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.

What Wal-Mart Taught Me About Being Happy

“Dredd, there’s no way in.  Are you even listening to me?  We can’t just knock on the wall and say “Hello, Cursed Earth Pizza”.” – Judge Dredd

If I had a nickel for every time I’d been cursed by a one-eyed Romanian gypsy after midnight at a 7-11®, I’d have two nickels.  That isn’t a lot of money, but still weird that it happened twice.

I remember when we lived in Houston, we went shopping in Wal-Mart®.  Once.  We walked into the store and it was simply depressing.  Not a person in the place seemed happy to be there.  The clerks at checkout seemed to be quite angry, to the point where I wondered if the store’s policy required them to rub six tablespoons of Frank’s Red Hot® on their genitals before each shift.

It also showed on the shelves:  towels, instead of being neatly stacked, were on the shelves in a random and sloppy way.  There was residual trash in the shopping cart that we selected.  Why not pick a different cart?  Do I have a fetish for pushing trash around in a shopping cart?  No, there was some sort of trash in each cart.  I chose one, on purpose, that didn’t have liquid-y trash in it.

When my dog is cold, is he a chilly dog?

As is recall (and it’s been nearly two decades ago now) we were there to buy something kid-related that the store we normally shopped at didn’t have, so we had to trek all of the way to the back of the store to see the most random assortment of mis-stocked shelves that made me wonder if this Wal-Mart© had a store policy against hiring anyone with OCD.

I seem to recall we did buy something, and quickly left.

We never went back.  The store wasn’t in a bad section of town, but it seemed oddly . . . cursed.  It’s like they built the whole store over the pit where the hospital used to bury all the severed limbs that they amputated when the leeches and bloodletting didn’t work.

I’ve thought about that Wal-Mart© more than the one time I visited it.  The place seemed so . . . off it’s hard to describe.  It just made me want to leave that store faster than the Secret Service closes an investigation into exactly whose cocaine was in the White House.

After moving to Modern Mayberry, the experiences in Wal-Mart® was drastically different.  It’s a small detail, but when I go in there, the towels are always neatly folded and stacked.  There is no, and I mean zero trash in the carts and the floors are always entirely spotless.

Where’s Arnold’s favorite spot in a Wal-Mart™?  Aisle B.  Back.

And the people who shop there and the employees who work there seem happier.  Sure, some of the employees grumbled, but they grumble at me because I’ve known them for years.  The checkouts are fast and efficient, and if the store policy requires rubbing anything into their crotch, it’s not Frank’s Red Hot®.

I don’t mind going to Wal-Mart™ in Modern Mayberry because it’s not a gloomy place.  It seems to be a happy one.  People smile while they buy their ham and mayonnaise and potatoes and chicken thighs.  They’re polite to one another, and I’ve seen more than one adult talk to a kid they didn’t know to tell them to stop shenanigans in the aisles.  And I’ve done it myself.

And the kids stop the shenanigans.

Wal-Mart© isn’t home, but it is a hometown store here.

I think part of the reason that Wal-Mart™ here is different in Houston is that none of us are anonymous.  We walk into the store and see people we know.  Be a jerk to a clerk?  That might just be your friend’s kid who is just having a bad day.

Congrats Whitney, you’ve been drug free for years now!

The other part is I think there is a much greater sense of community in a place like Modern Mayberry.  We’ve been here a decade, and while I’m not the new kid on the block, many people I come into contact with have been here for generations.  Oops!  That makes them sound like vampires.  But parts of The Mrs.’ family have been in this area at least since the 1890s.  When Pugsley goes out with people, we ask “who” since you can generally infer if the family is trouble just through the last name.

We never let him hang out with anyone named Clinton.  I mean, the parties are great, but bad things happen if you get on their bad side.

I knew someone would want an Epstein joke, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging.

But all of that aside – what I’ve found to be a good idea is to avoid places that suck.  No, I don’t think that Wal-Mart© in Houston was cursed, but I do think that the people in there didn’t like their work, and didn’t want to be there.  They were unhappy.  They were victims.

