Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
Streams will show up at 9EDT (click the link below), that’s in just under 30 minutes! (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)
Funniest News On the ‘Net.
In this episode:
“Mr. Rooney, Ferris is home and he’s very ill. I debated even leaving him.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Who won the presidential debate last night? People who didn’t watch.
As my father said when the cows got into the marijuana, “Son, the steaks are high.”
That’s how I’d describe the Trump/Kamala debate. Apparently, they’ve never met, so her charge that Trump put a wet finger in her ear and said “Wet Willie Brown” is certainly false. One of the rules is that Kamala has a two-drink minimum.
I decided I’d just blog about the debate instead. Since I’m going to get into the hot tub later with a cigar and maybe a scotch, today’s post will be, unfortunately, written while sober.
Notes: I like the muted microphone idea. It stops the debate for being a shouting match, though I wish they would give the candidates an array of condiments they could throw at each other. Regardless, here is my (partially made up) transcript.
But she’d be happy to force you to take it.
My biggest hope? That Trump says, “Be quiet or I’ll spank you, you disrespectful little turnip.”
Showtime!
Kamala walks to Don. I think she would have peed on him to show dominance, but she couldn’t lift her leg up, or Hindu tradition prevents it.
First question:
Are people better off than four years ago?
Kamala: “I understand the problem and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m going to say absolutely nothing, but then attack Trump.”
Trump: “No sales tax, other countries will pay for the wall, took billions and billions from Chi-nah. We’ve had a terrible economy, worse than ever seen since ever. We’ve had people stream into this country from mental institutions, and even Baltimore.”
Kamala: “Worst epidemic, worst unemployment and personally burned the Constitution after farting on the Statue of Liberty.”
Trump: “Cut taxes, make the greatest economy, ever, and then Kamala ate a baby. Alive. At Central Park. I was there.”
Kamala: “I’ve memorized a thing about the economy. Here it is.”
Trump: “She has no plan. It’s four sentences – run spot run.” I wish I had made that up, but that was Trump’s line, it’s hilarious.
You want to add tariffs, and that might cost more money. Why do you hate America?
Trump: “They kept my tariffs, because I made the best tariffs, and now people can’t afford bacon.”
Kamala: “There was a trade deficit, and Trump sold chips to China, and the United States should win the race against China.” It really didn’t say anything in the answer, but it was well said, much better than her normal word salad.
Trump: “Taiwan sold chips to Chi-nah. Immigration is bad. She’s a Marxist.” (Actually, one of Trump’s passionate answers, and pretty articulate and less hand-wavy than usual.
President Trump you were against abortion and then for abortion and why do you hate women?
Trump: “Six Supreme Court justices got Roe v. Wade out of the states, and now states can make a decision and people can make a vote. Ohio and Kansas were okay with killing kids.”
Kamala: “Trump is a liar. He’s the devil. Women have to leave a state to kill a baby, and can’t even do it at their home state. I might sign a bill making baby killing legal everywhere.”
Trump: “Kamala’s a liar. And stupid. And incompetent at government.”
Kamala: “Any woman should be able to kill any baby whenever. Perhaps up until college.” Kamala is making it personal, and looking at Trump as an accuser. Trump doesn’t fall for this.
Trump: “She’s a liar. Everybody knows it.”
The microphones are not always turned off during the answers of the other candidate.
It’s hard to make a good abortion joke, but leave it to the Left.
Why did you let just a few illegal people in?
Kamala: “I want to stop drugs from coming in.” She starting to slur her words. “Trump didn’t approve the bill and that’s because he hates you and you should go to his stupid rally.”
Trump: “There’s no reason to go to her rallies. People don’t leave my rallies. People want to take their country back. What they have done with allowing millions and millions into our country, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets.” This has happened, but ABC News disagreed.
Kamala: (first giggle) “Talk about extreme! The very worst republicans love me.” Kamala is actually effectively getting under Trump’s skin at this point.
Trump: “I fired them.”
Perhaps he’s upset because that was Fang-Fang’s dinner?
How can you send all of these illegals back?
Trump: “They allowed terrorists, drug dealers, criminals and Venezuelans in. Their crime is down. But they’re destroying the fabric of our country.” (no humor added on this comment)
Kamala: (next giggle, more slurring) “This is rich! Trump is a criminal and awful, and I have answers, I promise.”
