Money And Computers – Disaster Coming?

“Cats and dogs, living together.  Real wrath of God type stuff.” – Ghostbusters

A hacker got my friend’s bank account.  The hacker was so disappointed he started a fundraiser for my friend.

I drove up to the local generic national pharmacy that has systematically absorbed all the local pharmacies like Hillary Clinton absorbs the souls of the innocent.  The Mrs. had asked me to pick up a prescription for my scalp polish – she said she wanted to bounce a signal to the people up in the International Space Station.

To my surprise, I drove up to the drive-through window and saw this sign:

I had cash, but I figured it must be a nightmare inside for the people in the pharmacy.  I figured it would be easier on them for me to wait until they got it figured out before I came back.

After I saw the sign, I knew what was up:  yet another critical failure of an electronic data system leading to (probably) a nationwide outage.  I was right.

This is scary to me because of . . . money.

Money today is much more complicated than it was 200 years ago:  back then, it was (mainly) gold and silver and copper bits that we traded back and forth.  Most citizens of the newly-formed United States didn’t trust paper because the Continental Congress printed so many stacks of Continental money that it became as worthless as a math book to AOC.  This inflation and currency collapse gave rise to the phrase, “not worth a Continental.”

This is the direct reason that the Constitution had the clause that “no State may . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”.  Today, however, an arbitrary thing we all call a dollar exists.  But in many cases, those dollars may be entirely virtual.  I got paid by a direct deposit of electronic dollars into a bank account that, when I write a check, will send some of those electronic dollars to another bank.

This requires secure computer systems to work.  As we have seen, from oil to water treatment systems to my pharmacy, these systems are very capable of being hijacked.  Just this week, a list of 8 billion (yes, billion) passwords were being downloaded into the Internet, 6 billion of which were just “password”.  Chance are good that one of them was mine.  And one of them was yours.

It gets worse.  Should we even be trusting our computers?

A Russian research team found something scary:  undocumented instructions on Intel® computer chips.  As the researchers found out, these particular instructions couldn’t be run in the chip’s “normal mode.”  But why are they there?  Who could have put them there?

The NSA?  The CIA?

Want to bet that the NSA doesn’t really care how you encrypt your communications because they can read your typing and watch your screens in real-time?  I don’t know if the “Odin” post is some anon just making up a story, but with everything we’ve learned over the last decade, I’d be surprised if something like this didn’t really happen.

I would be shocked if they didn’t have the ability to take full control of my computer.  The United States government certainly reacted in a pretty negative way, pretty quickly.

What happens when you find a vulnerability?

Even turned down from sharing information about their data at the world’s most elite gathering of hackers.

Why wouldn’t Intel® want to know about vulnerabilities on their chips?  Hmmm?

Maybe the NSA could share tech with McDonalds®?

But if that backdoor vulnerability is there, what’s important to know is who has access to it.  As we look back, Stalin had not only a better mustache, but also better regular progress reports on the Manhattan Project than Truman did.  Who wants to bet that China doesn’t have backdoor data (if it exists)?  Who wants to bet that Chinese manufacture of motherboards and other electronic control architecture don’t have little extras added in?

I wouldn’t.

And, I’m not saying that the Chinese are evil for attempting to gain these particular secrets or this advantage – it’s a matter of self-preservation.  If I were President of the United States and had the ability to infiltrate all of the industrial, financial, and military assets of potential enemies, would I do that?

Sure.  But in this case, if you’re President of an increasingly weak government over an increasingly fracturing population, what do you do?  Anything you can in order to keep control, even if it means building in dangerous backdoors to critical products.

Which brings us back to money.

Money is essential to society as it is now configured.  A breakdown of the electronic systems that control the flow of money would, at minimum, bring utter chaos.  Matt Bracken famously asked this question nearly a decade ago:  “What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR?”

We saw what three days without gasoline shipments did on the East Coast.  That would be nothing compared to what we’d see if the money system broke down.

Well, I think the pharmacy will be back up tomorrow, and the impact, for us, has been zero.

This time.

Civil War 2.0: Extreme And Inflate

“System of government categorized by extreme dictatorship. Seven across.” – Hot Fuzz

I bought an Antifa© alarm clock.  It just calls me names.  Talk about a rude awakening.

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

May had (again) increased violence, but not as bad as it could have been as unseasonably cold weather kept other temperatures down.    Again, none of the violence that I could see originated from the Right.

I’m holding May at 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.  Last month I said that “ July or August could take us to a 10” and the reason is becoming clearer, as hot weather and economic woes will be showing up on the street.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) up to around 800 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Two Years On – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Inflation – 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 get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

Two Years On

I started this line of posting two years ago, and it was clear to me that the United States is Balkanizing around multiple worldviews.  You can’t read the headlines today without seeing it.

It’s getting worse, not better.  Trust me, I’d much rather have a post that says, “LOL, looks like it’s all good, this is the last issue.”