In my experience, people on the Right are happier (by far!) than people on the Left.  In study after study, it’s weird that people on the Right are more tolerant of the viewpoints of others.  One recent study (LINK) of college kids (is it bad that I assumed their species?) showed that Leftists absolutely hate people on the Right and are scared to be exposed to their ideas.  62% of Leftists said they would probably or definitely not room with a normal person.  28% of students on the Right said they were fine rooming with a commie.

Leftists also show much higher rates of mental problems (I could link a study, but you have search engines and also know Leftists) and are generally far less competent.  I think the “far less competent is why they’re Leftists in the first place.

My county voted 85% for Trump, so by inference we’re happier, more competent, and far more tolerant than any Leftist enclave.

What do you call an Italian Chad?  An Alfredo male.

Regardless, once again the pathway to being happy proves to be devastatingly simple:  avoid cities, be on the Right, be competent, and don’t put Frank’s Red Hot® down your pants.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families.  I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then.  Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it.  The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings.  They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner.  The big difference was in flexibility.  If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is.  The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income.  That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency.  The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes.  To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value.  So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down.  I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live.  Ouch.  One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason.  I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad.  This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction?  Yeah.  But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge. 

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments.  Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still.  But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency.  This is another one.  It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades.  There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith.  Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot.  In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income.  But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence.  This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control.  When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent.  This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one.  I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades.  It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man.  The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution?  Resilience.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Lessons From France And Falling Apart

“Yes, I shall certainly choose revolutionary France for my holiday again next year.” – Blackadder the Third

Why does France have so many rivers?  Water follows the path of least resistance.

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

Volume V, Issue 2

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 – Lessons From France – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Falling Apart – 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 800 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Lessons From France

France is always at the front of things, like fashion trends, like making great wine, like losing wars against countries that aren’t France.  Recently, after a foreign “youth” was killed after a police chase, the massive foreign population of France rebelled.  Riots, which are generally scheduled for every Wednesday in France, were extended to the weekends.

The people initially rioting were the Leftists and the foreign population of France.  Thankfully, they provided several lessons that may apply to the future Civil War in the United States.

First, violence can start and spread rapidly.  The violence is, generally, confined to the cities.

Second, the police won’t do much against people who are Leftist or associated with Leftist causes, like unrestrained immigration.

Third, the police will rapidly, and with great force jump down the throats of native peoples defending themselves.

Fourth, the native people can and will rapidly organize.  The time for organization in the face of a significant threat is measured in days, not weeks.  This organization scares the Powers That Be and they’ll rapidly do everything they can to stop it.  Everything.

Fifth, diversity isn’t a strength, it’s a weakness.  Society is tough to maintain and requires effort at every point in history.  Adding in a foreign element that has no commonality with the host country other than that they eat and use oxygen doesn’t make a country stronger, it weakens it.

Ask the French.

There are probably some other lessons (feel free to share more below) but these are the big ones I found.

Violence and Censorship Update

The censorship this month again is bigger than the violence.  Here are a few moments in a very, very busy month.  The theme of this month is about censorship unravelling as even the press begins to turn against Biden in preparation for his successor for the 2024 election.  Gavin Newsom?  Likely.

The biggest stories are about suppression of information about alleged corruption of the Biden Crime Family®.  Here are a few snippets of how the .gov folks are attempting to suppress

It’s almost like there was some sort of collusion between the Left and the various parts of the government, like the Biden Administration blocking disclosure of the Deep State’s® manipulation of the 2020 election.  Wonder why?

But if that’s not creepy enough, the .mil folks were looking for mean Tweets®:

And the CIA wanted the Leftists to win in Brazil.  Again, shocking.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, but not as steep.

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 down – I was expecting more during a long, hot summer.  Perhaps August?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit, though people are thinking a lot more about Civil War.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back up.  The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good, but June was a calm month.

Illegal Aliens:

The border numbers are down, and I’m a bit surprised, since the infiltration continues.  Suppressed numbers?