Trump: “It’s a political prosecution.” Really good answer here.
Kamala: “Trump would kill your children if he were back in the White House.”
Kamala, you flip flop, so please explain why you have such a good reason to flip flop?
Kamala: “After I was against oil, I was for oil. I want everyone to have houses, because that won’t increase inflation, but we’ll need to need to import labor to make them. And this friend I had in high school who is totally not made up was sexually assaulted. I want to help people not be mean like Trump.”
Trump: “I am so very rich. Fracking? She’s been against fracking and the police (even Sting) and – I’m talking now – does that sound familiar? – and wants to turn do transgender surgery on illegal aliens.”
Transgender surgery for even alien-aliens, would be my bet. But ALF as a woman?
Mr. President, why did you start an insurrection and why do you regret it?
Trump: “Peacefully and patriotically. You left that out. When are the illegals going to be prosecuted? When are the people who burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted?”
Mr. President, why don’t you say you regret this?
Trump: “I didn’t do anything to regret.”
Kamala: “I was at the Capitol. The President wanted to desecrate the nation’s Capitol because he hates you and Donald Trump hates Jews.” Trump does not take the bait to stare back at her, which people would take as threatening.
Trump: “Why is she now doing anything on the border? Biden can close the border, he’s not.”
Mr. President, why won’t you say you lost the election we stole fair and square?
Trump: “The illegals are trying to vote.” Kamala does not look remotely happy and ABC pulls away from the split screen.
Why does Donald Trump want to stop illegals from voting?
Kamala: “Donald Trump should accept the fact that we stole the election fair and square.”
Trump: “Victor Orban – why is the world blowing up? The most respected and most feared president was Trump. Kamala didn’t get a single vote. She failed.”
Israel and Palestine aren’t getting along, tell us a made-up way that you’d solve it?
Kamala: “War is bad. We shouldn’t have one. I really like Israel, though.”
Trump: “It never would have started. Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Kamala hates Israel. But, Kamala also hates Arabs. And probably hates kittens.”
Kamala: “I love Israel. Trump is weak and loves dictators.”
Trump: “Putin endorses Kamala.”
Commercial Break – A commercial for feminine products. Who knew women were filled with blue liquid?
Mr. President, you could solve Ukraine in 24 hours?
Trump: “We’ve spent $250 billion in Ukraine because Biden won’t ask Europe. I can call Putin and Zelinsky and settle it. I’ll do a deal. It would be a great deal. We could have World War III.”
Kamala: “You’re running against me. Putin wants to take over all of the Starbucks™ in Europe. No cappuccino for anyone. And Poland. You want to give up Poland.”
Trump: “Quiet, please. Putin would be sitting in Moscow, and don’t forget he has nuclear weapons. Kamala was sent to negotiate peace, and three days later? War. She’s worse than Biden. She is a horrible negotiator.”
Kamala: “I’m going to say a lot of things about Trump, to avoid talking about how I failed negotiating in Ukraine.”
Trump: “I got Europeans to pay for NATO.”
Kamala was a lot more prepared than she was the first time around.
Do you regret what happened in Afghanistan?
Kamala: “We got out of Afghanistan. Trump’s deal in Afghanistan was the worst. Trump invited terrorists to Camp David, America’s most holy place.”
Trump: “My agreement was good, the Afghanistan withdrawal was horrible.”
President Trump, why are you a racist?
Trump: “I’m not.”
Kamala: “He is.”
Trump: “She’s horrible.”
Kamala: “He’s horrible.”
Trump: “She’s horrible.”
(Hosts utterly losing control)
President Trump, how are you going to fix healthcare?
Trump: “I saved Obamacare, but it wasn’t great, but I’m trying to find a better one.””
Oh, wonderful Kamala, how can you say something about healthcare that conforms to the answer you memorized?
Kamala: “I’m not going to take your guns. And I know people who have been sick and we want Obamacare to get even better. And healthcare is a right.”
Trump: “Kamala wants everyone on government insurance.”
What would you do to stop climate change?
Kamala: “Climate change is horrible and I have invested $1 trillion in clean energy with my donors and opened factories around the world.”
