Month: March 2024

Gamer Gate 2.0: Woke On Patrol

“Mortal Kombat on Sega Genesis is the best video game ever.” – Billy Madison

Also like a gamer, he spent 73 years living off his mother before he got a job.

I predict this will be the most censored post I ever write, even including the one where I told Joe where he could stick his F-16s.

As I touched on in my last post, there is a process that makes people feel good – have a goal, work, and achieve.  It was important when my great, great, great grandpa Grug was hunting mammoth on the frozen steppes, and is important today.  Since there are few mammoths to hunt, lots of young men get their surrogate achievement from playing video games.

Games are important to them.

That’s why Gamer Gate was a big deal, and Gamer Gate 2.0 might turn out to be bigger.  Many of you might not be familiar with it, so I’ll give a too brief synopsis that skips over a lot of details, because you’re bright and can research more if you want to.

Zoë Quinn.  It starts with Zoë.

Literally who?

I think she was 27 going on 50 in this picture.

Original Picture By Ian Linkletter – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81658314

Zoë was a lame GloboLefty girl with stupid hair color who moved to Canada, built a crappy GloboLeft video game called Depression Quest, her lame GloboLefty ex-boyfriend wrote a long blog post.

Really?  A long blog post about your ex?  Regardless, in the post, people walked away with the idea that Zoë had slept with almost half a dozen journalists to get good reviews for her crappy game.  For this story, it’s not particularly important whether or not she did sleep with them or not.

The important thing to come out of this was that a bunch of gamers got together to complain about the corruption within the gaming journalism community.  It could have ended there because gaming journalists aren’t serious, and were gaming journalists in 2010s because they couldn’t get better jobs.

That would have ended it.  But no, the gaming journalists tried to cover it up and silence the whole thing, calling the gamers (you know, the audience that reads their crap and buys the games) sexist with dozens of articles all at once with the same theme.  The Narrative fought back, and, sadly Anita Sarkeesian got semi-famous.

Maybe someone could pay for a tattoo of fake kids over her barren womb.  Someone get that woman a wine and cat I.V.  Stat!

It kept growing, and growing, and growing.  Oddly, that was the time The Fappening (leaking of all of the nekkid celebrity women’s iPhone® pictures) happened and lots of nudes of celebrities were leaked, starting at 4Chan to discredit 4Chan.

But what became clear was in 2014, there was a narrative, The Narrative that had to be protected.  And why gaming, and why gamers?

Remember the 1995 movie GoldenEye?  It was an okay Bond™ movie?  It cost $60 million to make, but made $356 million worldwide.  A tidy profit.  The 1997 video game GoldenEye 007 grossed over $250 million.  Not quite as much as the movie, but it also racked up hours and hours and hours of play by, mainly, guys.

In other words, Gamers.

Yup, you have no idea how deep it goes.  Snowden might . . .

What a propaganda tool!  Hours and hours of time and attention of people.  Having it the market dominated by (gasp!) young white men was simply not acceptable.  Why think of all the wrongthink they demanded?  Attractive women!  Strong men!  Violence solving problems!  Bond had to be changed to the less-manly Daniel Craig, and video games had to be changed to serve The Narrative.

But the Gamers still existed.  It was required to change the message, to show via the combined might of the gaming journalist press that Gamers were dead.  Boys need not apply to the future – the future was about putting a chick in it, and making her lame and gay.

Well, Kathleen Kennedy didn’t ruin games, but she ruined Star Wars®.  Lame and gay.

So, places like the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) funded by the GloboLeft and manned by the fire-breathing GloboLeftistElite came for the games.  Their job was to create “scholarly” papers regarding video games.  I’d write more about the connections of DiGRA, including supposed links to DARPA funding, but, oddly, much of that material is now 404’d.  Now, this stuff is nine years old, but I get videos on YouTube™ from fifteen years ago, so the removal had intent.

Remember when the mask started to come off at Hollywood, Twitter®, Wikipedia™, Amazon™ and YouTube©?  When the transnonsense became sacrament?  Why are there raging GloboLeftElite censors trying to shut down people merely questioning The Narrative?

It was GamerGate, the leaderless resistance to the GloboLeft that started it all.  One summary I read said, “A girl slept (allegedly) with some journalists for good reviews, a lot of stuff happened, and then Donald Trump was elected president.”  As I’ve said, there’s a LOT more there if you want to dig into this subject.  I won’t even mention PizzaGate.  Oh, too late:

But that was then.  Now, in 2024, GamerGate2.0 has started.

What this time?

Sweet Baby© Inc. is a “narrative development and consultation studio . . . .”  The idea is that they go into a company that actually makes games and tell them what story they should tell, and how they should stick a chick in it, and make her lame and gay.  In one of their triumphs, they kill off male characters (think Batman™ in the most cringe way possible just so strong, triumphant women can have the story.

