John – Page 52 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Get Woke, Go Broke: Disney Princess Edition

“I woke up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.” – Anchorman

I knew that Disney® was broke when they wouldn’t give R2-D2™ a brother, only a transister.

As is probably obvious now, I like movies. I think that they can convey complex ideas, and can exemplify that which is best in all of us. When done properly, they provide a shared mythology that replaces the stories that we used to tell each other around the fire after a successful mastodon hunt. They would sometimes even sing songs, I mean most people who killed a mastodon are in the mood for some Hairy Elephante.

Movies can be subtle propaganda. Certainly, looking back there were large elements of mainly harmless propaganda added into the media that I watched growing up – trying to convince me to eat properly, brush my teeth, get enough sleep, and not start a criminal drug trafficking gang.

Data Point Number One is a Hollywood® movie that certainly has more wholesome values built-in, Top Gun: Maverick. Going as far back as the first Top Gun, the idea was fairly simple: America and Americans were trying to be the good guys. We were brash, we took Polaroid® pictures of Russian pilots, and we had shirtless, sweaty volleyball playing . . . dudes?

Well, at least Kenny can get spare parts if he has a footloose.

Okay, they did make some mistakes in the original. But it was nationalist. It focused on excellence. And the latest version has some of the same notes. Amazingly, people seem to like feeling good about their country and seeing excellence in action. Top Gun: Maverick will end up making over a billion dollars.

So, mainly wholesome. Sure there were some less wholesome parts built in there, but I’m still planning a post on propaganda. Some of the propaganda has been awful, and lately, it’s been worse. Hollywood® has recently been all-in on propaganda, and not the good kind.

That brings us to . . .

Data Point Number Two is Lightyear. Disney® movies used to be a bastion of wholesome values. Parents. Kids. There would be a conflict, but the end would almost always be resolved in a way that showed the importance of values. Disney©, however, has decided to showcase a family arrangement of two lesbian moms. This is a lifestyle that would have been:

Not legally enforceable across the country a decade ago,
Widely shunned two decades ago,
Subject to a visit from Child Protective Services thirty years ago,
Ruled out either of the lesbian moms to be able to work as a teacher forty years ago, and
Caused them to be burned as witches fifty years ago, though my timing might be off a bit on that one.

Jeff Epstein tried to give Hillary a high five, but she left him hanging.

Now? It’s a lifestyle being celebrated as normal in a Disney® film. To most parents (remember, it takes an actual woman and an actual man to make a baby, even in 2022) it’s not the propaganda that they want to have in the minds of their little kids. I did the math, and (to the best I can find) 0.14% of kids were being raised by lesbian moms.

Add in people who are hard Lefties who buy their kids Transition Flakes™? That’s your Lightyear audience.

Thus, it’s no surprise to me that the film failed. Lightyear has greatly disappointed the folks at Disney® due to its poor financial performance. People are simply declining to pay money to take their kids to become indoctrinated with the Latest Thing®.

Disney™ seemingly doesn’t care is actually blaming the audience, from some interviews I’ve seen.

I hear AOC met her boyfriend on Tinder®. That must have been awkward.

It’s not just Disney®, though they’re the absolute worst today. I’ve noticed that most movies made after, say, 2018, are awful. It’s not just Coronachan, either. It is the movie content. I don’t know if all the screenwriters suddenly became activists after Trump was elected, but the movies became awful.

How? They became drenched in Leftist propaganda. If it were just that, it might be interesting entertainment. But Leftism screws everything up. Character development doesn’t exist, because Strong Woman can never, ever be inferior to Man, even if Strong Woman just started piloting starships and Man has been piloting them for decades. Oh, and she’s stronger, too. And can beat anyone but another woman in a fight.

I wonder why they didn’t call her Mary Sue?

Yawn. It’s not even interesting, and combined with the bales of propaganda that gets thrown in, it just turns into a poorly written script that ends up making a movie that’s not very interesting. What are the stakes when the hero is perfect from the first moment of the movie?

It isn’t just movies. Books started to get infected with the same nonsense even before movies did. For a time, I stopped reading fiction because the books ceased being enjoyable. I thought it was me. I thought that I had grown up, and science fiction has lost its appeal because I’d grown out of it.