Trump: “Kamala loves Chi-nha. They’ve destroyed business and manufacturing, and Biden got paid off by China and Ukraine? They are crooks.”
Commercial Break – Debate sponsored by Crazy Z’s Unpainted Ukraine, for the best in discount barely used weapons.
Closing Statements:
Kamala: “We’re not going back to low prices. I’ve never had a real job. We need me as a president.”
Trump: “Here are the wonderful things she’s going to do, but she hasn’t done it. Why hasn’t she done it? I can rebuild America. I can make it better, faster. I’ll call it the six-million-dollar country.”
Overall, Trump was Trump, and this was probably his best debate of all of them during three elections. Kamala, however, didn’t look like the blithering idiot that she is, since it looks like they got her off the sauce long enough to do debate prep.
If you liked Trump, you still like Trump. If you liked Kamala, you’re probably not a regular reader, but you probably still like Kamala and are relieved that she didn’t Biden-out with disjointed word salads. I think Team Kamala will be happy enough with this performance that they’ll trot her out for a few very carefully scripted interviews.
There will not be another debate.
How will the normies take it? Not a clear victory either way, and the undecided mainly don’t watch these things, so it’ll be decided by what news they hear between the “top hits of the 80s, and more” and what they’re paying for gasoline.
Or, by the people who count the votes in big cities in swing states.
Stay tuned, and I suggest spending election night at a mountaintop restaurant, where the steaks will be high.
“You know, I’ve always like that word, gargantuan. I so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 2
I worry that the judge in Trump’s case will be too judgmental. I can tell just by looking at him.
Volume VI, Issue 4
All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.
This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.
In this issue: Front Matter – Crime and Punishment – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Polls And The Vote – 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.
https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/
Crime and Punishment
September 18, a date that won’t live in infamy.
September 18 was the date that Donald Trump was scheduled to be sentenced for his convictions related to his paperwork issues (without an underlying crime, no less) in New York. For the life of me, I have no idea why anyone, no matter what their politics, would ever have their company incorporated in New York.
But as I wanted to verify the sentencing date, I looked it up and found that the sentencing date had been pushed back to November 26, 2024. The Teflon Don does it again. This is, probably, the best thing that could have happened to him in September, and certainly the best decision Judge Juan “Not A Real American” Merchan could have made, both for himself and for Trump.
The next thing you know, black people will want their own drinking fountains.
First, why is this good for the judge? Well, imagine having the pressure of the potential backlash of jailing the frontrunner in the election over a paperwork “violation” with no actual crime and no actual victim. But, from his perspective, he has to live around all of the Antifa nuts that infest New York City like the unexplained cuts and bruises all over my body on the night that I discovered tequila.
No, I imagine he went to bed sweating.
Now, the sentencing will be held on November 26, 2024.
Maybe.
If Trump “loses” the election, well, Trump instantly becomes an irrelevant footnote in history. Trump won’t be worth punishing except as a humiliation ritual against those that might emulate Trump in the future. So, he’s probably safe from jail (where he’d be Epsteined) at least until the appeal would overturn the insane conviction. But judges can think of other sentences that are humiliating, so I’d expect no jail time, but something that would be calibrated for just that: humiliation.
If Trump wins the election, the prospect of jailing the president-elect of the United States becomes such a high-stakes game that I think Juan will blink and sentence him to probation for a month. Jailing the president-elect is a de facto declaration of Civil War 2.0. That would make a very, very long winter for New York City without electricity and gas and would result in the place looking worse than it did in Escape From New York.
I’m pretty sure HoJoFromJerz has only a tenuous grasp on that whole “separation of powers” thing.
I think, really, the only threat that Trump poses to the agenda of the GloboLeftElite is if he gets the opportunity to appoint two or three justices to the Supreme Court replacing Thomas, Alito, and maybe Sotomayor or Jackson. Sotomayor won’t retire, but it looks like she’s pretty fond of chalupas, so, let’s call it a 10% chance that she expires. And, although Ketanji Brown Jackson is very young at only 54, everything she’s ever said aloud makes me doubt that she is capable of understanding the warning labels on consumer products, so, there’s that.
If the GloboLeftElite really wants a United States military, they’ll have to go for Trump, in which case maybe he gets three appointments. Otherwise, if they’re content to just run the place into the ground, who better than Kamala?
