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“You must not take the Controller away. We will all die! The Controller is young and powerful. Perfect!” – Star Trek, TOS
Song lyric idea: “The Beautiful Sheeple, The Beautiful Sheeple . . .”
Currency started out innocently enough. If I wanted to sell my wheat and then buy some beer, well, I could trade my wheat to the brewer. But what if the brewer had all the wheat he needed, but needed, oh, hops? My wheat would do him no good. There is evidence of a guy making beer in the Bible, after all there’s a book in the New Testament named Hebrews.
I could try to trade my wheat to the guy who grew hops, but if he didn’t need any wheat, what was I to do?
The problem that currency solved was a simple one – how do I trade with someone who doesn’t need what I have? How can accountants get into amusement parks? How can ATF® agents do, well, anything since absolutely no one has any use for them?
The solution was some sort of medium of exchange. In one sense, it’s magic. As long as everyone believes, it works. When used judiciously (i.e., backed by gold on demand) it transforms into something that is hard to manipulate – what we’d call money.
How do you greet a German wheat farmer? “Gluten tag.”
When backed by nothing, (like now) it’s simply cash or currency.
The history of the last fifty years (and the last twenty, especially) has been the history of printing currency out of nothing and then giving it to a few small groups, and then they use the cash to buy up everything.
Once a group owns everything, there’s no reason for them to worry about profit: they already own all the things worth owning. That’s BlackRock©. The Aptly Named® Larry Fink runs it, and it’s no longer about profits, it’s about control based on his ideology.
What does Fink expect you to do when it’s cold? Huddle around a candle. What about when it’s freezing? Maybe then Larry will let you light the candle.
People (last I checked) still drive cars driven by sweet, sweet internal combustion engines. Those internal combustion engines (for the most part) require sweet, sweet crude oil to be turned into gasoline and diesel. Yeah, ethanol exists and so does biodiesel, but those can’t pull the load, and ethanol actively takes food out of the supply chain.
What if, however, the United Nations leaned on banks to get them to stop the supply of oil by choking off the supply of cash to oil producing nations?
If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: it’s not about humanity or human rights – it’s about control.
Is the reason Saudi Arabia has so much money all the oil cash, or that they won’t let their women spend it?
Please don’t believe me, believe them when they say it. Here is the head of the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) saying that “central banks will have absolute control over all money (sic)”. This is in how each dollar (or whatever unit) is used, what people are allowed to buy, and what people are prohibited to buy.
Why do Central Bankers drive Ferraris®? Because you’re okay with a Fiat©.
One thing I know that they’d love to do is to make money evaporate to force people to spend rather than save. This can be done with electronic currency, and I expect they will do it to make sure that people can’t save and are forced to work every day of their lives.
Even more than now.
-Fintech Times, July 25, 2023 (LINK)
Things are looking down for many Americans. When it comes to the point of using credit cards for financing life, it’s getting rough – I know, I was in that trap when I was in my 20s. I’ve seen it here in Modern Mayberry where the labor market is now getting tighter, and more people are looking for work. Employers can now be a bit choosier, which will put downward pressure on wages. The reason for this is simple: people aren’t going to McDonald’s®, they’re eating at home for half (or less) the price.
Another sign of control: in a recent month, 1.2 million “native or heritage”, (i.e., Americans actually born as Americans from American parents in America) lost their jobs. They were replaced by 600,000 immigrants. Low-cost labor is still being imported, and putting even more wage pressure on the middle and lower classes. The Biden administration even ordered that some of the gates in “The Wall” be welded open, which defeats the whole “wall” idea.
Looks like that Bill Gates was in charge of the wall, too. Look at all the Windows®.
To paraphrase William Jennings Bryant (among others), it is difficult to get a person to voice dissent when their next meal requires them to agree. That, then, is the nature of control of economic systems as demonstrated by BlackRock®, the BIS©, and the World Economic Forum™ – the desire is to make it so that the average person cannot resist without being kicked outside of the system that provides food, shelter, and the occasional luxury.
I’m sure it would be easy to start your own Central Bank . . . oh, maybe not.
Even that deal is in danger: the desire to dramatically change the way that people work and live is on the table for these groups. Who, exactly, do you think wants you to live in a pod and eat the bugs, and not own anything? Owning everything that matters isn’t enough – they want to own everything, and make your ability to have anything depending on you giving them all of yourself.