Then I picked up an older book, (Lucifer’s Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle) and was happy to find it wasn’t me – it was that science fiction books started sucking, and for exactly the same reason. Leftism kills everything that it touches.

I’ve noticed that most larger businesses don’t seem to care. Star Wars® (another Disney© product produced some of the weakest, worst content ever. Why? Retreaded stories and a protagonist that wasn’t interesting because she was already the Best Ever® at everything. Disney stock wasn’t impacted.

Until now.

If you pour root beer into a square glass does that just make it beer?

It has lost about half of its value since last year, with over $170 billion in market value lost. This started before the big market slide with the Biden Bust.

Looks like there’s a line. And looks like Disney© has found it.

The Unraveling

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

I knew a lady who loved mushrooms, she was a fungal.

The unraveling continues. In one sense, what’s happening is predictable. Looking back in history, while not everything happens in the same way, things very much rhyme. That’s why certain aspects of the current financial collapse are very, very familiar.

The Fed® still has enough influence that it can stop a snowball. Can the Fed® stop an avalanche? Not so much. They may have some tricks to push the day of reckoning down the line if it isn’t off the rails. Again, like a presidential election, it’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

If it were merely a financial problem, the actions might be enough. But it’s not just financial.

Other problems include extreme societal decadence. Decadence is a strong word. When I was a kid, it was applied to places like the late Roman Empire, or Willy Wonka’s® Chocolate Factory™ where those Umpa-Loompas wore those scanty tight outfits.

But when people take kids – elementary-age kids – to Pride®©™ parades that contain actual nudity and sex acts between adults, and then suggest putting hormones into five-year-olds because they pretended to cook in a pretend kitchen one day, you know that this is the point where God told Noah, “Get the boat,” and told Lot, “Tell everyone to wear sunglasses – I don’t care if it’s night.”

“Oh, and Noah? Put some lights on the boat. Floodlights.”

Whatever fetish sex act that any individual wants to do “because it’s Thursday” now seems to take the place of virtue. Replacing actual virtue with temporary individual passions is exactly what every single functioning society in history has avoided to in order to remain functioning. When people follow passions that are productive, like building rockets, they add to society. When people act on passions counter to virtue?

Those passions consume and destroy society. Period.

We don’t live in a world where “if it feels good, do it” can ever be a policy that lead to a productive society. At some point, we must be guided by virtue, we have to have a shared vision for a future, and a shared desire to build. Can you imagine a single event that would bring us all together again?

I can’t. We have to have that shared vision – if nothing else, to survive. Do we have it?

What’s the best way to avoid significant radiation exposure? Don’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

We do not. We are divided. The idea of a selfless devotion to duty seems to have (in many places) evaporated. Cops are supposed to put themselves into danger to save the innocent – that’s the only reason we put up with the rest of the nonsense that they get up to. If they have changed their motto from “Protect and Serve” to “Hide Until We Can and Give Traffic Tickets to People That Don’t Scare Us” then they’re not much use.

Globalism is likewise something that sounds good, but isn’t. I can understand the need for some places like, say, deserts to import grain and Alaska to import medicine and export oil and good vibes. But can someone tell me that we’re in a better and safer position as a country now that we depend on far-flung nations for things. When I talked to The Boy about careers, the advice I gave him was simple – don’t do anything that someone can do over the Internet. If you do, you’re competing with a job with millions or billions of people.

We have reached the stage of cultural collapse. I’m in favor of capitalism – but amoral capitalism is different. When capitalism is allowed to meet any need, the result isn’t good. Like any system, it needs boundaries. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Why can’t the Democrats use the 25^th Amendment on Biden? They can’t count that high.

Freedom needs boundaries. Freedom needs responsibility. Liberty, real liberty, requires obligation for stability. Otherwise? It descends into chaos.

So, we’ve established that we’re in a difficult place. The things that we depended upon are slowly slipping away. The economy is in a very precarious place, culturally we’re shattered to the point that not even another 9-11 would bring us together. The difficulties that we see from here on out won’t serve to bring us together, they will bring us apart. How about the economic difficulties related to just high fuel prices alone?

The Lefties love it, even as it destroys our economy. Heck destruction of the economy might even be the point.

But stresses have consequences. If I drop an orange, it will fall. If we destroy an economy, it will fail. Some parts of it will be predictable: interest rates going up will make housing prices go down. Simple. We can talk about other correlations on Wednesday (feel free to bring up more below).

