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Author: John
Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.
The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality
“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School
Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.
Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.
So, I guess we’re the same.
Except we’re not.
This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?
The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.
But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.
Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!
And some people think Leftists are nuts.
Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.
How Leftists think.
And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?
I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.
Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.
You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:
And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.
This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.
It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:
Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.
Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.
But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.
It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.
So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.
One other last thought about reality:
Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex
“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain
What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.
Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.
This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.
Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?
Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.
On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.
When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.
Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?
Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:
- Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
- Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
- Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.
If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).
If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.
The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.
Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.
That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.
When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.
Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.
My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.
I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?
People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).
I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.
Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?
The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:
- Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
- Declining heritage American birthrates,
- Declining two-parent families,
- Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
- Increasing de facto censorship,
- Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
- Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
- Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
- Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
- Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.
We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.
I guess some people can read the future.
Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.
It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.
In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.
This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.
The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.
Dune, Mood, Wrestling, and a Way of Life
“Look at the symptoms: temperamental behavior, mood swings, facial hair. Uh oh, Dad, I think you have menopause.” – That 70’s Show
There ended up being roughly 732 books in the Dune series. I stopped after book four, which was one book too many.
(Note, this is a repost from 2019. I was working on a post and got started two hours late and then Conan the Barbarian came on. Life.)
In our basement we have a wrestling mat. It would be unusual if we had a wrestling mat and dismembered mannequin parts strewn around the room and baby doll heads covered with blood red paint, but we don’t. The Mrs. and I decided we need to leave some projects for after the kids go to college. So we use the wrestling mat for the more conventional purpose of practicing wrestling. Both Pugsley and The Boy enjoy it, and so do I. Pugsley has expressed an interest in winning a lot of wrestling matches, so he fairly enthusiastically led us to doing independent wrestling practice at home so he could improve.
One night it was time to practice. The Boy was ready. I was ready. But Pugsley said, “I’m not in the mood.”
The Boy turned pale. He knew what was coming next – the kraken was about to be unleashed. I did a quick Internet search. I then looked up from my laptop screen and quoted the following:
“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset [JW: a musical instrument]. It’s not for fighting.” – Frank Herbert, Dune
If you’re not in the mood, make it so.
The lecture he got that followed that quote exceeded the amount of time that we would have practiced. It’s the same lecture The Boy had gotten several years earlier, and he joined in to poke his brother with verbal barbs as well. You may call it bullying, we call it raising children with values. Maybe we should have stopped before we gave him a swirly?
The context of the quote is from the novel Dune which has spawned one bad movie (the early 1980’s version) and one underfunded movie (the early 2000’s version). In the novel, young Paul Atreides is the son of a space Duke somewhere in the far future after humanity has spread through the stars. Paul has the benefit of being royal, so he has a rather rigorous curriculum of everything from math, physics, and gender studies to small arms combat. Just kidding. Study math and physics. Ha! Studying math and physics is a sucker game: study those things and you’ll have to pay taxes.
This would have been a better plot than the early 80’s film.
Like all boys, Paul was looking for a day off. His combat arms teacher, Gurney Halleck, rightly told him the truth: when trouble is brewing or there is work to be done, the Universe does not care about your mood.
Like all boys, Pugsley was looking to push and see just how far he could get away with slacking. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. He had made a commitment to his brother, to me, but most importantly to himself. But sometimes, like all boys, he needed a reminder from his father that duty comes before mood. So, he got the big speech. I quote books, I quoted Patton, I quoted my father, I quoted Mr. Rogers®, and I noted that I hadn’t taken an unplanned sick day since before he was born. Call in to the boss on a Tuesday morning with a sore throat? No.
If you’re not familiar with wrestling, the guy in purple is like France at the start of World War II.
As an adult you have to do a lot of things that you don’t enjoy. You have to go to work when you know it’s going to suck. You have to take your punishment when you know you’ve done wrong. You have to pay your bills. You have to work out. You have to meet the commitments you made, no matter how painful.
Keeping your word to other people is how the world sees that you have good character. Keeping your word to yourself is the sign of real integrity. Some days you don’t want to hit the weights. You don’t want to go to work. You don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to go to practice. You don’t want to meet that pesky General Grant at Wilmer’s place in Appomattox.
Boo hoo.
I heard you don’t have to lose the war if you’re not in the mood to lose the war. Also, is it just me or does it look like they’re playing Battleship® on paper?
When you start failing to keep the commitments that you made to yourself, you’ll stop keeping your commitment to others. What matters is turning on the alarm clock, and getting out of bed when it rings or beeps or whatever it does. Every day.
You don’t need seminars. Or pep talks. Or motivational posters. Or Tony Robbins and his weirdly white teeth (I swear that man has the grin of someone who likes to eat things that are small and squirming because they’re still living) and a $2000 seminar.
You need discipline. Discipline is better than motivation any day.
Why do you need discipline?
Kevin Bacon understands.
Because motivated is a mood.
But disciplined is a way of life.
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Computer Files And The Fate Of The World
“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS
For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)
I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.
I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.
Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.
The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.
Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)
I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.
Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.
I blame smart phones.
Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:
- Easier to use, and
- Harder for users to accidently goof up,
have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.
If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”
However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.
Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.
What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.
Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?
Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.
I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.
What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.
The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.
You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”
The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.
“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”
Bug? Or . . . feature?
Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)
Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Waiting For A Spark
Too much fuel, not enough spark.” – Ford vs. Ferrari
This clock tells when the next Civil War will be. This clock is so accurate, the military keeps it in Afghanistan.
- Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
- People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
- Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
- Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
- Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
- Open War.
Point 9., until this issue, used to be point 8. I’ve changed it out based on the idea that we’ve clearly passed point 8., but are not seeing the opposing structures required. I do not do this lightly, since this list was created after quite a bit of research.
It’s clear that the Right has no governing/war structures in place. Might someone be putting those in place? The Left thinks so, but I (and other readers) doubt it. By my observation, putting these structures in place does not take long, as I’ll write about below.
I’ll repeat this from the last Civil War Weather Report: The Right is being hunted, and punished for pushing back.
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 – The Spark – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Two Nations, Two Worldvies – 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 770 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.
The Spark
In research of Civil War over time, it appears that the conditions exist that start Civil Wars for some time before they turn into outright Civil War. Often, one group finally comes to the conclusion that they are out of power, will never be in power again, and are being treated unfairly, that feeling builds up. It’s waiting for a moment, a spark, that allows the emotional feeling to turn into action.
A recent example is Bud Light®. Bud Light’s™ recent ad campaign with a transexual person hit at just the wrong time. What’s the definition of the “wrong time”? After another transexual shot up a church school senselessly killing several people (and disappearing from the news in record time), people had enough. The killing was the last straw, after trans activists had worked to (among other things) set up transitioning children as young as toddlers, and remove pedophilia as something to be dealt with other than by fire and woodchipper.
People were done. They had no real way to protest as the Left came up with an unending number of ways to twist the sexuality of kids. Here was something, though, they could do, right now. Just don’t buy Bud Light©. That’s it.
The spark was simple – a narrative that had been pushed down people’s throats for a decade, on people who had no real way to push back as they were continually told they were wrong and evil if they didn’t want to jump into the child’s game of pretend where the G.I. Joes™ were really princess dolls at a tea party.
It’s not a big spark, but it’s one that should scare the Left. People are waking up, and questioning The Narrative. It’s not a big jump from there to the Left taking another step too far, and getting pushback. As I have said before, the most logical one in the United States is ownership of firearms – there are more guns in private hands than there are people in the United States, and if that’s pushed, I’m imagining that would be the spark. Remember, the Shot Heard ‘Round the World was fired on redcoats that were out to . . . take guns.
Violence and Censorship Update
The stories about why Tucker Carlson got fired are multiplying as time goes along. First? The Dominion lawsuit. Second? Describing Fox® executives using naughty words. Third? Some broad said he was sexist. Fourth? Robert Murdoch was scared of him. Fifth? The Ukrainians don’t like him. Sixth? Someone at Fox® had a case of the Mondays.
It’s irrelevant, really, because all of the people with the politically correct viewpoints (the Pentagon, the ADL©, the Soros family, AOC) all wanted him gone. Tucker provided one of the things that the Left can’t stand – someone to stand up to them. So? He’s gone. How much did they want Tucker gone? So far, FOX™ is down nearly a billion in market valuation.
So, they wanted him gone a lot.
Tucker’s already got a $100 million offer on the table, so, I think he’ll do fine.
Tucker was pretty big news, but there were some other events worth tracking as well. Being correctly labeled as “State Funded Media” NPR® and PBS© decided that they’d leave Twitter® because NPR™ falsely claimed that they like the truth and Elon proved that wasn’t the case.
JPMorgan® wants to take your things. Doing it through interest rates is too slow, so they just want to take the stuff.
A trial in Texas convicted a man for defending himself. Why? Because he was defending himself against Antifa®. Expect a pardon on that one.
The FBI thinks if you use the word “based” you’re an extremist. Don’t worry about keeping up with that yourself, they’ll track it for you.
Biden’s Misery Index
Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .
Yup, up again. Biden announced he was going to run for President. The only person that wants him to win is Jill. I think she has some parties planned, and the White House is good for that.
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 jumped up, ahead of schedule. May and June are generally bad months, we’ll see what happens in 2023.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable, and it was up a bit.
Economic:
Economic numbers are back up, a tiny bit. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.
Illegal Aliens:
I’d say the border is wide open, but we have no border. New York and Chicago are now irritated because they want these illegals to go back to Texas. Huh.
Two Nations, Two Worldviews
The United States is currently very polarized ideologically – a key fact in the tensions that may very well lead to Civil War. I wrote earlier in this Update about The Spark. The Spark mentioned above centered, at least partially, around children. That’s a powerful subject, and it is one that is fundamental at the civilizational level. No children? The civilization dies.