Even your thoughts.
And to think, all we really wanted was a beer. I guess it was pretty expensive.
“I give hope to men.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
“Hope to see you soon!” isn’t what I want to hear from my doctor.
Volume V, Issue 4
All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.
This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.
In this issue: Front Matter – A Sign of Spring – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Fall of the House of Biden – Links
Front Matter
Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 810 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.
A Sign of Spring 
A recent survey came out from the University of Michigan, which did a survey of high school seniors. The result didn’t particularly surprise me: high school boys aren’t a little more “conservative” – they’re a lot more to the Right. It has declined a bit since the high point in 2020, but there was no corresponding uptick in the boys turning Leftie. High school boys are nearly 2 to 1 on the Right.
It doesn’t surprise me. Part of the war of the Left has been a war on manhood, and you can see the increase in feelings on the Right corresponded well with politicians, the media, and companies like Gillette® telling young men that they’re awful, trying to convince them to emasculate themselves, and flat out trying to tell them that they’re really girls deep down inside.
This has sparked a backlash, and the Leftists will probably have lost an entire generation of young men. As an example, a bunch of Leftist researchers from Oregon State tried to get engineering and computer science students to take a survey about Leftist gender gobbledygook. The (primarily male) STEM students roasted the survey so hard that several of the transgender researchers were made even more mentally unstable having to read the responses that conflicted with their carefully created safe-space of ideas.
Of course, the response to the survey was that there needed to be more “reeducation” for the young men. That will, of course, just push all of them farther Right.
I will note that girls in high school (who have been Lefties since probably forever) did spike upward with the Supreme Court abortion ruling to their highest level, ever. I’m not particularly worried about this, because I think most of the high-quality men will be on the Right, and, well nature will take its course.
And bad times? Bad times bring out the Right in people. And, those are certainly not here, but they are coming.
Violence and Censorship Update
We’ve had much more violence than censorship lately, so let’s start off with the Mayor of Chicago (who sadly beat the meme-worthy Mayor Beetlejuice) has determined the reason that violence in Chicago is so bad. Thieves? Criminals? No, continuing the logic of the Left, the causes for violence are inanimate objects, like cars, guns, houses with glass that’s too fragile, and people who look like they might have more the $5.
In Stockton California, two 7-Eleven® beat the everloving snot out of a thief who felt that he could take his time while stealing thousands of dollars of cigarettes. The bigger crime is that the clerks who defended justice in such a wonderful and amusing way were vilified by the California press. Wonder why there’s crime? This is why there’s crime. The Stockton police say the Sikh men who beat on the criminal won’t be charged. I won’t make this into some sort of Sikh joke.
Antifa members walked after a Leftie jury found them not liable at a civil trial. The Left can and will continue to be violent as long as there are no repercussions of note, and it is certainly not in the interests of the Left, who hold the reins of power in cities like Portland, to stop them.
Part of our language is having a variety of words for things. Part of the very worst, most Orwellian type of censorship is removing those words and changing their meaning. Case in point, the word, “Woman”. It has existed in every language, ever. Yet now, we have woke CEOs who now try to police the language of people who aren’t even a real percentage of their actual customers. Harry’s Razors® will probably not be the new Bud Light®, but you can see it from here.
Ignoring this, of course, will have the real, simple words that have been in our language AS LONG AS WE HAVE BEEN HUMAN eradicated or shifted in meaning to the point of uselessness. Thus, this attack is censorship. Just ask Trish:
Lastly, I’m sure Mr. Musk will be in for trouble as he points out one of the biggest advocates for censorship on the Internet:
Biden’s Misery Index
Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .
Yup, up again. I have no idea why that would be, with leadership as smart as this (note, Lathechuck corrected that Harris (probably) never said this, but she’s said so much other stupid crap I didn’t fact check this one):
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, slightly – I was expecting more during a long, hot summer. I’m guessing that people don’t even notice it anymore.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable, and it was nearly dead flat. Biden is unravelling, so this may increase a bit.
Economic:
Economic numbers are swinging back down again this month, but I expect October will be a bit more interesting after earnings reports.
Illegal Aliens:
The border numbers are up only slightly, and I think that (shockingly) the government may just be lying or that the Border Patrol is being told to leave the illegals alone. Why would I think that?
And the result is that anyone trying to do anything to stem the unrelenting tide is called out.