I dated a homeless girl once – it was nice, after the date you could drop her off anywhere.

The one thing that I can tell you, is what comes next won’t be like what came before. The problems that we have rhyme with the problems of the past, but they’re not the same. During the Great Depression, we were at least (mostly) homogeneous as a country. Now, not so much.

The end state is tied to the initial conditions. And the initial conditions of the Great Depression were greatly different than they are today, so there’s no way that we’ll see the same results. And things will never go back to “normal” because we simply cannot go back in time, and there isn’t any such thing as “normal” nor any time period which is “normal”. They will be different.

What we have, though, is the rhyme. It won’t allow us to predict perfectly. But it will allow us to see, dimly.

It Came From 1982

“The Alan Parsons Project is a progressive rock band in 1982. Why don’t you just name it ‘Operation Wang-Chung’?” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

A hipster asked me if I liked Indy films, “Sure, I loved The Last Crusade.”

The last time I did a movie list, I did a list based on an entire decade: the 1990s. It was an interesting list, but Aesop made a comment I’ll paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look it up to get the exact quote: “If you did the 1980s, you’d break the Internet.”

And he’s right. The 1980s were, very clearly, a much better decade for movies than any decade since. Before? Probably. There are great movies before and after the 1980s, but I think this was peak movie.

Why? In the 1980s it was very much Reagan’s country: “It is morning in America.” People were starting to feel optimistic after the recession, and people were starting to feel proud again. The movies of the period reflect that. Also, Hollywood® was able to experiment – it didn’t have to get a blockbuster because it invested $600,000,000 in a movie. No, it could do stupid, cheap movies. It could do daring movies. And that let it do exceptional movies. I’m picking 1982, because, like Aesop warned: I don’t want to break the Internet.

Why 1982? Because when I got into the hot tub tonight to smoke a nice Rocky Patel Decade Toro cigar and prepare to write, a video about my favorite movie from 1982 showed up. The following are a list of eighteen movies from 1982 that were better than most movies that show up today. For the most part, they’re in alphabetical order because, again, I’m too lazy to rank them.

But number one for me from 1982 has got to be:

The Thing.

But at least they’ll have lots of pasta to eat down there: penguine.

I had always loved John W. Campbell’s work, and The Thing is one of his best films. No, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test where it has women talking to each other. There are no women in the movie. At all. And it kicks ass, so I’m beginning to think the Bechdel Test shows me what movies will suck.

The film featured all practical effects – and that made them more visceral, in some cases literally. Kurt Russell in a beard losing a chess game against a computer and then tossing scotch into the computer from his nearly infinite supply of J&B®. And the result? One of the best action/horror/science fiction movies. Ever. It was considered a flop at the time, and now is considered one of the best movies of all time.

See? That’s why I love the 1980s.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Burt Reynolds. Singing about whores, in a movie about LaGrange, Texas, which if I believed ZZ Top®, is just filled with whores. With Dolly Parton? No, there’s nothing particularly good about this, but, someone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea.

Blade Runner. Stark. Grungy. Set a few years ago. Everyone was sweaty. Also? Everyone likes this movie more than I do – probably my least favorite Philip K. Dick movie. Bonus? I had a girlfriend who I convinced that she was actually a robot. Dick move? No, a Philip K. Dick move.

This movie begs the question: did they have blow driers in ninja school?

The Challenge. Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune in a movie about an American who fights ninja-style with office supplies, and, no, I’m not making that up. Utterly awesome. I believe I am the only person on the continent who liked this movie.

Conan the Barbarian. You’ve all seen it. I had read Conan stories before I saw the movie – I was not particularly impressed, but I had to mention this movie. It featured Arnold after he learned to read, but before he learned to act.

Eating Raoul. The best movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve seen. It’s also the only movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve ever seen.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Little needs to be said about this classic – carrot eating would never be the same in the cafeteria again in 1982. Plus? Sammy Hagar jamming.

Doesn’t anyone knock?

Firefox. Clint Eastwood stealing Soviet jets because he could think in Russian. Special effects don’t hold up, but still fun.

First Blood. Sly making the best Rambo movie before they started to get silly.

Night Shift. There are some actors that should stick to comedy. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Michael Keaton is one of them. What is it about 1982 and whores? This movie has the lighthearted subject of a morgue turning into a brothel.