Falling Apart

During the month I save memes and snippets to use in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, often, they for a theme for the month.  This month, I had a few where the only thing I could think of was the theme that everything is falling apart – the values that we once held dear are now inverted, and we cease to be recognizable as a country.

The first is inversion, and Krassenstein, thankfully, took a lot of heat for this really, really bad Tweet®.

In California, the criminals have more rights than property owners.

And let’s look at the impact of diversity:

And just like Jason from Friday the 13th, you can tell that Evil never dies:

And things that are good are described as Evil.  Funny.

But the tide is turning . . . .

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1672995397642469378

https://twitter.com/i/status/1673519038855630849

https://twitter.com/i/status/1677485194918461440

https://twitter.com/i/status/1674800078845018118

https://twitter.com/i/status/1673049905470795776

https://twitter.com/i/status/1671291289776664578

https://twitter.com/i/status/1670750415057477633

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1673880949287706624

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1667539871232315392

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1672303533998108672

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbzrxEuL54

https://twitter.com/ScottLoBaido/status/1667293405804736513

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/06/26/making-real-men-king-randall-and-the-life-preparatory-school-for-boys/

 

One Guy

https://www.foxnews.com/us/armed-las-vegas-housing-employee-thwarted-likely-mass-shooting-received-little-attention-expert

https://www.revolver.news/2023/06/nyc-threatens-queens-hero-with-91-years-in-prison-after-he-shoots-violent-crazed-robber-who-attacked-him/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12237045/Murder-charges-against-Chicago-mother-son-14-dropped-video-shows-victim-punching-mom.html

https://news.yahoo.com/advocates-call-for-abolishing-stand-your-ground-laws-after-ajike-owenss-death-192846780.html

 

Body Count

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/30161.jpeg

https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1673982701500497922

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/covid-deaths-heart.jpeg

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/06/no_author/865136-2/

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-the-cardiovascular-death-toll

https://www.statista.com/chart/30206/suicide-homicide-rates-us-10-24/

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/fentanyl-responsible-80-overdose-deaths-under-24-us

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1669919081343111168

https://apnews.com/article/polarization-republicans-democrats-abortion-gender-colorado-idaho-406b5a841d4d47c8a08cf054c38bb2a0

https://alt-market.us/how-to-solve-violence-in-the-us-remove-democrat-run-cities-and-bring-back-asylums/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-all-volunteer-force-is-in-crisis/ar-AA1dmIUn

https://nypost.com/2023/06/11/us-military-offers-legal-migrants-path-to-citizenship-amid-recruiting-shortfall/?utm_campaign=nypost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

 

Vote Count

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2023%2F06%2Fthe_gop_is_losing_the_vote_fraud_war_.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/states-introduced-nearly-200-bills-2023-subvert-elections-report-finds-rcna88163

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/update-halderman-report-reveals-georgias-dominion-voting-machines/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fnews-and-politics%2Frobert-spencer%2F2023%2F06%2F19%2Fnow-they-tell-us-new-report-reveals-critical-vulnerabilities-in-dominion-voting-machines-n1704516

 

Civil War

https://idahocapitalsun.com/2023/06/08/wallowa-county-votes-for-greater-idaho-talks-crook-county-schedules-vote/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/secession-talks-emerge-in-one-northern-california-county-is-a-new-state-a-possibility/ar-AA1cA1jy

https://lithub.com/how-inflammatory-rhetoric-feeds-the-insurrectional-fantasies-of-the-far-right/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/10/how-to-avoid-a-civil-war-by-the-man-who-predicted-trump

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/12/trump-civil-war-chances-documents-indictment

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-far-right-brad-onishi-america-civil-war-interview-1234772017/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/the-congressman-telling-trump-supporters-to-buckle-up/674367/

https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/06/1440/810/AP23161658871944.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/03/americans-down-on-god-family-country-patriotism-polling

https://news.gallup.com/poll/507980/extreme-pride-american-remains-near-record-low.aspx

https://twitter.com/CannConActual/status/1667650134656655361

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1676433342223515651

 

Through A Glass Darkly
https://www.the-sun.com/news/8396436/worlds-most-dangerous-city-haiti-machete/

Getting The Truth Out, One Tweet At A Time

“Why are there so many amendments? Get it right the first time people!” – Veep

I heard a Zoomer kid say:  “The Bill of Rights is so old, I think they made it on a typewriter.”