The seeds of this situation were planted decades ago.  Back in 1990 (according to Pew Research) we were mostly one nation.  Sure, there were people on the extremes of either end, but those people were mostly ignored.

I believe that after this term in office, Chuck should get another term.  In prison.

But when Pew looked at people in 2017, they found the Left has moved far to the political left, while the Right had only slightly moved.   The Balkanization exists because the Left has moved left.  That direction of drift by the Left is accelerating.

Right and Left have, since 1999 or so, completely given up on the idea of fiscal discipline.  It’s gone.  The spending has just sped up, and taxation is no longer related at all to the amount that the Federal government spends.  There are numerous problems with this, not the least of which is the off-balance way that growth is funneled to chosen winners.

What happens when you mix a population that doesn’t have the same conception of the fundamental function of government with massive numbers of unassimilated foreigners and throw in an economic dislocation?

Civil War.

The reaction to Trump brought about the current coalescence of the Left’s strands that have many fundamental reasons to hate each other, but skipped it for the purpose of hating even more.  Internally, they’ll eventually face a mass purity test, but for now they’re content to just spend their daily Two Minutes Hate on the Right.

Conditions are closer now to Civil War than at any point in my life.  The Civil War 2.0 Scale™ has moved from a 6 to a 9 in that time frame.  Billions in property damage have been done.  At least hundreds of people are now dead with untold thousands of injured due to this ideological conflict.

All in 24 months.

Violence And Censorship Update

This month is, again, mainly censorship.

Point 1.  Twitter® Is Unaware Of Irony

Twitter™ got kicked out of Nigeria.  Why?  Because they deleted a Tweet® from the President of Nigeria where he was threatening secessionists in his own country who might try to start a civil war.

Here was Twitter’s™ response

Wait, what?

It’s an essential human right for people to have Twitter™.  Huh.

Point 2.  Wuhan Fluhan

One of my big pet peeves about the press is when they turn news stories into editorials.  It reduces my trust in them to, well, zero.   Looks like they can’t even trust themselves as they go back to memoryhole their own inconvenient headlines:

Point 3.  Enemy Of The State

Homeland Security has now issued warning bulletins for:

  • January 27 and “coming weeks” as they waited for violence from the Right,
  • May 14 for “Right Wing Violence” and, now,
  • Last week, for Right Wing violence against marchers at the Tulsa Riot Anniversary.

It turns out that Joe Biden wants to simply change the War on Terror laws to make them applicable to, well, everyone Joe doesn’t like.  You remember, those laws that were derided by the Left and Right as un-Constitutional, back when such things mattered to the Left?

How do we know who is on those lists?  Well, the CIA is spying on Americans.  Huh.  Thought that was illegal?  No matter.

Thankfully, someone is speaking out for the Right:

Glenn Greenwald has a lot more at this (LINK).  RTWT.

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:

Up is more violent, and violence is down again in May.  Inner-city rioting continues and murder rates are up by double-digits, but nobody seems to care anymore.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability increased this month, as expected.  I think June may calm down, but who knows what Congress will get up to this month.

Economic:

I expected this number to be less positive.  It’s not.  Inflation has yet to hit this measure.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for every year I have data for.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Inflation

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” is more than a song lyric – it’s true.  Right now we’re seeing inflation everywhere.  Lumber.  Gasoline.  And . . . hamburgers.

All of the inflation stems from different things.  Wood, well, it’s demand and a limited supply of mills.  Gasoline?  Those prices are up based on capacity, too, but also on crude oil prices, which have gone back up to pre-COVID levels.

Hamburgers?  I just saw a fast-food double cheeseburger for $6.99.

Ouch!

Ranchers are making the same to less money than when beef was cheaper, so just like lumber, the big money is being made by the processors.

Not that any of that matters.  Inflation is corrosive – it’s really a stealth tax where a government prints more money and, well, to put it in the immortal words of AOC when she wants to pay for universal healthcare, “You just pay for it.”

Obviously, there are consequences, and those are rising prices.  Is there a limit?

No.  There is no limit.  The result, though, is generally catastrophic.  People in an inflationary economy don’t behave rationally, since they become tempted to purchase absolutely anything because their money is so worthless that they want to get it out of their hands as quickly as possible.  Why?

Because as worthless as it is today, tomorrow it will be worth even less.

This creates panic.  Mania.  Desperate people.  A situation ripe for changing out a government.  Or even a revolution.  In the 1970s, there was no revolution, but the government was changed out, decisively.  Twice.  But in the 1970s, the United States was the world leader in manufacturing.  In the 1970s, the United States was (relatively) culturally homogeneous.  In the 1970s, the difference between Right and Left was much, much smaller.

Now?  None of those are in play.  For a government to play with inflation now is like trying to catch falling daggers:  dangerous.  Revolution after revolution and war after war has been caused by the devastation created by bad economic conditions.