An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s like Top Gun, but no flying. Why would you watch this movie? Because you have nowhere else to go.

Poltergeist. The movie that led to making it a law that if you moved a cemetery for a housing development, that you had to movie the bodies, too. Go to the light, Carol Anne!

What do Italian ghosts eat? Spooketti.

Porky’s. This movie was a series of sketches combined with bad jokes and nudity, and those are the redeeming bits. Gets bad when the plot gets in the way. Paging Michael Hunt.

Rocky III. Sly was busy in 1982. But this movie was a good sequel, and probably better than you remember.

Silent Rage. A Chuck Norris movie. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an awesome movie. I know that makes no sense, but neither does this movie. It’s really my favorite Chuck Norris movie – science fiction with karate.

Yup, sittin’ around without a shirt and with my cowboy hat on. Ahhh, 1982, we miss you.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is the sequel that saved Star Trek. Star Trek the Motion Picture was a dud. This was not. It was the best Star Trek movie, ever. It had the joy and exuberance of the best of Star Trek TOS, plus a worthy villain and a chess game in space combat. There has been no Star Trek after this that has been nearly as good, and probably few before this.

Tootsie. The Mrs. loves this movie. Me? Once was enough. Bill Murray was my favorite part of this one.

The World According to Garp. This was the best Robin Williams movie, period. I read the novel, and this was a movie that could never, ever be made today.

Young Doctors in Love. Excellent movie that’s nearly unavailable today. Also, taught me how to easily test for diabetes.

Yup, that’s just one year in the 1980s, picked nearly at random.

Good times.

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side. When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla. Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis: that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed. To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.” You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything. Some items are starting to deflate now. Houses, for instance. The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan. And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans: fewer people qualify? Less demand. Less demand? Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days. These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand. Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry. With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs: an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage. He liked ice before it was cool.

Now? Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down. Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here. That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit. For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down. Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down. For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation. This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks. Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate: Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate. That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20. Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers. There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time. But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers. At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks: if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too. For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet. If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing. Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers? Less money for chow for the Egyptians. We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012. Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria. Some things don’t change. If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen. Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores? She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed. The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion. The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion. (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up. That means less money available for everything else. When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in. That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work. It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors. If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy. If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily. We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger. If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index. You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK). It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple. The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age. The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

Black Monday (1987), MMMRI 234
Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000), MMMRI 208
Great Recession (2008), MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup. MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up. But you knew that. Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill. So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo. Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

A Crisis Of Legitimacy

“If I am not a tyrant, if I merely seek legitimacy then why would I not accept such favorable terms?” – Rome

Hulk Hogan apparently had to seek therapy – the diagnosis was wrestle-mania.

I think one thing that has always been a feature of Americans is that we’ve had a healthy distrust for authority. The entire Revolutionary War was because we didn’t trust the British to take our interests into account. We even used roosters to find British spies – a version of chicken-catch-a-Tory. Yet, just enough trust has existed to keep us going.

Mostly.

Right now, however, there is a crisis brewing – a crisis of legitimacy.

We see it everywhere, but I’ll start off with the worst: the “Presidency” of Joe Biden. The points that bear discussing are certainly well known to readers here:

The “open” conspiracy to change laws to beat Trump,
Evidence of ballot harvesting, and
Evidence of counting “irregularities”

Among a lot of other things. Heck, even Pa Wilder voted for Biden, which is something he’d never do if he’d still been alive.

How do you change a lightbulb in a house built by Apple®? You don’t, they no longer make that outlet, so it’s time to buy a new house.

The reaction of the Left is more of their politics as usual. Anything possible to distract and vilify the Right is in play. Any hint or even joke about the legitimacy of Biden’s electoral “victory” is shut down. Case in point, I made a joke about Biden’s victory being more in the counting than in the voting, and that podcast was immediately shut down by YouTube’s® A.I. (Shhh, don’t make fun of that A.I., it’s really self-conscious),

If they’re that sensitive, I know I’m over the target. The reason is that there is a mountain of evidence that shows fraud in the election, in just the right places and locations it would be needed (and would be possible) to swing the election to Biden.

Huh.