A few years ago I gave up on Twitter®.  Flat gave it up.  It had ceased to be fun.  When I first started out, I had a (plainly marked) parody account of a famous person (it may or may not have been Chelsea Clinton), and enjoyed that quite a bit.  I then switched to being just plain old John Wilder.  Twitter© had been fun – it was a good way to meet like-minded folks, and a really interesting way to irritate famous people.

John Cusack blocked me.  That was a fun day.  To be fair, I would have blocked me, too, since I was right up in his extremely Leftist face.

Gradually, then suddenly, my Tweet® impressions started to drop.  I had Scott Adams liking my posts, and had Ron Howard Retweet© me when I told him that Hollywood actors felt guilty by having buckets of money.  It was a reasonable conversation.  I would get tens of thousands of impressions (people viewing my Tweets®) on an average month after I figured Twitter® out.

Back then, Wilder, Wealthy and Wise wasn’t getting near the traffic it gets now, so in some months virtually all of the people coming by were tricked into coming here from Twitter™.  After traffic here started picking up organically, something happened at Twitter© – my Tweets™ weren’t getting any views.  I went from 100,000 a month (going from memory) to, maybe, 10,000 a month.

I was shadowbanned.

I always wondered how Vader© ate with the mask on.  Then I realized:  Force™ feeding.

By manipulating “the algorithm”, (or by picking me directly, but probably just a general tune of the algorithm because Leftists hate people on the Right) Twitter™ programmers made it so I virtually disappeared from view.  I went from knowing I irritated John Cleese to wandering down the hallway of a closed sanitarium by myself along with the 2,000 or so followers I had.

So, I gave up.  I didn’t shut my account down, I just stopped going there.  I think that was a part of the plan – Twitter® was about ideas, but only if yours matched The Narrative.

But then I noticed something interesting – my views here started going down here, leveling off in 2021 with a slight dip in 2022.  Now many sources of traffic were more-or-less constant, but the biggest drop was from search engines.  I’m on pace to have a drop of search engine traffic of 63% this year from the search engine traffic I got in 2020.  It will hurt overall readership, but the bigger thing is that it won’t grow the site if new people can’t find it.

By 2023, I’ve written millions more words, had big links from major websites, but the only conclusion that I have is that “the algorithm” hit me and is suppressing me showing up in search recommendations.  I guess the loneliest place on Earth is Twitter® after a shadowban is being on page 2 of the Google® search results.

I heard if you don’t pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.

I am not alone.  The Unz Review™ (to be fair, MUCH MUCH bigger than me) has experienced a similar problem with search according to Ron Unz.  And while comments here are a lunchroom food fight, his comment section looks like the Siege of Paris in 1870 – it’s fancy, but they’re still eating zoo animals.

The first idea that I came up with is that the comment section is too spicy for the search engines.  I doubt this since the most of the 25,000+ comments have been PG-13 or less.  The other alternative is that the entire viewpoint of the Right has been tuned out.  I suspect it’s this.  If your page is dedicated to comments to the Right of center, it’s lonelier than an idea in Whoopi Goldberg’s head.

Search engines are important, since they drive new traffic to a site.  I recalled early on when I could count the website hits here at one an hour, and then someone would hit the site and the traffic would go up from someone who just stumbled upon the place enjoying reading what I wrote.  I hope I gave them an afternoon with some chuckles.

I then read with an utter lack of surprise that our government had been colluding with Tech companies to suppress viewpoints they found unacceptable.  Things about The Vaxx®.  Things about the validity of the 2020 selection.  Comments critical of Dear Leader and three-letter agencies.  Propaganda against the American people was made legal again in 2012, and now the Federal Government was colluding with private industry to shut down uncomfortable viewpoints.  Why?  Because they can can can.