Violence and Censorship Update
Some groups just don’t want the truth to get out:
Because it’s uncomfortable, I guess:
Must be very far south in Ukraine:
And Google® really wants you to forget some things:
And when you look for Trump, you get Kamala:
And the very GloboLeftElite Governor Polis wants you to ignore this:
And a news organization won’t release news:
But everybody is in on it:
Even the newspapers (TK is short for “To Come” – a placeholder for a name, like Walz):
And the DNC treats bathrooms likes sports:
And Gavin lets the mask slip, a little:
And, this is your future on Woke:
Biden/Harris Misery Index
I’m sure vice president Zoolander can save us:
Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .
Yup, up again. It’s like there’s a pattern here . . .
Updated Civil War II Index
The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.
Violence:
Violence is up, and this should be higher given that Venezuelan gangs are turning parts of US cities into no-go zones.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable, and it is steady, and will probably hold that way until November.
Economic:
The economy is in full juice mode for the election.
Illegal Aliens:
August is showing as down, again, since (my take) the .gov folks are just making up numbers now.
The Polls And The Vote
We’re in the last few days before the election – in two months, it will be done.
The numbers generally look well for Trump. He’s trending well in the states he needs, and, well, he’s Trump. This week will provide us with the ABC® debate, and if Kamala can remember the answers to the questions that she no doubt has been given, she won’t look nearly as bad as she does when she’s trying to remember anything more complicated than the combination to her phone.
She’s tried to run a campaign based on “nothing” – a Seinfeld campaign, if you will. She now has policy positions up on her website, and those are mainly of the “I’ll be nice to you and make everything wonderful and Trump is a big meanie.”
That doesn’t matter to the voters on the GloboLeft: Kamala could be in favor of forcing nuns to crush kittens at gunpoint to feed to orphans, and GloboLeft voters would be in favor of her. Her major accomplishment in life to date? Passing the bar in California on the second attempt. That’s it.
But the major polls show a different story. Why?
The polls simply have to show Kamala close enough in a few swing states so that the massive cheating that’s already planned for urban areas can be conducted to give her the results she needs. That’s it. That’s the goal. Unless the people who did it last time are stopped, that will be the result this time, as well. The follow up to this will be the Democrats making their (admitted) 11 million illegals (which is probably a low number by a factor of two) legal, and will cement the People’s Republic of America.
It’s very likely that “voting harder” won’t matter. Sure, I’ll go vote, and suggest that you do, too. But don’t be surprised when the same humiliating illegalities result in a stolen election. That will certainly bring us much, much closer to Civil War 2.0.
But what would I know, I’m just a right-wing extremist.
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!
TURNING POINT
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1831486742052159886
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1823963955024605650
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1817731127672779239
https://trump2024.film/
BAD GUYS
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1829621234629529714
https://x.com/MrStevenSteele/status/1828970643133800908
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1830401573219926448
https://x.com/America_2100/status/1826385727388614867
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1830943524524536151
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Violent_Crime_by_State_SITE.jpg?itok=Xf8kjQev
GOOD GUYS AND GALS
https://thefederalist.com/2024/09/04/cdc-fbi-working-to-hide-data-showing-shootings-stopped-by-good-guys-with-guns/
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1831193585326182443
ONE GUY
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13819107/Georgia-school-shooter-Colt-Gray-received-AR-15-mass-shooting-Christmas-present-father.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13821987/georgia-school-shooter-colt-gray-gun-father-hunting-apalachee-high.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13823345/Former-landlord-reveals-father-Georgia-school-shooter-kicked-door-retrieve-guns.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/father-georgia-high-school-shooting-suspect-arrested/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/case-colin-gray-father-georgia-school-shooting-suspect-tests-limits-pa-rcna169906
BODY COUNT
https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1826367330596655495
https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf
https://x.com/Twitermytweet/status/1817781490744242379
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/the-urban-family-exodus-is-a-warning-for-progressives/679350/
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/more-1-9-americans-live-poverty
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db507.pdf
https://dnyuz.com/2024/07/25/kids-a-growing-number-of-americans-say-no-thanks/
https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/despite-bans-number-abortions-united-states-increased-2023
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-survey-pills-roe-election-2024-7179dda48eae0a764be89c2e0aafd80a