The Fall of the House of Biden
Okay, maybe that title is a bit too much, but we’re deep into election season and there’s no real sense that Biden is doing anything or will do anything. The first hint is that Kamala is nowhere to be seen, but, then again, that might be part of the campaign because, well, she’s Kamala.
All sorts of other bad news are coming out now for Biden. There is yet more information showing up that would indicate that the vote was, at the very least, suspect in the only places that were required for him to steal the election. I think this is intentional, and I think it’s because the Left wants Biden out. Why? He’s a horrible, horrible liability every time he opens his mouth.
The playbook for the 2024 election is starting to show. They’ve also let slip that the prosecution of Trump is entirely political. The rumor is, and I stress rumor, is that the prosecution of Trump is being done in coordination with the Biden White House. It certainly fits the setup to prosecute Trump, but also bring Sleepy Joe down, too. His bizarre behavior certainly hasn’t helped:
I mean, really, who would let their child anywhere near a Biden?
But I’m sure the other candidates aren’t fake at all:
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!
Bad Guys
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12390343/Brazen-thieves-ransack-YSL-store-California.html
Good Guys
https://crimeresearch.org/2023/08/cases-where-armed-citizens-have-stopped-active-shooter-incidents/
One Guy
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195655023/the-rise-of-oliver-anthony-and-rich-men-north-of-richmond
Body Count
https://studyfinds.org/united-states-mortality-rate/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2023-07-11_11-13-16.jpg?itok=SnHr9qTF
https://twitter.com/i/status/1693837585905250364
Vote Count
https://capitalresearch.org/article/report-how-charities-secretly-help-win-elections/
Civil War
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/25/sarah-palin-us-civil-war-donald-trump-prosecutions
https://newrepublic.com/post/175257/maga-georgia-state-senator-trump-trial-civil-war
https://truthout.org/articles/georgia-republican-warns-of-civil-war-if-case-against-trump-proceeds/
https://www.newsweek.com/pro-trump-lawmaker-fears-civil-war-if-fani-willis-isnt-defunded-1823253
https://news.yahoo.com/mehdi-hasan-shows-why-civil-054756823.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-united-states-election-2024-serious-threat/
“Watch your top knot.” – Jeremiah Johnson
Bill Clinton thought Hillary would be a good president: “There’s no chance she’ll blow it.”
Alexander the Great is said to have solved the riddle of the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C. Whoever solved the Knot, the legend said, would rule all of Asia. Alexander took one look at the large and complex knot, pulled out his sword and cut right through it. I think Alexander was certain that he’d be successful and that no one would challenge his solution since he had, you know, an army with him. I guess you could say he was so confident that he was knot sure.
One of the things that I’ve seen fairly consistently in my life is that, like Alexander, I generally know the answer right when I see the problem. Some of them, like calculus problems, it took a lot of work to get the answer, admittedly, but there was no place when I said, “Well, if only the Federal government had a Federal Bureau of Solving Calculus problems, I’d be set.” No. I knew the only answer was for me to sit down and hack through that calculus problem until I had it solved.
Most problems in life are just that simple. Too hot in the living room? Get a fan. Turn the air conditioning down. Experiment to see how many cold beers it takes to make me feel cold. But I never think to act on that until I’m uncomfortable. When I’m slightly warm, I don’t go running for the fan, I just deal with it. But when I start to sweat?
Time to take action.
What does a hipster say to create peer pressure? “C’mon, man, no one is doing it!”
I think most people are like this, not just me. Sure, there are things I do when I anticipate a problem coming down the road to save myself the trouble. But like that room temperature slowly rising, at some point I look at the situation and note, “This must be dealt with.” But I always knew the solution.
The solution itself isn’t the issue. Most solutions are mind-numbingly clear. The level of frustration or fear or whatever motivating me just has to be high enough that I’m willing to take the action necessary to solve the problem. To be clear, I also have to believe that my action might work – if I think the air conditioner is broken, for instance, I won’t bother to go over to turn it on and will stick with the whole “drink a lot of really cold beer” idea.
The above paragraph contains all three of dead economist Ludwig Von Mises’ causes of Human Action. Von Mises said for anyone to take conscious action, for any action three things needed to be present:
While I’m focusing on today is when we already know what we want, I’ll just noted that it doesn’t have to come in that order.