I published a book on propaganda.  You’ll never find a better book on the subject.

Missouri (along with a host of others) sued.  The Judge in the case was fairly blistering in his 155 page injunction.  You can read it here (LINK).  Although I am not a lawyer, amazingly, I can still read, and the parts I’ve gone through are very enjoyable.  I haven’t read it all, but I do say the man is not afraid, since in his THIRD LINE he writes “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Now this is what I call Stunning and Brave.

What did the government do after being slapped so fiercely?  Appeal.  The Deep State and the Left want to weaponize the Government-Tech-Investment Bank Complex.

Against you and your ideas.  What ideas?  All of them.  Here he lists just a few, but they are doozies:

It’s not being paranoid if they really are out to get you.

It should make you mad that this brazen manipulation against ideas that are generally recognized as the basis of Western Civilization and the United States are being actively suppressed by a shadowy combination of elected and unelected creatures skulking in the darkness with secret meetings determining what you should read and hear and think.

It should make you happy that it has been uncovered and the cockroaches, rather than scurrying for the cover of the cracks they hide in when the kitchen light is turned on are showing themselves to hate you as much as you thought they did.  They’re not denying it – they’re brazenly trying to keep this advantage of a deadly combination of Leftist ideology and the power of Big Tech.

But back to Twitter©.

After reading that Elon had found that he was still shadowbanned as late as May or June, I thought I’d give Twitter© a try again.

Wow.  Last two days on Twitter™, I had over 70,000 impressions (Tweet® views), hundreds of likes and retweets, and even several hundred poor unsuspecting folks clicking on links to show up here to read a post or two.  This was after four hours of Tweeting®.

Four hours.

I should have called her @aoc, since she doesn’t like capitalism.

And also I put the meme right above this in AOC’s Tweet™ and I’m sure she (or the dogwasher who does her Tweets®) saw it.  I also “Reported” a dude for calling me a “cis virgin”.  Elon said “Cis” was a slur, so we’ll see.  Old me would have said, “I’m sure your mom would agree, but her mouth is full right now.”  But I’ve grown up.

Regardless, it was a pretty good day.

When they don’t hold us down, look at how we fly.

This is why we’ll win.  When held up to the Light, the Truth doesn’t scurry away or cover itself in lies and deceit.  It shines.

Bud Light: “You Never Go Full Bud Light.” Ben And Jerry’s: “Hold My Beer.”

“Lt. Uhura, you’ve interrupted my song. I’m sorry, but there’ll be no ice cream for you tonight.” – Star Trek, TOS

I hear that they’re going to release their famous, “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” flavor.

I think I might have had Ben & Jerry’s® ice cream once, probably 20 years or more ago.  It was not especially memorable.  I think the flavor was something like, Kill Those Who Worship Jesus Crunch, but I sure couldn’t taste the hate.  It was more of a pistachio flavor.

I can certainly remember the first company that I said, “I’m not going to buy your stuff because you hate me”, and that was Levi Strauss & Co.© products, including anything made by Dockers™.  Why?  They committed to the abolition of private gun ownership sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.  Although I hadn’t heard the phrase BFYTW, it was my BFYTW moment.  I resolved to not buy things from people who hated me.

Sadly, Levi’s® is still in business.

On Monday, I wrote about the Frankfurt School, a dedicated group of commies that dedicated their lives to destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world in order to replace it with soulless communism.  I imagine they were great at parties.  Monday’s post, rather, was about how there was a continual attack on the people of the West about their history.

The funny thing about being exposed to the idea that there are a group of people that hate America and all it stood for is that their power diminishes.  Yeah, subtle propaganda still works even when you know about it, but in 2023 the propaganda is so unsubtle as to be confused with a Brawndo® ad.

It’s got what plants crave:  it’s got electrolytes.