A robust and positive response would have been to participate as hard as possible to show Biden was legitimately elected. They would have taken the points brought up by (in many cases) non-partisan analysis showing the trickery.

Nope. The Democrats looked for voter fraud just as hard as O.J. looked for “the real killer”.

I drink apple juice; I heard OJ will kill you.

I wonder could there be a parallel there, or if that could be the reason that a majority of the American people think Joe was falsely elected? Instead, they use the word “baseless” when they really mean “facts we really, really, want you to ignore.”

Hmmm.

If a phony election was enough to destroy the Republic, though, it would have failed long ago. Historically, there have been other elections that have been called into question: 1876 and 1960 were two big examples. But we survived both, even though Rutherford B. Hayes was called “His Fraudulency” for the rest of his life.

Rutherford B. Hayes was a stunning success compared to Biden, serving one term where his most notable accomplishment was attempting to avoid inflation and keep the money supply sound, whereas Biden prints and spends money like a Pelosi drinks and drives.

Why is Owen Wilson’s nose in the middle of his face? It’s the scenter.

That’s the second crisis of legitimacy – phony money. Again, none of this is new – I’ve written that our monetary policy appears to be less sound than the logic of a drunken 22-year-old rock star in a strip club in Vegas.

The phony money is, of course, only one component of the phony economy. For years now, pools of cash have kept up the appearance of value in home prices. Likewise, stock prices have been artificially pushed upward at the same time bond prices (and interest rates) were artificially kept downward. At some point (and, it’s looking like that point is very near, indeed) the stored energy caused by the distortions will cause the economy to snap.

Because? Our economy is illegitimate.

What about the Uvalde police department: Who thinks that they’re legitimate now? But how many people are secretly asking, “if that happened in my town, what would our cops do?” and then thinking, “probably the same thing.”

Reason #238 for the Second Amendment.

Where most people would expect cops to run in and, oh, save children, it’s not in their playbook. Really. Lots of police departments put as their number one priority “officer safety”. And courts have repeatedly backed the cops up – they have no duty to even try to save me, kids in a school, or you.

How legitimate does that feel?

I could keep going all night, but sometime I have to sleep, so I’ll just bring up one more. We’re in a society where even the concept of “being a man” or “being a woman” is legitimate anymore. But even that is a symptom of a society where the basic values that have been consciously subverted at every opportunity – good is now bad, and vice versa. Truth is now despised while lies are celebrated.

To summarize our society is in deep jeopardy because we have:

Illegitimate Politicians (especially the President),
Illegitimate Money,
An Illegitimate Economy, and
Illegitimate Values.

I hope he never gets around to building back better . . .

This is the opposite of the formula to make a country work well. Civil strife combined with a collapsing economy, rising prices, and a collapsing social fabric sounds like a lot to take away from just a loss of legitimacy, but it’s not – for people to create a productive, free society, they have to have incentive, they have to have trust.

They have to have legitimacy – they have to believe.

To restore that? They have to have truth.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

the police,
the Constitution,
the courts,
the military,
congress,
and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows. “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits. Let’s take . . . the Earth. The Earth is absolutely filled with life. It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons. Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life: temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small. Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time. Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy. Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things. No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant. The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell. No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser. But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser? Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled. The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me. I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it. Yup, that’s a sobering thought. Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering. All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

Baby Formula Shortages
Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
Short Tempers
Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences. Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry. A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down. Forever. The owners threw in the towel. Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks. I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them. It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch? Let’s just talk a single variable: fuel. By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy. That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything. Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800. Per person. Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family. If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income. Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable. Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring. And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation. I got a B.

Here’s another data point. I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®. Don’t judge me! They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out. We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay. I’ll take one.” Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.” It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty? For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit? And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that. First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth. I drove out of the line and off on my way. Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance. Badly. We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly. Be prepared for a change in temperature.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Failure and Guns

“Your company cannot be worth that much.” – The Office

I hear Joe Biden has an I.Q. of 150 – he took the test three times and added up all the scores.

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve kept Clock O’Doom at the same location. For now. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Michael Scott Presidency – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Guns – 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 700 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Michael Scott Presidency

The Michael Scott in the title refers to the fictional Regional Manager of Dunder-Mifflin on the NBC® sitcom, The Office. Michael Scott was a bumbling character, a bit self-important and self-absorbed, and an HR nightmare. Even with all of that Scott was generally successful, often in spite of himself.