It turns out my chemistry teacher was right – alcohol is a solution.
On a personal level, I have to be uncomfortable enough from where I am and where I could be to initiate action. The Vision has to be sufficiently far from where I am for me to care. But, again, I generally know the solution, it just requires enough discomfort to create action. If my air conditioner isn’t working in December, that’s not a big deal. If it has failed in July, that’s where I’m willing to pay extra to see the repair folks show up on a Sunday afternoon because the liquor stores are closed then.
Other examples – I don’t paint my house when it’s a little faded, I might need to see some bare spots. I wait until the trashcan is maybe slightly more than full to take it out. But in each case the action isn’t in question. I always know the solution. It’s not a mystery.
It’s similar as a society. In a society, we all have the ability to act as individuals, but there is some minimum number of people that are required to take action. One group, the 3%ers, took their name from the idea that only 3% of the American Colonial population fought and won against the British. I’m not sure that 3% is correct; that’s irrelevant to the post.
Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.
Certainly, that’s a minimization, because if there hadn’t been broad support for the American Revolution anyway, it wouldn’t have happened. Rather, I am certain that group of fighters represented the symptom of a greater dissatisfaction.
Everyone on the side of the Revolution knew what had to be done. If you take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it certainly spells out the vision, and also spells out the reasons why it was important to take the action.
Of the signers, at least John Hancock had belief that the actions would work, since he signed his name so boldly and largely. And John Hancock never told a knock-knock joke. Why? Freedom rings, baby.
For each of the societal ills we see, the solution isn’t complex, it’s simple. We just haven’t had the guts to implement it. If mobs are ruling the streets of San Francisco or Chicago or Malmo, the solution isn’t to study the problem with a commission. The solution is to make crime much more uncomfortable than the reward for committing the crime.
I’m glad Godzilla® wasn’t Korean. That would have been Seoul destroying.
That solution to stopping crime will involve dead criminals. Oddly, it takes less to keep criminals in line than to stop criminality, but the solution almost always involves Rooftop Koreans and bar owners with very short shotguns and prosecutors that don’t prosecute good and honest people stopping crime.
If the problem is illegals flooding the southern border, the only actual solution is to make living in the United States a living hell for illegals. I assure you, if sufficient pressure was applied, the illegals would deport themselves in weeks.
Have an anchor baby? Fine. It goes into an orphanage or with foster parents. Illegals have to leave. Something tells me the parents will pack up the kids as they head out.
Brought here as a young child and the United States is the only country they’ve ever known? Not my problem. They have to go back.
Drugs? Simple solution. I’ll leave that one to you.
Illegitimate kids? Remove spousal support and child support and welfare. Illegitimate kids will cease in a year and the baby-daddy with 20 different baby-mommas will disappear while those baby-mommas cease to have sex randomly. Or, if they do? They have to suffer the consequences.
What about the kids? Yeah, heard it. Don’t care. It’s that sort of forced compassion that destroys nations, turns them into countries, and eventually leads to Balkanization.
I fell into the reupholstery machine at the furniture factory. I’m completely recovered now.
I’m right and every person reading this knows it.
The wonderful part is that these solutions will take place. Sadly, because the room is getting warmer, these solutions will take place only when the discomfort is so high that it will be unpleasant for all concerned.
And then, once again, the Gordian Knot will be solved.
The Mrs. made a commercial for the 100th episode. It’s funny. The episode itself will be available (stream starting around 8:55 EST, show starts at 9pm EST. Or, you can watch it later – it’s still funny.
Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/streams
“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS
Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.
As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity. Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros. Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.
Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”. Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.
I heard a fairy tale about politics once. It was Grimm.
Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream. Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.
On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source. The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.
So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it. So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane. I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!
Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol. These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote. Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.
“But we could make houses out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could make furniture out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could heat houses with it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”
The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles. The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario. 45%! The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.
That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years. I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years. That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles. I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.
>Be forest.
>Exist. Die. Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.
That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon. Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered. Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .
Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier. It has to be generated somewhere.
One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car. The question is, where do those materials come from? If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.
>Be forest.
>Burn. Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.
According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today. Cobalt increases would be 2,000%. The increase in availability alone is questionable. Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is. And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?
It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious. China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO2, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO2. Why do we fixate on the United States?
First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.
Second? The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever. The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.
Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?
Or was that the plan all along?