You can’t unsee the propaganda.  And, you’re soaking in that propaganda.  Here’s the latest two minutes hate, delivered right on time for your 4th of July pleasure by Ben & Jerry’s™:

Ben and Jerry saw an ice cream truck in their neighborhood and ran it down.  “What do you guys want?”  “Nothing, we just wanted to tell you we’re vegan.”

Yeah, you read that right.  They just Bug Lighted® themselves.  They were trying to

I wandered over to the Twitter® comment section on this, and it was bloodier than people being stuck between Hunter Biden and a pile of cocaine.  It was worse than that, even after you factor in the mass of venereal diseases that must be the only things holding Hunter’s underwear together.  After looking through them at length, I found zero comments supporting whatever Leftist social media genius that they left with the password on July 3.

But social media from large conglomerates like Unilever®, which owns Ben & Jerry’s©, don’t do anything that isn’t planned.  Bud Light’s® problems aren’t the result of some crazy person acting on their own.  And Ben & Jerry™ intended this.

The virtue signal Ben & Jerry® was trying to light was one where Mount Rushmore would be given back to the American Indians that owned it.  Of course, the American Indians who owned it killed a batch of previous American Indians to take it, and since the place around Mount Rushmore isn’t exactly the garden spot of the world, they were kicked out of a much nicer place.

It warmed my heart that some nice person asked the most relevant question:  “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s®, why don’t you start?”

To me it’s like what I want to say to the government when they want me to give up my guns.  “You first.”

The amazing part to me is that this has nothing at all to do with ice cream.  It’s about projecting the woke values of a company owned by faceless corporate overlords to erase the history of the United States.  It has nothing to do with ice cream, and everything to do with an agenda.  After you see it, you can’t unsee it.  I’ll just re-print the relevant Stonetoss:

Burgers?

Ben & Jerry’s©, and, by proxy their corporate overlords are selling hate.  The hate?  Against you.  To be clear, this should come as a zero surprise since Ben & Jerry® hate you and want to erase you and your forefathers from history because you’re inconvenient to a business model that wants to sell only to nupeeple who are perfect economic units.

Heck, if they’re bored, they’ll remove American Indians from their products just to make nupeeple:

Is Land O’ Lakes® saying, “Keep the land, get rid of the Indians”?

Me?  I’m hoping that Ben & Jerry’s® becomes Been Gone & Jerry’s©, an out of business ice cream company that was put out of business because it hated its customers and the country that made it.  Then they can have Wilder Ice Cream©.  Maybe I’ll make a flavor called Been Gone & Jerry’s™.  That one gets most of its flavor from vanilla and me taking pleasure from Ben & Jerry’s® failing.

France, Hot Mimes, And The Fate Of The West

“We’re from France.” – The Coneheads

I friend at work quit to become a mime.  Haven’t heard from him since.

I’ve written about the Frankfurt School before, but when I did a search on the site it came up with two results.  One in July 2021 (LINK), and another in July 2022 (LINK).  So, since it’s July 2023, it must be time to write about the Frankfurt School again.

The reason I keep coming back to them is that the story of the Frankfurt School is the story of a small group of committed Marxists that created lot of what is wrong in the world.  It’s shocking, right, that a group dedicated to destroying everything good in a nation might be the wrong sorts of people to let in?

I’m becoming convinced that the Frankfurt School created a big part of what’s wrong in France.  And Great Britain.  And Sweden.  And the United States.  And, well, all of Western Civilization.

Save the bees.  Plant the trees.  Deport refugees.

YouTube® recently suggested (a two-year-old video – LINK) about the Frankfurt School that brought me some new information – members of the Frankfort School had been involved in the process of taking postwar Germany and breaking the will of the German people by using the propaganda of Collective Guilt.  It was a surprise to me to learn that many of the main members of the Frankfurt School (at least Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer) worked directly for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.  Thankfully, the CIA never engages in schemes that make James Bond villains look sane.

Oops.