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/how-the-origins-of-americas-immigrants-have-changed-since-1850/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-08-19_15-21-37.jpg?itok=xzOry1uG
https://archive.is/VGSGa
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-AA1ooDQw
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/selling-america-the-army-s-fight-to-find-recruits-in-an-angry-divided-nation/ar-AA1pHFd8
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368528/us-military-army-navy-recruit-numbers
https://news.usni.org/2024/08/22/navy-could-sideline-17-support-ships-due-to-manpower-issues
VOTE COUNT
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184621/presidential-election-voter-turnout-rate-state/
https://nypost.com/2024/08/04/opinion/team-biden-is-shocked-shocked-at-massive-migrant-fraud-but-still-wants-to-wave-them-in/
https://aflegal.org/america-first-legal-sends-all-50-states-a-plan-for-how-to-use-existing-federal-law-to-prevent-foreign-nationals-from-illegally-voting-in-american-elections/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/progressive-dems-michigan-tell-undercover-journo-they-were-ballot-harvested-out-office
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1823154080748872069
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/08/09/tenacious-citizens-force-election-integrity-investigation-in-georgia
https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/19/how-a-far-right-takeover-of-georgias-election-board-could-swing-the-election/
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/27/pennsylvania-election-results-mail-ballots/
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/14/alabama-secretary-of-state-finds-3000-potential-noncitizens-registered-to-vote/
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/14/states-file-federal-lawsuit-seeking-to-shut-down-bidenbucks/
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/08/14/vote_integritys_nitty-gritty_the_battle_lines_of_24s_epic_struggle_1051309.html
https://dailycaller.com/2024/08/14/gop-get-out-the-vote-scott-presler-trump-campaign/
THE FUTURE OF WAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7L1aZzLz1Q
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/07/europe/ukraine-thermite-dragon-drones-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
https://x.com/David_Hambling/status/1823384768324796498
https://x.com/ivandexx/status/1832109578173215041
CIVIL WAR
https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/the-civil-war-didnt-settle-the-question
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-AA1oNBsN
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-secret-ap3-militia-american-patriots-three-percent
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/elon-musk-predicting-civil-war-europe-nearly-year-rcna165469
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-dmitry-medvedev-predicts-us-collapse-imminent-civil-war-1950276
https://usawatchdog.com/a-period-of-great-uncertainty-martin-armstrong/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13739915/fbi-donald-trump-assassination.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ar-AA1pDxw5
“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club
I then started a summer camp for people who wanted to be plastic surgeons. Arts and Grafts was very popular.
Distractions.
Blaise Pascal wrote about them in his book Pensées, which is French and means “reflections” and is pronounced “Hamwich” because the French never properly figured out that sounds in words should be connected in some fashion to the letters used.
Pascal was a mathematician, a physicist, and invented the laptop computer, which was initially a plank of wood. In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him.
Pascal was also a philosopher, and thought a whole bunch about Christianity. This was back before the “let’s get a cappuccino and listen to Pastor Dave talk about why God wants lesbian ministers” type of church, and instead when there were debates on how salvation occurred and if free will was a thing.
Thankfully it didn’t take them too long to clean the kettle out, though they did ask me where I got six gallons.
Pascal wrote: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet, it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.”
And, although he’s dead, Pascal was entirely correct. We see it all around us right now.
Distraction is seductive. I remember we were on a family vacation and stopped at a Denny’s® to get breakfast. There was a line, and about 30 people (mainly families) were waiting.
As I looked, every eye was focused on a phone – 30 people sitting next to each other, yet distracted by whatever it was that they were looking at. They had escaped reality, and also escaped talking to each other, almost as if they were addicted to the distractions coming to them over their iPhones®.
In reality, many of them probably are technically addicted to those phones. Much of the internet, even back then, was built on the premise of stimulating dopamine to create engagement with the phone, and not with the world surrounding us.
Such a wonderful society we have to take pills to deal with it. Meme as found.
Were those people worried about their bills, their jobs, or their immortal soul? Nah. They were distracted by flappy bird games or Faceborg™ or InstaChat©. They were allowing the moments of their lives to drain away into that sea of distraction rather than confront reality.
They did have bills. Their jobs sucked. Their immortal soul was in peril. But that’s difficult to think about, so it’s much easier to look at pretty colors and cat videos for ten seconds before flipping to the next infotainment bite. The distraction was total.