At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity. That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy. Me? I have my own plans.
“Hey, is that Donald Trump’s car?” – American Psycho
Biden likes all-mail voting, Trump prefers all-male voting.
The battle of the Left against Trump continues, as it will for every day of his life. There isn’t really an end to how much he’s rustled the collective jimmies of the Left. It’s especially fun to watch it play out in the Twitter™ X® feeds of Leftist celebrities like John Cusack, Ron Perlman, Steven King or Rob Reiner.
It’s actually amazing to watch the chemicals soak their brain as their amygdala gets hijacked by someone not even in the room (great example here: LINK). And I’m glad that I’ve never been in a small room on a hot day with Cusack, Perlman, King and Reiner – imagine the smell.
Why is that? Trump is a focus. If you go back in time, the Left was similarly fixated on Bush I, Bush II, and Reek, er Mittens Romney. As noted by the commentor El B on last Wednesday’s post Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com),
I imagine the next article will be titled, “There’s no good reason you should have to be alive to vote” so at last Pa Wilder can vote Democrat.
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a promiscuous habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.
C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, where the quote above originates. It was written as if from a demon to his nephew, showing how Evil might best subvert society. In 2023, I think it could simply be a text from Soros to his kid. Lewis absolutely nails this concept, and does it in a simple, cogent, readable paragraph. Sadly for humanity, Leftists live this way, and thrive on it.
All of the hate of the Left has a concrete and local focus, and all of their compassion is spread in such a diffuse manner that it becomes meaningless. This is why these monsters pretend that handouts from the government (from money coerced from actually productive people) to those who meet some nearly arbitrary criteria is the same as actual charity.
I just donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see the money.
But back to Trump. After he first said “Build the Wall®” the Left went into overdrive with hate towards Trump, pulling out all of the stops. “Europeans won’t think nice things about us!” they said. My response to that one is actually very, very simple, “So what? My ancestors left there for a reason and we have better steak here and don’t have to share a continent with the French.”
Trump’s presidency wasn’t a failure, but it was close, and it showed off his biggest weaknesses: the chose people based on how much the complimented him, and not based on either actual competence or actual loyalty. His personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was a prime example. He hired a corrupt caricature of a sleezy lawyer to do business for him, and was shocked when the guy actually turned out to be sleezy.
Who knew???
Trump didn’t build the wall, didn’t stand up to Congress, and blinked when he had the chance to cross the Rubicon and stand for actual election integrity since, yeah, we know that the Left stole the election, and the receipts to back that statement up are starting to pile up. He did add some okay Supreme Court justices, but I think he should have added the Zodiac Killer, Ted Cruz.
I’m telling you, it would have sucked to have been killed just because I’m a Sagittarius.
Had Trump said, “I’m staying here, not because I demand the power, but I will stay here until a President can be rightfully elected to replace me. I declare that elections will take place in November 2021. I will not be a candidate, and will in no way serve past January 20, 2022 regardless of the circumstances. This is necessary to ensure that the legitimacy of the Presidency of the United States remains unsullied.” Oh, sure, he’d have said, “I, your greatest President, will stay in office because you deserve a system that is excellent in a way only I can give you.”
Then, he could have done that, and retired a hero to the middle and the Right and it would have been talked about for 500 years. The Left would have grumbled, and might have lost their demon and the coming inevitable crisis might (stress, might) have been pushed down the road a decade or more.
After Caesar crossed the Rubicon, I believe his first words were, “Can someone get me some dry socks?”
One thing Trump did was completely transform the face of politics. Just as the Left didn’t vote for Biden, instead voting against Trump, Trump unmasked the utter weakness and complicity of the Republican politicians (not the Right) in creating the landscape we have today. It was especially instructive watching Trump eviscerate ¡JEB! ¡JEB! had been the consensus candidate for the establishment, but Trump sucked all the air (and ¡JEB!’s soul, it looked like) out the room.
This was also inevitable. The system has stopped serving the interests of the heritage American middle class for decades. Vox Day put it very well the other day when he noted that the Republican debate featured two Indians arguing about who could give more money to Israel.
I think there are a lot of people who would vote GOP for $20. Heck, vote twice and you can afford a Big Mac®
Will Trump survive the trials? I think not. The original charges are (mainly, as far as I can tell – IANAL) to be farcical. Trump’s later attempts at covering crap up? Not so much. There are legitimate charges that could bring him down if Trump did really try to have records or videos erased.