The fact that the OSS hired committed communists who were dedicated to the overthrow of the American Way of Life® can charitably be described as a “failure of background checks”, or less charitably be described as “the cure being worse than the disease”.

Collective Guilt really did a number on the Germans.  Over time and with repeated pressure, people who had done nothing wrong were made to feel guilt for things that they hadn’t done.  Over time, this made children who were born in Germany be ashamed of just being born German.  How bad is it?  Angela Merkel saw an aide holding a German flag after an election victory.  She took the flag from the aide and tossed it off camera.  Sure, Angie was raised in East Germany, but she certainly was aware that her voters wouldn’t have a problem with her hating Germany, since they hated it, too.

How do you get an art major to leave you alone?  Either pay for the pizza or give up the Sudetenland.

The Soviets took an entirely different approach in East Germany than the Frankfurt School did in West Germany:  “Be communist, take your steroids, don’t rock the boat, and we’re watching everything you do.”  Being German was okay, but being anything but a good communist was punishable by getting fewer potatoes for dinner.  The results of this?

The map above shows that in former East Germany, the AfD (Alternatives for Germany) party does very, very well,  The AfD platform includes crazy things like protecting sovereignty, Western identity, and that German culture is okay.  They’re against immigration, and don’t trust the EU.

Since the Germans have been so shamed, AfD, which has values that approximate the values of any functional nation, is continually investigated as an “extremist” group.

I’m certain the Frankfurt School was thrilled with the success of turning Germany into a nation that hates itself.  Why stop there, if your goal is to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with communism?  To a committed communist, every functioning Western nation that isn’t communist is fascist, and so why not target them with powerful psychological warfare?

In previous posts, I’ve covered the attempt to make the people in the United States feel Collective Guilt over slavery (gone nearly 180 years) with the 1619 Project™, a hate filled propaganda fest launched alongside the other efforts to destroy the United States.  All of them are from the same source – Black Lives Matter®, and illegal aliens are just part of the destabilization movement, attempts to create and exploit Collective Guilt.

How well has that worked on white people?  Unlike every healthy civilization, ever, white Lefties in the United States actually have the opposite of an in-group preference.  They actually like people from other groups rather than their own group.  Here’s a graph that shows why Leftists behave like they behave.  As I’ve said again and again, they hate themselves.

The same thing has happened to Great Britain.  They sent their ships around the world, and landed at desolate backwaters whose idea of high technology was a mud hut.  When the British left, they left roads, hospitals, and (at the time) functioning governments, and access to improvements that invariably increased the quality of life for billions.  For this, their Collective Guilt has been being called colonizers, and they’ve been made to feel shame if they don’t allow hordes of people who have no connection to Britain to come into their country and pull their statues down.

23% of the crew on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were named Juan.  That’s nearly a three to Juan ratio.

France is much the same, with just different groups of aliens there.  The riots in France here in 2023 are about a serial criminal who got shot and died after doing the usual criminal stuff and endangering civilians.  The result is somewhat different than the George Floyd riots – the illegals (many of them are – France doesn’t have birthright citizenship) and “legal” rioters have guns, and have been using them, though to what extent is not clear.

France may very well be the end of the road for the Frankfurt School’s plans.  As the violence of the rioters makes a lie of the years of propaganda about the true nature of France and the true nature of the illegals, perhaps the conditioning will wear off.

Perhaps.

Steps Forward, Steps Backward, and The Long Road

“Not according to the recent Supreme Court case of bite versus me.” – House, M.D.

No one complained when I got into Buddhism and became a Buddhist.  No one complained when I got into Affirmative Action and became an activist.  But get into fashion?

Today the Supreme Court (it’s like regular court, but with sour cream and tomatoes) said that, under the Equal Protection clause, that discriminating against people (or even for people) based on race is against the Constitution.  I guess you could say that the Supreme Court has changed since Ginsberg passed away:  it’s now Ruth-less.