I would hate for anyone to think I was comparing *resident Joe Biden to Michael Scott. I don’t think that Biden could last for a month as a regional manager of an office supply company. But what I do refer to is one particular episode, where Michael had quit, started his own paper company, and was negotiating its sale to his old employer. Why?

It was a sitcom.

Michael Scott’s old boss had a simple response when Scott wants his old job back, which his boss, rightly, notes is a multimillion-dollar buyout. “Your company cannot be worth that much.”

Scott responds: “Our company is worth nothing. Business isn’t about money to me, David. If tomorrow my company goes under, I will just start another paper company. And then another. And another. And another.”

What sounds good on paper? Communism. Unless you’re reading a history book.

And that’s where Brandon Biden is. He has failed so spectacularly in every category imaginable:

Economic Policy making Jimmy Carter look like a genius,
Remembering the names of the days of the week,
Foreign Relations, except the Afghans would sure like to do business again,
Raising children that even a drug lord would disown,
Trade, where his idea of sanctions on enemies are actually things that hurt Americans more, and
Energy, where he started with an energy-independent nation and made it more dependent than a welfare mother of six.

Biden’s presidency isn’t worthless, it has a negative value. He has nothing. At all. So he has nothing to lose, which is the scary part.

When Bill Clinton was in the same place, however, he did something incredibly astute: he decided to work with the Republicans, and crafted a legislative package that led to drastic reduction of deficit spending while creating a booming economy. Just like sleeping with Hillary, it wasn’t what Bill wanted to do, but it was what he had to do to keep power.

That’s not where Biden has gone. At every chance, he has upped the stakes on partisanship. This is straight out of Obama’s playbook – whenever there is a chance to unite? Divide. I’d say that Joe learned that lesson there, but I’m pretty sure that his cognitive abilities are somewhere below the low battery limit.

No, whoever is calling the shots is upping the ante. And, losing this badly and refusing to admit that there are no fewer than 100 million citizens that think he is insane, he’s attempting to swing for the fences. That means that, as long as Joe is in office, there’s no limit to the number of things he’ll try. There’s also no limit to the level of Leftist insanity that will be in those plans.

Sadly, this isn’t a sitcom episode. I mean, except for the whole Hunter thing.

Hunter spilled beer on his laptop so he took it to the repair shop since he thought it had Corona virus.

Violence And Censorship Update

May started off with a victory, of sorts. The shrieking harpy that had been selected to head the Department of Justice’s Ministry of Truth quit. At least temporarily. I’m not sure that I completely believe that they’ve given up the plan, but I think that they’ve given up on the cartoon-tier villain that they had chosen to run it.

In other news, the dream of the dystopians isn’t dead: vax trackers and now, a “carbon-footprint” tracker has been created. All of them use that oh-so-wholesome invention, the cell phone. We see how that will be implemented – in Australia, for instance, “citizens” had to take pictures and prove location using cell phones at random intervals to prove they were following the COVID laws.

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 ticked up. Perhaps turning back up in June or July – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up more in May. With abortion and gun control, even more in June?

Economic:

Instability increases . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

It set a new record. Again. An all-time record. The border is, for all intents and purposes, wide open.

Guns

Gun control is probably the third rail for ten or twenty million Americans. And, well, those are Americans with guns. It would probably be easier to disarm the “pillow lovers club” but it has always been guns.

Why?

It is certainly for one reason, and one reason only. It’s not about hunting. It’s about a challenge to tyranny. As attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

So, when the Left asks, “How many more kids have to die?” it’s not a political position or tear jerker line. It’s a threat – they will do anything, anything at all to take your guns from you.

Regardless, the gun debate is over. Period. If armed police will stand outside of a school while children inside are slaughtered, they will stand outside of anyone’s home while the same happens there. The reason that we haven’t had another hijacking after 9-11 isn’t because of sky marshals. It isn’t because of enhanced security or the FBI suddenly becoming competent.

Nope. It’s because the American people on those airplanes finally recognized something that nearly every reader here has always known: the defense of your family and your own life is your responsibility, always has been, and always will be. The defense of our nations and schools belongs to us, not some outside entity.