Regardless, the RINOs are doing everything they can to hide the only candidate that they have that has national impact, the only candidate who is leading in the battleground states, the only candidate who stands a chance against the corrupt vote harvesting system set up by the Left.
Then what? Après moi, le deluge (After me, the flood) is attributed to Louis XV, and is said to foreshadow the French Revolution. Since we need more rain here, I’ll adapt the phrase for our current problem:
Après Trump, qui? (After Trump, who?)
The only person on the Right who can even come close to Trump in charisma and poise is Tucker Carlson. Tucker seems to have as much charisma, but can also add in an intelligence and poise lacking in Trump. Could he manage being President? I have no idea, but when compared with the rest of the candidates on the Right, he leaves them all in the dust.
Longer term who will emerge as a leader? Some corporal that fought in Afghanistan and is fed up?
We’ll see. The current crop of mainstream politicians on the Right and Left make ¡JEB!’s charisma vacuum look like Robert Downy, Jr. Most of their policies are, at best, simple replays of politics that are 20 years into the past, with less of a likelihood of solving our problems than using a 4-year-olds fingerpainting to design a passenger jet, though that might be exactly what Boeing® does nowadays.
I’ll vote for Trump in November 2024 if he’s not in the slammer, obviously. It amuses me to watch the Leftists get in a froth-ridden frenzy against Trump. It’s almost like Leftists don’t believe Biden won the election.
“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy hitting buttons randomly.” – Phineas and Ferb
At dinner sometimes I pretend to gag. My kids know it’s just another dad choke.
There’s a time for odds and ends, and Friday is as good as any since a lot of them are on the health side. These are sort-of random, and are around a central theme of experiments that I do to myself and some of the results. I’m not going repeat the one where I replaced my arms with animal limbs – that idea still makes me mad enough to rip up a car with my bear hands.
First: Humans have been taking drugs for at least 12,000 years. I have written (and stand by the idea) (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com)) that the reason that civilization was formed was so we could have beer. If you look at the artifacts found at Göbekli Tepe you’d find that one of them is a stone trough perfect for making beer, with residue from making beer. People have also been ingesting or smoking various things for millennia from coffee to mushrooms to the Devil’s Lettuce. Humans are drug using – it changes our mood.
I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week and he led off with an interesting comment. “Music is a drug,” because it alters our moods. I was working the other day with earbuds in and found myself really happy. Why? Music. It put me in a great mood and I was amazingly productive.
I hear wind turbines are big metal fans.
Adams is right, music acts like a drug. But there’s more: literature and television and Twitter™ I mean X© all fall into the same category. When I was dating in high school I also (accidently) found that horror movies were an amazing aphrodisiac for the girls I dated. Who knew?
I watched a LOT of horror movies on dates when I was in high school. I guess you could chalk that up to Pavlov’s libido.
I have made this point many times: be careful what you let into your head. It can act like a drug, and the wrong drug at the wrong time can be fatal. Choose wisely, and avoid things that make you feel despair.
Second: YouTube® recommended an 8-hour dreaming track that they promised would allow me to have lucid dreams. For those not aware, lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming, but you’re fully conscious. It’s an odd state – it’s not like being hypnogogic, where you’re in that twilight zone between being awake and being asleep. Nope, you’re dreaming but you’re fully conscious.
My boss said I was on the Dream Team! He also asked me to stop sleeping at work.
Sounds like something good, right?
The first night I tried it, The Mrs. reacted very negatively. “What on Earth were you playing last night? It gave me awful dreams.” I persisted for a few weeks. Normally, I go to sleep quite easily, and just like Epstein’s prison guards, I can sleep through almost anything. I still found it easy to go to sleep with the “music” but my dream quality really changed over several weeks. My dreams became incredibly dull. Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.
Aaaargh! I love dreaming when I’m a pirate, or hanging out with Tom Cruise having adventures or being asked by ZZ Top® to play bass at a concert because they were desperate. Those are good dreams. But being at work doing normal day-to-day crap?
It was awful. And I was conscious during the work dreams. Sometimes I’d end them, but end up going right back to work. In my dreams.