Is it any wonder that coping skills have been drastically impacted in the generation raised on the distraction of phones? Kids can’t cope because they’re never forced to confront themselves until the stakes are high. This creates a group of victims.
I hate victims. A lot. They’re whiney and they suck every bit of energy out of the room, like psychic vampires. Oh, wait, I just described The View. Huh.
If you ever feel uninformed, remember that some people get their news from The View.
Absolutely, there are people who are in situations that are far beyond their control. And, absolutely there are people who don’t deserve what fate has given them. However, when I look at people who have self-control, who have looked fate in the eye and said, “Yeah, so what? I’m still standing here, chump,” I feel admiration.
Neil Postman was a professor and writer, but then he died. Perhaps his best-known work is Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985. The Mrs. introduced me to it not long after we met, and I knew she was a keeper. In it, Postman talks about the impact of amusement. Amusement is close enough to distraction for our purposes and both Postman and Pascal are dead, so they can’t put up too much of a fight.
Again, Postman wrote about this in 1985, well before the every distraction, every place, all at once monster of the smartphone appeared. In it, Postman identified television as a drug. If so, it’s a gateway drug like aspirin, and the Internet is heroin.
Part of distraction is that it discourages the formation of complete thoughts. I think at least partially that’s part of the inspiration for this place, since I want to create and bring forth ideas that people might not think about, or might have forgotten in all frenzy of flashing lights, free porn, and distractions of Instabook© and Facegram™.
If idiots could fly, TikTok® would be an airport.
It’s a world where, “Excuse me, I’m talking” becomes a replacement for actual thought and people thinking deeply about issues like old Pascal becomes rarer and rarer. A side effect is that the information we get becomes information we can’t take action on. Want to complain to your congressman? How would you even contact them? How would you get their attention? Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions.
Instead, you’ll complain to your neighbor.
Worse, though, is the impact that’s happening to our youth. The lesson that bad crap is going to happen to them so they need to learn deal with it simply isn’t taught because they just distract themselves away from the Truth they don’t want to consider. It’s not their fault – their brain is optimized to live in villages, and we distract them with the hardest hitting drug in history: the smartphone.
Failure is an option. And failure is a teacher, but when the teacher is fired and replaced with social media? The lesson is muted or ignored.
I bought a book called “How to Hug”, but it turned out to be volume seven of an encyclopedia.
How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist?
I guess Pascal was good at avoiding distraction and dealing with pressure.
One that turned out very funny:
Streams will show up at 9EDT (click the link below), that’s in just under 30 minutes! (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)
Funniest News On the ‘Net.
In this episode:
“Baseball. Cold showers. Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery
Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.
It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat. In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.
However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids. Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked: at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.
That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system. The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output. Which is also their minimum output. My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off. Period.
What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster. Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach. Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.
If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.
Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.
The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward. As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”
After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.
That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.
I think step five is the hardest.
But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy. Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates. So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.
Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time. Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response. But soaring oil prices?
Responding to those requires time and investment. First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases. After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.
Then, pipe is needed. And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera. This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales. That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.
The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.
Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results. Now. Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.
The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located. They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”
I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?
The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them. They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:
John Wilder: “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder. With me?”
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “Huh? Why are you in my house at midnight?”
JW: “Let me try a different approach. How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”
AOC: “Oh, like 40 or 50?”
JW: “Good. Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”
AOC: “I don’t know? That they smell like my feet?”
JW: “Well . . . . okay. But is it hard to keep them organized?”
AOC: “OH! Totally! I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”
JW: “Right! The amount of disorder increases!”
AOC: “Oh, I get it!!! Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”
JW: “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there. Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”
AOC: “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner. Instead? Only Fans®.”
I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.
Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.
Longer term decisions include:
Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades. The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.
I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.
Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.
But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time. I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.
“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – Return of the King
I had a sacred, flammable piece of wood once. It was a match made in Heaven.
All memes “as found”
One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.
Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do.
The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”
The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”
The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.
This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.
Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it:
“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”
That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.
If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.
Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.
Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual.
Yeah, that was the plan.
Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.
A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.
Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).
The pesky 1st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:
It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win.
Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men.
The only thing that stands in their way? Us.