Yeah.  That didn’t go over well with the core audience that buys the games.  Think about Left Behind 2 – where the popular male hero of the first Left Behind was reframed to be an evil white man, and the new hero was a trans sack of potatoes.

That’s what Sweet Baby® Inc. does, but I don’t think they were behind Left Behind 2, which shows you how deep the crapfest is.  Well, why would anyone hire a corrosive crapfest of woke to make their games more awful?  Here’s the idea in the CEO’s (Kim Belair) own words:

If you’re a creative working in AAA, which I did for many, many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups. And if they don’t see the value in what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want.

And, just in time for journalists to show their true spots haven’t changed since 2014 . . .

These are the journalists we’re dealing with.  Nice that they at least tell you to your face how they hate you.

The best news though is that someone is pushing back.  On Steam®, a service where you can buy and talk about games, a gamer has put together a simple list:  Sweet Baby Detected, which showcases games Sweet Baby has helped ruin.  That’s okay with Kim, she’s gotten rich making the people who buy her games angry while helping companies lose money.  As /pol/ notes, she’s probably a Marxist, so for her, it’s a two-fer.

I’m skipping out on fuzzing the f-bomb.  I agree with Anon on Marxists.

Sweet Baby isn’t alone.  There are hordes of these cancerous “companies” out there, with their sole intent to make stuff worse.

Is there any surprise that the Zoomer males think Pinochet did nothing wrong?

 

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?  Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy.  It was a disaster.  No one would accept the program.  Entire crops were lost.  Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.  But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.  The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.  Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off.  I walked through the room naked.  (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart.  He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects.  One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical.  I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements.  The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal.  (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.)  The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand.  You can read it in Ted’s work.  Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski:  it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy.  People like the struggle.  I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe.  Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days.  Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder:  “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe:  “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge.  Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame.  But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks?  A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key.  And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy.  Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him.  Imagine fighting a kitten.  I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems.  At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized.  Eventually he may become clinically depressed.  History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.  This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power.  But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power.  This shows that power is not enough.  One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals:  they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there.  All the time.  They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them.  Maybe winning an Oscar™.  If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders:  they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this:  the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier.  Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival.  Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again:  the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers.  They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God.  They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me.  Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo.  Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good.  I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone.  We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears.  That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live.  So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not).  One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out.  But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself.  You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House.  The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so.  Men need quests.  Society needs quests.  We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning.  And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

Podcasting Is Fun. You Should Come And Listen. 9EST.

One of our best, ever.  Skip forward six minutes or so for the fun.

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

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

 

In this episode:

  • War and Stuff
  • No Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • ThinkRealFast

You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry:  it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock.  Grug grab other rock, smash rock.  Rock eventually breaks.  Grug happy.

Another example:  Grug want break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine.  Grug create coal mine.  Grug find tree.  Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer.  Grug smash rock.  Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example:  Grug want to break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur.  Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite.  Grug break rock real fast.  Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot.  The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient.  It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time.  And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well?  A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method.  And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet.  Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine.  Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once.  It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman?  More like Grugman.

Yes.  Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas.  What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea.  Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck.  And they were always digging.  I think they might be part mole.  Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly:  couldn’t buy gas.  At all.  Even with cash.  Credit card usage?  Nope.  And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber.  But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet.  In Alaska.  In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely.  Information used to be hard to move.  Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places.  It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear.  Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China.  Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain.  But books burn.  The ephemeral website?  It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon.  Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today.  I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice.  Why would they?  Their methods, their lives are the most direct.  They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus.  It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike.  The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it.  Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon.  He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why?  There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done.  He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz.  Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct.  How fragile?  Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom.  I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: It’s All Planned

“Did everything go as planned?” – Pulp Fiction

I had some chips at midnight on Saturday.  It was a snackrifice.

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

Volume V, Issue 10

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

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

I’m keeping the clock at two minutes to midnight, probably will roll back next month.

In this issue:  Front Matter – All Of This Is Planned – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Border In Five Memes – 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 810 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

All Of This Is Planned

When I look at the road we’re on to Civil War 2.0, it has not gone unnoticed that the enemy creating this isn’t outside the United States.  As much as the GloboLeft likes to call out Russia, others see things perhaps a little more clearly.

Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador.  What has he done for them?  He’s broken the back of organized crime, by this one crazy tactic:  arresting criminals and putting them in jail and getting gender ideology “contrary to nature, contrary to God” out of El Salvador’s schools.  He has a 90% approval rating from El Salvadorans, so of course the GloboLeft hates him.

What is the response of the GloboLeft?  Isn’t it obvious?  First is the rotting the minds of youth.  The map above should be clear enough – it’s a symptom of a plan coming together.