That was bad enough, but the final straw that ended this experiment for me was that I would wake up at 4am and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d be there hours, awake in bed. Or so I thought. In reality, I was dreaming that I was trying to get to sleep, but I was fully conscious. I figured this out one morning when my alarm went off during a dream about trying to get to sleep.
That was weird.
I cannot recommend this sort of “music”, unless you want to relive a boring day at the office without being paid for it.
After I stopped, within a week my old sleep patterns returned.
Third: I was the victim of a plagiarist this week. Oh, sure, I’ve actually seen that someone tried to make .pdfs of my posts and (maybe?) sell them a few years ago, but that isn’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about someone taking one of my posts and re-writing it, beat for beat, even using the same analogies.
I’m still mad at the guy who did it.
Surprise: It was me.
Sometimes I take notes (I used to use notecards, but don’t have the same set up, so don’t anymore) for posts. Other times? Walking around, or snoozing, and a post idea hits me. I’ll often work it out in my head, and then write it out.
Plagiarist? Their words, not mine.
I did the latter in this case. Then I saw an old post of mine getting traffic with a really similar name after I posted the piece I had just finished. I clicked on it, and it was amazingly similar – the algorithm that suggests posts based on the post I have up suggested it. That post was also four years older, so I guess my main defense was that I’d written somewhere north of 600 posts (nearly 750,000 words) and slept over 1300 times (1260 if you discount the lucid dreaming nights) since then.
Fourth: I’m really enjoying doing the podcast. This isn’t a commercial or anything, since if only one or two people listened I think we’d still be doing it because it’s fun. It’s a livestream now, but I think it’s pretty tightly produced, so we don’t end up with a lot of the awkwardness you’d expect with an amateur like Shawn Hannity. Nope, we’re professionals. Also, I’m thinking this makes us journalists. For legal reasons. You can watch it here (LINK).
I bring it up because a) I can prove The Mrs. actually exists, and b) it’s something we have a lot of fun doing, and it’s creative and we mostly have our clothes on when we do it. As far as you know.
Fifth: I used to hang out with The Mrs. at lunch, but since her schedule changed, I don’t. Instead, I’ve packed off my laptop and tried to be productive wherever I am during lunch, and it saves mileage and I just don’t eat, so that’s a bonus, too. I’m writing this at lunch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far since I tend to do the first drafts and then when I get home later I do the research and edits and add the (bad) jokes.
Actual German joke: “Why are there so few crimes in Germany? Because it’s illegal.”
It may not sound like a big change, but it shaves hours off of my writing time, and those are hours that I can sleep instead rather than building up a big sleep debt and paying it off on the weekend. Plus, I’m fasting at lunch. In reality, when I went home I’d eat, but I find I don’t miss it at all.
I also think I might get a better overall quality since I’m writing during my most productive time, and editing and cracking jokes at my sillier times. We’ll see.
As always, YMMV.
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“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz
Whoops, sorry! Just a regular old death cult after all.
This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week. This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.
What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post. I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me. I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left. It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.
The graph is shown as a bullseye. Why? I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway. They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.
I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim. They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it. Who put the electrodes up the fish butts? Grad students.
The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:
So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you? For me, this is an easy answer. I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.
Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?
In general, I like the people that are close to me more. Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people. I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®. Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:
Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.
Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics. What about the Left?
Why did they pick 45°?
Whoa, that’s amazingly different! Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them. The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated. They like these things best:
Rocks are more important to them than their parents. And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why. They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them. You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death. “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!” Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status. “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”
I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?
To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning. But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.
I’m not kidding. I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans. Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.
To be clear, I love the environment. I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees. The reason I love them is simple: they exist to by enjoyed by Man. If Man doesn’t exist? None of these mean anything to me. There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now. Because we want to make cows happy? No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust. To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man. But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.
The Moon? Just rock without people. And Soviet Russian ships that landed. A crash is a landing, right?
Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country. Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits? Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends. Why? We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.
When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?
Thought so.
People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government. I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest. For today, let’s focus on government.
The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.
Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?
The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control. And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people). And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy. They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin. Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains: they hate humanity.
Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer. None of these policies have humans in mind.
Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck. I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do. That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy. I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.
Hmmm.
Mussolini was lucky. On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.
Other examples of this are things like nuclear power. The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner. How can we drag them back down? Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.
The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy. Is an energy crisis coming? It certainly is. Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people? Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.
To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.
Is Leftism a death cult?
Not if you’re a rock. Otherwise, yeah.