Anything else is fiction.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://youtu.be/MTzbYB0SE

https://youtu.be/FEnPmPGF4aY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqSqsT0SJmU

https://twitter.com/i/status/1527067336334639104

https://twitter.com/DMVFollowers/status/1523469299230253056

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523437362197323777

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523532070412120064

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523165355828461571

https://twitter.com/WCBD/status/1531652018900713472

https://youtu.be/WQ5gbRqss-M

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10861417/Woman-pleads-fellow-NYC-subway-users-intervene-thug-assaults-none-do.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10812643/Moment-pair-gunmen-assault-rifles-kill-man-gas-station-brazen-broad-daylight-attack.html

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/RockholdJones/status/1527711404786073602

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523792561936408576

https://twitter.com/ArtValley818_/status/1524983401706496000

https://twitter.com/NFL_Memes/status/1524427784776466432

https://twitter.com/i/status/1522560391590653952

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqRXYevJbiw&t=17s

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10820965/Hero-pastor-hit-Orange-County-gunman-chair-churchgoers-hogtied-seized-weapons.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10820413/JK-Rowling-praises-feminist-never-dropped-flag-stood-masked-trans-activists.html

https://nypost.com/2022/05/19/topless-mom-in-her-undies-rescues-pet-goose-from-bald-eagle/

One Gal

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10865783/West-Virginia-woman-praised-using-pistol-shoot-dead-gunman-AR-15.html

Body Count

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/428/960/original/0b6680c0c946e893.jpeg

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/massive-fire-strikes-huge-poultry-farm-supplies-eggs-major-supermarkets

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/fbi-warns-imminent-cyber-attacks-food-plants-after-mysterious-rash-fires

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/05/16/when_misinformation_drives_bad_policy_147601.html

https://summit.news/2022/05/09/fda-chief-claims-misinformation-is-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-united-states/

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/mortality-among-white-collar-workers-jumped-24-percent-between-2020-and-2021-life-insurance

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/05/us-road-deaths-increased-by-more-than-10-in-2021/

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens?s=r

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10846893/The-birth-rate-increased-time-seven-years-2021-teen-pregnancy-fell.html

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/number-of-abortions/?

https://abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm

https://www.statista.com/topics/3218/abortion-in-the-us/#topicHeader__wrapper

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/06/1096676197/7-persistent-claims-about-abortion-fact-checked

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/uk-government-data-shows-nobody-should?s=r

https://www.statista.com/chart/26397/cumulative-covid-19-deaths-in-the-us/

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

https://twitter.com/gyan_chakshu/status/1522359806606159873/photo/1

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/breakthrough-deaths-comprise-increasing-proportion-died-covid-19/story?id=84627182

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/unvaccinated-covid-deaths-growing/index.html

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/research-suggests-covid-jabs-are-actually-killing-more-people-than-they-save/

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-friends-sorry-to-announce-a?s=w

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328529

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/3484416-us-drug-overdose-deaths-hit-another-record-high/

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220521-kill-japan-s-elderly-cannes-film-probes-chilling-idea

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/MeetMalcom/status/1523642964152504328

https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1522408945880555521

https://twitter.com/Stevenjsargent1/status/1527791870981640192

https://twitter.com/AKA_RealDirty/status/1525246274626371586

AZ: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/new-long-withheld-records-reveal-20000-mail-ballots-received-legal-deadline-maricopa-county/

GA: https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/something-stinks-in-georgia?s=r

GA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/05/24/breaking-new-ballot-data-in-fulton-co-reaffirms-2020-election-issues/

GA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/05/03/true-the-vote-unusual-surge-of-absentee-ballots-in-gwinnett-county-ga/

GA: https://www.ajc.com/politics/what-2000-mules-leaves-out-from-ballot-harvesting-claims/FFMNUU56RVBRNOLZKWHUREQPEU/

MI: https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/tales-from-the-swamp-how-a-republican-senators-son-partnered-with-a-liberal-dark-money-group-to-sink-voter-id-expansion/

MN: https://www.kpvi.com/news/national_news/lawsuit-minnesota-voter-roll-has-586-duplicates/article_7a454991-675c-5a6e-be92-7857bc083fb9.html

PA: https://www.mcall.com/news/elections/mc-nws-state-martin-request-20220506-rfiavrwadvc3jnqmyugnm6fq5e-story.html

VA: https://wcyb.com/news/local/grand-jury-report-accuses-adkins-of-forging-voters-signatures