Although this is from Canada, it’s very, very clear that the agenda is simple:  they want the kids.  It has long been the GloboLeft’s desire to use propaganda to get children at their most vulnerable and split them from their parents.

Things like this idea are created to humiliate people.  None of that can make a “more green” planet since the energy used in the process more than offsets any “benefits”.  No, this is humiliation and dehumanization.

Canada, again, has show the goal.  They want to stop making any new roads outside of cities.  Live in a rural area?  No roads for you.  And, last I checked, Canada has a lot more rural availability than most nations outside of Russia.

Now they’re even giving TED® talks about how literally any sort of degeneracy is a sacrament.

And the lawfare is continual.  The New York  Soros GloboLeft Attorney General, Letitia James, is on a a tear.  Donald Trump is just the most prominent of her use of the law to destroy people.  Another target besides the new one listed above?  VDARE.  VDARE is a fairly prominent anti-immigration website that Ms. James has hit with amazingly broad subpoenas and is costing them tens of thousands of dollars – even though they aren’t in New York.  You can read more about that here (LINK).

She’s also gone against the NRA, suing them.  The important question:  why would anyone want to do business in New York?

So, Nayib Bukele is right.  It’s all being taken apart from the inside.

Violence and Censorship Update

Several readers have reported to me (via email) that they were unsubscribed or that their subscriptions are filtered out as spam.  FYI.  Might it be random?  Sure.  It might.

I’ll (mostly) let the memes speak for themselves.  Foreign stories are included as they often foreshadow attempts in the United States.

I guess this one involves both censorship and violence?

This one is especially fun:  Canada has a bill that punishes hate crimes, which can be reported anonymously, and that do not require evidence with huge fines and up to life imprisonment.

Crabs reading?  Forbidden knowledge.

People reading?  That’s racist!

Looks like the plan is working.

I thought they loved science?

If only they could be sent home to Make Eritrea Great Again.

Yeah, that’s the history of the top Google® executive in charge of A.I.

Looks like the New York Times censors . . . food.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  Why?  The GloboLeft are economic geniuses, right?

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 flat.  Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down.

Economic:

Economic numbers did a slight dive.  I wonder if this is the new American Dream?

Illegal Aliens:

Highest January.  Ever.

Also, other people are noticing:

The Border, In Five Memes

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762833481682264080

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762297111381455043

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762568451581681721

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762225168645059071

https://twitter.com/i/status/1610431809334149120

https://twitter.com/i/status/1763481437372567971

https://twitter.com/i/status/1761129463218139238

https://twitter.com/i/status/17636130393229273

https://twitter.com/i/status/1760862306005590149

Good Guys

https://youtube.com/shorts/tQGuha2gpQw?si=kjoLNVF2y0qd7wdE

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1759109053630800211

https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-worker-fired-shoplifters-retail-theft-fight-problems-2024-2

https://www.wtoc.com/2023/07/24/woman-gets-job-back-lowes-after-being-attacked-while-trying-stop-shoplifting/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article285835356.html

One Guy

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2024/02/28/louisiana-expands-gun-rights-for-self-defense-against-criminals-with-concealed-carry-bill/72765215007/

https://www.wowt.com/2024/02/09/nebraska-legislators-consider-bill-alter-self-defense-laws/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2894180/arizonas-commonsense-self-defense-bill/

https://www.oxygen.com/kill-or-be-killed/crime-news/how-to-watch-kill-or-be-killed-an-oxygen-true-crime-series

Body Count

https://twitter.com/MakisMD/status/1754830517986566210

https://thehighwire.com/editorial/why-are-young-adults-having-more-heart-attacks-the-level-of-denial-is-stunning/

https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boys-who-were-killed-by-police/item/5

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-02-13_11-38-28.png

https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PRRI-Jan-2024-Gen-Z-Draft.pdf

https://twitter.com/noble_x_x_/status/1758149565251784710

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-81749d7c-d0a0-48d0-bb11-eaab6f1e6556

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1757461240421449806

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759305508584882680

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/nevada-identifies-voter-history-errors-on-website-fixes-underway-3003358/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/11/data-specialist-presses-georgia-look-voters-cast-ballots-wrong-jurisdictions/

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/exclusive-see-the-grave-markers-of-long-dead-residents-listed-on-michigans-voter-rolls/

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/elon-musk-is-right-and-the-ny-times-is-wrong-about-illegal-voting-by-non-citizens

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2023-review

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-24-2020-Election-Analysis-vWeb_Final.pdf

Civil War

https://uproxx.com/movies/civil-war-alex-garland-details-february-2024-update/

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/cpac-donald-trump-voters-warn-355149

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-is-spoiling-for-a-civil-war/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kristi-noem-war-texas-border-standoff-1234960568/

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-disinformation-campaign-civil-war-texas-border/

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/comes-thermidor/

About Last Week

“I’d better call my housekeeper.” – Independence Day

The Mafia just started a new online banking system:  PayUpPal®.