For the longest time, the courts were sort of ignored by the Right.  The judges appointed by the Right (when they were in power) were often horribly Leftist advocates of state power.  At some point, the Right started picking justices based on choosing people who actually weren’t horrible Leftists in disguise (looking at you, David Souter).  The Federalist Society® was the catalyst for this.  Of the current Supreme Court, six of the nine justices are current or former Federalist Society™ members.

Yes, this is a real Tweet® and not a parody account.

The vote to kill affirmative action on campuses was six to three.

That’s an important number because it shows that the Federalist Society©, founded 41 years ago, has now defined the Supreme Court and the judges that have been nominated.

This is a victory.

But it wasn’t easy, and the span of effort to get that victory took decades of effort.  When the Federalist Society™ was founded, the court system of the United States was an absolute shambles.  When the Leftists couldn’t pass legislation that let them do things they like to do, like killing moar babiez, the courts could be counted on to find a new right that was somehow stuck in the “penumbras and emanations” of previous rulings to let them do whatever was popular with the cool kids that week.

Think that’s what happened to the Titan?

What always bothered me was that they could take a simple phrase like, “shall not be infringed” and twist it through precedents and rulings and interpret it to mean, “shall be infringed whenever we feel like it, you stooge”.  The “you stooge” part wasn’t actually in the ruling, but it can be inferred through the “emanations and penumbras”.

Why did Roe v. Wade get struck down to allow states to make laws against baby killing?  Because of the Federalist Society™.  If you’re ever able to go buy a .50 caliber Ma Deuce at your local convenience store in full auto as God intended?  Thank the Federalist Society©.

I don’t remember Linda leading the Leftist Karen Brigade in the Amy Coney Barrett Insurrection . . . do you?

Another place where the Left has lost is on carry of weapons.  In 27 states you can take your favorite hand cannon and pop it right under your vest without a permit, and without asking anyone for permission.  It’s what’s called “Constitutional Carry”.  This didn’t happen by accident.  It took dedicated groups working locally through decades to get these laws passed.

That’s the key.  Victory isn’t won in an afternoon after a training montage where Luke© spends 22 minutes with Obi Wan® and learns the Force™.  Nope.  Victory is won by grinding it out, day after day, putting people in place.  Having conversations.  Convincing people that the idea of freedom is better than the idea of government control takes time.

Remember, it only works if you have goals.

One view is that, from the viewpoint of the Right, that there has been nothing but a long string of loss, and there is no way that we can every come back.

Clearly, that is wrong.  The grassroots pushback against the insanity of The Narrative can’t be stopped.  Why, exactly, do gays and transexuals and drag queens need access to our children?  That question is in the minds of enough people that celebration of Pride Month, 2023, was a bit limp.

I guess we’ll have to re-purpose the journalist machine, after a fair trial, of course.

Have we lost most university campuses?  Have we lost the military senior officer corps?  Have we lost the senior management in most Fortune® 500 companies?

Yup.  We’re still down in many places.  But Budweiser® is afraid now.  And we don’t have to destroy every company that goes woke.  There’s an old Chinese saying:  “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.”  We don’t have to destroy every company, but I’m certain that the distinct lack of Pride stolen rainbow colors in June on every damn corporate logo was a result of that Budweiser© chicken being plucked.

Where will the next victories come from?  They will come from places that passionate people have been working for decades.  It doesn’t require money, it requires work.  As the other saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.  The second-best time is now.”

The seeds of our future victory are being planted right now in the heads of they youth.  They see the lies, greed, and envy that are the only things outside of Nancy Pelosi swimsuit pictures that the Left has to sell.  Today, removed from their menu, is the idea of Affirmative Action.  That idea is dead.

I know nobody wanted to see the swimsuit picture.  You’re welcome.

The battle is not over.  The Left is always better organized than the Right, but the Right has a wonderful thing on its side:  the Truth.  As I have always maintained, we will win.  And as I have also always maintained, the final victory won’t be tomorrow, or next week, or next year, though some events will certainly happen suddenly.

And the Supreme Court?  They can go out to dinner together again since Ginsberg died.  She used to steal food from people at diners – they called her Booth Raider Ginsberg.