USA: https://rumble.com/v16w7mz-true-the-vote-destroys-journalist-terrorists-for-fake-news-over-geospacial-.html

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/05/2000-mules-documentary-provides-compelling-evidence-that-2020-election-was-stolen/

USA: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/03/exclusive-true-the-votes-catherine-engelbrecht-america-needs-to-wake-up-or-election-malfeasance-could-occur-again/

USA: https://otter.ai/u/qtUQSw4cQupaguY3OkmodyLtbzY

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/19/does-thou-shalt-not-steal-apply-to-elections/

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/09/no-more-ballots-in-the-wild-america-needs-to-ban-mail-in-voting/

USA: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/2000-mules-investigator-gregg-phillips-drops-bomb-investigators-discovered-multinational-player-federal-agencies-involved-operation-multinational-deal-involving-billions-dollars/

USA: https://verityvote.us/

Civil War

https://www.wired.com/2022/05/geeks-guide-stephen-marche/

https://www.ft.com/content/9c237473-603d-4196-8a32-0f135c900612

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/syndicated/assault-voting-rights-midterms-may-mark-beginning-end-multiracial-democracy/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/05/roe-abortion-supreme-court-republican-divide/629768/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/us-democrat-republican-partisan-polarization/629925/

https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/05/18/ncreased-testosterone-levels-turns-voters-more-conservative/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/10/roe-civil-conflict-military-democracy-gender/

https://baptistnews.com/article/the-religion-of-the-lost-cause-is-back-and-it-may-be-winning/#.YoA99-jMJoM

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/actual-insurrection-chicago-mayor-urges-call-arms-over-supreme-court

https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2022/05/civil-war-lets-make-a-civil-pact-instead/

https://summit.news/2022/05/10/swedish-fashion-designer-embrace-multiculturalism-or-face-civil-war/

https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/we-are-fighting-a-third-civil-war/

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/11/second-american-civil-war-robert-reich

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-that-is-here-and-the-one-that-may-yet-come

https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/kress-the-gop-arms-up-in-preparation-for-civil-war-ii/article_26ae7e92-14d5-5d20-80ce-193865627d03.html

https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/second-revolutionary-war

https://time.com/6174297/america-divided-civil-war/

https://www.historynet.com/are-we-on-the-eve-of-another-civil-war/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/10/roe-civil-conflict-military-democracy-gender/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/19/the-new-civil-war-00033782

https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-civil-war-gun-control-mass-shooting-school-robb-elementary-texas-1710356

https://unherd.com/2022/05/do-we-need-a-capitalist-civil-war/

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/05/ending-the-civil-war-over-the-future-of-the-us-marine-corps/

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/will-war-break-out-between-red-and-blue-states-93cac4d8c219

https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/2025-the-year-america-tears-itself-apart-e175f30f9f1f

The Real Replacement

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-real-replacement.html

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter. That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently. What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do. The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy. You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development. Huh. Nope, none of that matters. A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it. The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car. It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient. This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth? It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game? The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point. A.I. exists. A.I. is real. Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence? Nope. And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I. Why? I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge. What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy? This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine. It would be worth billions. And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be. Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function. What would A.I. value?

Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter. Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I. And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop. Favorite artist? M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier. Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system? Easy. Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system? No problem. An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water. It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself. While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe. How quick? 500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is. That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®. And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan? Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting. If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.? What would I program them to do?

Yup. You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age. It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse. We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once. It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat. When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km). This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings: a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense. If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts). Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop. But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off. There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting. Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices. So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F. But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met. Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test. Cover one eye.” Norm covers one eye and reads the chart: “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on! I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue. At all. They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor. Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods. But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial – Lawyer: “Did you see what happened after you left?” Depp: “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated. “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk? How does that happen? Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome. My sides are still in stitches about that one! But when it’s us, it’s scary. I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case. When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it. Sure, it’s dangerous. And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable. It’s just one variable. Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute. Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas. When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation. Really, that was their plan. But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices. That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely. An example: a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield. Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue. So, he deals with the “natural” yields. Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle. So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle. More expensive food for cattle? Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd. Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea: every action has a reaction. Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices. Others are longer-term. There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer. That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system. The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system. If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound. It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know. It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil. Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium. However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”