So, this will be just a general housekeeping sort of post, and it will be shorter than usual.  I do try to make these posts mainly not about “me”.  I’m fairly uninteresting, but if I have a funny thing that happened to me, well, I’ll share it.  Mostly, I like to write about ideas and their implications and how they combine to create and change the world we live in, so writing about me is far less interesting than that.

Monday, normal stuff will be back, with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.

First, thank you (sincerely!) for all the well wishing in the past week.

I almost fell down one at night – I couldn’t see that well.

Second, I’d like to stress that, in every sense, the last week that I took off from blogging was really one of the best weeks of my life – not the “not blogging” part, but the “finishing the project” part.  I really like writing the blog because it helps me work out questions that I have.  I sometimes return to the same topics as my understanding increases, or sometimes just because I think I’ve found a better way to get my point across.  The Mrs. says, “Just take off your hat and everyone will see your point,” but I still keep writing.

And to the point of “blogging or not” I only promised to keep writing (about four years ago, I think) until the end of March 2024.  I’m going to keep going.  I found that during the week-long hiatus, I was always thinking about how to fit something I read or heard or talked about with The Mrs. into a post.

The result was, when I got back to writing, that it felt like a hand going back into a well-worn baseball mitt, one that’s perfectly broken in that snaps shut around a fly ball, where your fingers fit into the nooks and crannies they made over the years.  It felt like I was doing what I needed to be doing.  In that, the vacation was instructive – the desire to write is still there and won’t be turned off casually.  I mean, unless there’s a lot of PEZ® and cigars.  I can be bribed.

I came in second place in a Fidel Castro lookalike competition.  Close, but no cigar.

That’s good, because putting out 3500 plus words a week on multiple topics with a minimum of 18 memes a week, well, that takes some time. Sometimes, the topic is easy and “closes” well, like Monday’s.  Sometimes, it’s harder, and I have to fight to get the paragraphs together in a good sequence.

Oddly, some of the ones that I thought were my best stuff got a “meh” reaction and some of the ones I thought, “well, at least it’s finished” have gotten the strongest positive reactions.  That actually doesn’t bother me, because the results are in your hands.  I mean, if the person who got the idea judged it, communism would have been rated top notch.

Just goes to prove what grandma always said, “If you’re having trouble writing a blog post, the secret is just to put a nearly naked hot chick in a bikini in a meme or make a fart joke.”

My first high school girlfriend was like a super spicy burrito.  It hurt when she left me.

That being said, writing takes time.  It takes less time as I work harder to get better, but it still takes time.  In the best-case week, it’s still more than a dozen hours.  Add in the other stuff I have to do, and I often skip sleep to finish a post.  But less so recently, since I’ve found a way to use some otherwise non-productive time to shift a large chunk of the writing to time I used to waste.  So, overall, less missed sleep most weeks in 2024.

Third, I’d love to tell you more about the project I finished!

But I can’t, at least not right now because I haven’t figured out how to write it up in the right way.  Again: it was all positive, and everyone is healthy, all relationships are intact and strong, and exactly zero bad things happened.

The things I learned, of course, will ultimately make it into the blog.

Do British people call monkeys who share an Amazon™ subscription “prime mates”?

Fourth, to be clear:  despite all of the gloomy stuff I write, I am exceedingly positive about the ultimate outcome.

Of everything.

I do not pretend to know that path that, ultimately, will lead to victory.  But I do know that the true, beautiful, and good are very, very powerful and rarely lose for long.  The true, beautiful, and good exist today.  They will exist tomorrow.

Horrible things will happen, have happened – things we don’t, can’t understand.  I wish I could explain them all.

I can’t.

That is above my ability and is in His hands.  But I promise everyone reading this that He does exist because I’ve seen too much in my own life to believe anything else.  Norman Vincent Peale, who I believe was the lead singer of Mötley Crüe, once said, when asked about the afterlife gave an amazing analogy:  imagine a child in the womb.  Unbothered.  Moisturized.  Happy.  In their lane.  Focused.  Flourishing.  Then the pain hits, the squeezing, and the light, so bright, the air – for the first time air hitting my lungs, and who let that cat in here?

This movie is why I’m married now.

I can scientifically show, six ways from Sunday, that there is no way that you are randomly here in this place and time.  None of this is an accident, and there is a purpose, a much deeper purpose.  I didn’t write your part of the script, so I don’t know your part, but I do know:

We all play a part in it.  Our part.  And I believe yours is probably more important than mine, so what are you going to do with it?

Me?  I’m just lucky I get to write for the greatest audience in the world.

You.  That way I get to take partial credit for the great stuff you’re going to do.

Okay, post about me is over.  No homework for the weekend, enjoy yourselves, kids.  Wait for the bell!

See you back here again on Monday.