this time.  It was worth $99 yesterday.  It has gone down by half.  Amazon© has also announced that they’re going to lay off 10,000 employees in the next month.

Oops.  And what else might be a sign of a Potemkin Economy?

I’m sure it’s all legit, right?  Thankfully for the Ukraine, Russia sucks at war.

Valuations are built on emotion, and emotion is defined on how pretty something is.  Well, at least if we lose the Potemkin Companies and the Potemkin Dollar, we still have our relationship with Catherine the Great Kamala.

Oh, crap.  We’re in even worse condition than I thought.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania.  The candidates weren’t great.  The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke.  Ugh.

His opponent?  Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke.  Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win?  Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden? 

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense.  People like idiots better than frauds.  But it wasn’t one little win.  It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend.  In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them.  Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine.  More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense.  But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers.  Nope.  They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever.  They cheated.  How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election.  Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago.  Before him?  Nelson Rockefeller.  Yup.  New York could be called Blue York.  So, letting it shift to the Right was fine.  But Michigan?  They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair?  So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left.  That’s it.  From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job.  In Illinois?  The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however.  Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft.  What does Washington have?  Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022.  Again.  We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots.  We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever.  What about the “Who”?

That’s simple.  And you may not like it.

Bert knows.  Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now.  Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time.  On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President.  Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange.  Oh, and his mother?  She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law.  Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time.  FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence!  Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected.  And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money?  Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it.  In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme.  He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company.  This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing.  Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people.  And, he was amazingly good at that.  He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.  Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price.  Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele?  They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels.  Nope.  He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan.  Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning.  She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire.  Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool.  Me?  If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international?  Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine.  Yup.  Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country.  This is a scandal of global proportions.  Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is.  This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections.  Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel.  If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close.  But, hear me out.  What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge?  And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George?  And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Burning Your Way To Happiness

“No! Look, what’s the matter with you all? It’s perfectly simple: We have the fire drill when I ring the fire bell. That wasn’t the fire bell! Right?” – Fawlty Towers

At the pub, the owner told me I was drunk and needed to take the bus home.  Turned out those are even harder to drive when you’re drunk.

It was a cold, February campout.  It was also rainy, and also weather that most folks would call miserable.  In fact, it was also the first campout that I was Scoutmaster.

I think the temperature, at its highest, was probably around 45°F.  It froze at night.  We put our tents up in the dark, and I snuggled deep into my sleeping bag.

The next morning, we had breakfast.  One thing that I had changed since I became Scoutmaster was that the Scouts bought, cooked, and ate their own food.  One thing I observed on previous campouts was when the kids and adults ate the same food, the adults wanted good food, and wouldn’t leave the kids alone.  Me?  I had no desire to eat chicken tartare, so I let the kids fix their own food, and I often cooked for the adult leaders.

I drew a picture of a criminal once.  He looked pretty sketchy.

The plan for the day was fairly simple.  80% or more of the Scouts needed to get to First Class (a rank where a boy would know most of the things so they could survive a solo campout for a few days, if need be).  We focused on First Class skills.  One other thing I instituted is that the older Scouts were to teach the younger Scouts, for reasons that are probably obvious.

My job, mainly, was to drink coffee and take someone to the hospital if the hatchet got the best of them.  At this campout, there was one Scout in particular who had very little skill at anything.  One of the Scouts of higher rank ran him through building a fire.

Jack London aside, building a fire after a rainy night on a blustery, rainy day isn’t the easiest of things.  And, to be fair, this Scout wasn’t the quickest on the uptake.  But he worked at starting his fire for a really long time.  More than an hour?  Certainly.  But he had dogged determination, and finally got his fire going.

“Okay,” I said, “You can put that one out now.  That qualifies.”

“No, I want to keep it going.”

I hear arsonists do well on Tinder®.  They have a lot of matches.

I was fine with that.  It was his fire, and if he wanted to keep it going, I was fine with that.  There was little chance of him burning down the soggy campground.

He kept the fire going through the night, feeding it, and teasing it along.

He made First Class, but I must point out, by the time he got the rank badge it wasn’t nearly as important to him as building that fire.  He had acquired a skill.  He could do more than he could before.  He did not need outside validation.  The achievement was part of him.  He was proud of himself.

So often, we get tied up in feeling about things that are beyond our span of control.  Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events.  Realize this and you will find strength.”

I hear that Marcus Aurelius got the first weather report.  “Hail, Caesar!”

I know that we are living in a world filled with tough situations.  I would say this, if some outside event upsets you, go ahead and be upset.  Until midnight.

Then, take control.  Realize that what you can be and do is the important thing.  As that Scout taught me, being fulfilled isn’t being surrounded by supermodels and driving a Lambo® while they softly nuzzle your neck and . . . where was I?  No, that’s not fulfillment.  Fulfillment is achievement.

Almost every single person reading this has the power to be better tomorrow at something.  A skill.  Bench pressing five more pounds.  Learning Shakespeare in the original Klingon.  Becoming a better carpenter.  Finally trimming those nosehairs, or at least weaving them into an attractive scarf.

Me?  I write, and try to get better.  When I’ve written what I want, I don’t need anyone to tell me – I feel it inside.

And I’m okay.

Except in especially tragic situations, it is in our power to be better.  It is in our power to improve.  And through doing so, it is in our power to build internal strength.  And we don’t need anyone to validate it.

Life is tough, and it’s even tougher when we try to take on every injustice in the world.  Sometimes we just need to take a few minutes, and build a fire.