And yet, the Left is going all-in on gender ideology, reaching out to kids who would eat nothing but Cadbury Cream Eggs® and suggesting they are capable of making life altering decisions. In California, legislation has been suggested that would allow the state to take away any kid who feels that their gender choices haven’t been respected.
The United Nations jumped on this idea. Thankfully, the United Nations is little more than a knitting club, but they are absolutely in tune with The Narrative. Thankfully, someone spent the time and looked at exactly what words the New York Times® is attempting to put into The Narrative, and they showed up by frequency. Here they are:
There has been, and there is a continuing effort to propagandize Americans to accept The Narrative, and stories from the New York Times® are picked up worldwide. Here, you can see The Narrative, in its full glory, as the Times™ tries to shape the people it is supposed to inform.
It’s your mind, keep in mind what people are trying to sell, and make your own choices, and remember that together, we’re stronger and have more ability than anyone imagines.
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!
Bad Guys
https://twitter.com/wherescrewed/status/1647633030662483975/photo/1
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1647339038850859010
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645377339058970625
https://twitter.com/i/status/1647598422667456512
https://twitter.com/i/status/1647421259272052737
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645205129518301187
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645567760750227456
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645470144439754752
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645638282938662913
https://twitter.com/i/status/1646317391285047297
https://twitter.com/i/status/1644132885740367873
Good Guys (And Gals):
https://twitter.com/i/status/1650665339389132800
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645250939480158214
https://twitter.com/i/status/1645261569482428418
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1648058674919936000
https://abc13.com/houston-crime-shooting-4-hurt-hpd-investigation-circle-k-valero/13124992/
https://twitter.com/i/status/1644181952671653888
One Guy
Body Count
https://twitter.com/personalrespon1/status/1646885430766313474
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12017939/Record-one-FOUR-high-school-students-gay-bisexual.html
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2023-05-03_07-27-43.png?itok=je3spElX
https://nypost.com/2023/04/16/how-new-yorks-legal-weed-is-turning-workers-into-stoned-zombies/
https://www.phinancetechnologies.com/HumanityProjects/Projects.htm#Nav_VDamage
https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F04%2F11%2Fanalysis-big-tech-conducts-mass-layoffs-while-importing-34000-foreign-h-1b-workers-to-take-american-jobs%2F
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-bought-almost-60-million-100000845.html
Vote Count
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/09/bidens-digital-strategy-an-army-of-influencers
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1648462770936115202.html
Civil War
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/21/political-violence-2024-magazine-00093028
https://www.wpr.org/reporting-front-lines-slow-civil-war
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/barbara-walter-civil-war-democracy-ted-2023
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-john-roberts-saved-the-gop-and-sparked-its-civil-war
https://whitmanwire.com/opinion/2023/04/13/is-a-civil-war-likely-its-already-started/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/social-media-free-speech-jeff-leach-lawsuit/
https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/is-secession-the-best-way-forward
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3949011-sometimes-secession-works-why-it-wont-work-for-the-us/
Beyond Civil War
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/4-ways-that-joe-biden-could-get-america-into-a-nuclear-war
https://mythpilot.substack.com/p/total-nuclear-death
Your Job
Self-Experimentation And Leisure
“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade
I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat. She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.
Seth Roberts is dead. I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014. He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley. Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.
What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself. He even wrote a paper about it (LINK). It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood. I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.
In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.
Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.
The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:
Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire. Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things. He noted that these included:
- Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it. Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
- Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
- Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things. I think the BLM® riots might count here.
I can’t wait for their final show. Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?
Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way. The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.
It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up. He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians. They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world. Darn it for those guys. And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.
I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.
Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials. It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him. He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself. He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously. Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter? Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.
Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life. To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall. To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment. And most of them have worked well. 20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep. Now? I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.
Someone asked me what my dream job was. “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”
How long did that take? Years. An experiment here that worked. An experiment that didn’t. I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep. I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby. It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow? Is it a blanket? No, it’s Slumberman™.
My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful. For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.
This was a 100% solution. Every time, it worked. No theory. No real reason. And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.
Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems. And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.
People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.
But most of my life is in my hands. I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are. If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.
So, is self-experimentation good? Yeah, mostly. I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.
Open Bar at 9pm EDT on YouTube, or Catch It Later
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In this episode:
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- CDC makes up stuff
and? ThinkRealFast.
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/streams
PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations
“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer
I once had a dream I was an owl. It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)
The dollar. Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency. The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent. The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious. It was the strongest economy in the world. It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.
While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons. I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.
Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music. That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.
I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler. I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”
As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency. First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff. If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper. I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.
Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end. Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework. Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos. Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.
I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.
Then, Ukraine.
For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money. How much? $1 trillion. That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.
It was a pretty serious breach of trust. In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.” Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.
Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year. The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me. I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”
Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?
How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars? I’m not sure. Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.
To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here. Why are they headed back? Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.
If we lower the interest rates? Inflation kicks higher. If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less. If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.
But they didn’t. And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.
I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.
Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society. Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.
Maybe they could mine coal?
Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?
It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government. Then everything will change. Oops, guess not.
And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?
Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.