LINKS

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

CHATTER LEFT AND RIGHT

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-race-power/

https://theweek.com/articles/983063/threat-civil-war-didnt-end-trump-presidency

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/12/gop-civil-war-dont-bet-on-it-487192

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/05/14/its-not-a-civil-war-its-a-purge-492851

https://news.yahoo.com/civil-war-bad-business-095607030.html

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/31/pete-meijer-slams-gop-treacherous-snakes-salivating-civil-war/5286907001/

https://richmondobserver.com/opinion/item/12399-opinion-will-treason-mania-destroy-america.html

http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/mike_jones/is-a-next-civil-war-in-our-future/article_4a634fd0-bb7a-11eb-afc8-ffafd746b7d5.html

 

SECESSION TALK

https://vtdigger.org/2021/05/31/edward-mcmahon-u-s-could-soon-cease-to-be-a-functioning-democracy/

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/01/the-new-secession-crisis/

https://americanmind.org/salvo/red-lines/

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/denton-county-republican-party-passes-resolution-supporting-hb-1359-the-texas-independence-referendum-act-12016219

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/their-own-private-idaho-5-oregon-counties-back-a-plan-to-secede/

https://www.thestate.com/news/nation-world/national/article251530708.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/img2.png?itok=p10yKIFF

 

ONE, TWO, THREE, WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

 

NYC : https://twitter.com/yuhline/status/1399502974272131078

Portland : https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1398986717047230467

Miami : https://twitter.com/ONLYinDADE/status/1399791879068192783

America: https://twitter.com/i/status/1399800643880108035

https://www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-portland-public-schools

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/removing-the-bedrock-of-liberalism-826

 

1,000 KILLED THRESHOLD TO OFFICIALLY DECLARE CW? HOLD MY DOS EQUIS…

 

https://fox59.com/news/national-world/body-count-from-drug-cartel-wars-earns-mexican-cities-label-of-most-violent-in-the-world/

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/mexico-shares-grim-figures-on-disappeared-citizens/2202969

https://www.dw.com/en/dozens-fall-victim-to-mexicos-brutal-election-campaign/a-57694375

https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-mexico-police-f6ea7798ca3cc171ac13b3a5a6a6c266

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-deaths-covid-19.html

A Day In The Life Of . . .

Actual Johnny Carson Joke:

Carnac The Magnificent, holding envelope to his head to divine the contents:  “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Carnac The Magnificent, opening envelope and reading contents:  “Give three reasons you should name your baby Al.”

How do you determine love?  I mean, if you put your wife and your dog in the trunk of your car, who is happier to see you in two hours when you let them out?

Why do we do it?  I mean, I’m the funniest writer on the Internet, so I know why I do that.  But why do we do all of this?  You know, the life stuff?

Life is difficult.  It’s an uphill slog, and the ending (of the life part) is predetermined.  Yet we keep picking up one foot and putting it in front of the next.

Why?

Because it’s who we are.  It’s what we are.

We have lived in the most prosperous civilization that’s ever existed.  In most Western countries, we have many, many more people afflicted with diseases because of too many available calories, rather than too few.

That’s a rarity in human history.  In medieval France, peasants would essentially spend the whole winter in bed together, shivering, trying to minimize calorie loss in a simulation of hibernation.   Now?  It’s Cheetos®, PEZ™, elephant rides and pantyhose for everyone.  We are in a civilization characterized by excess.

That may not always be the case.

I wish they made pantyhose that don’t rip, because now everyone in the bank has seen my face.

I’ve read a book or two, and one that really hit me was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.   It’s by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  I think I come close to pronouncing his name correctly, which might make me sound pretentious.  But if you read Solzhenitsyn, it’s not pretentious at all.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is just that, a day in the life of a guy named John (Ivan means John).  This particular John is in prison.  Why?  He was captured by the Germans during World War II.  Anyone captured by the Germans who wasn’t suffering from life-threatening wounds was considered a traitor to the U.S.S.R.

Denisovich was not only in prison, he was in the GULAG.  It’s all capitalized because, like NATO, it’s an acronym.  In this case, GULAG is an acronym for a series of Russian words, Гла́вное Управле́ние Лагере́й that I imagine sounds like a cat choking on a hairball made of fiberglass and cheap vodka when pronounced correctly.

See, that’s not pretentious!

This particular book is very, very short.  Solzhenitsyn uses his language with economy, yet to me he creates a story that’s like a joke.  It’s not clear what he’s talking about until the very last page, and (for me) it hit me like a ton of bricks.  It’s like if M. Night Shyamalan wrote it with a particular twist.

You’ve already read Solzhenitsyn.  See?  You’re not pretentious.

I recommend it unreservedly.  I bought it at a garage sale, and I gave it to the foreman of a crew who was putting in cinder blocks.  That makes sense in an M. Night Shyamalan way, too, but you have to read the book.  Here’s one place I saw a copy (LINK).  I’d give you mine but I’d have to track down a retired bricklayer with a bad back.

The message I took away from this book is that life isn’t about grand moments.  And, as I mentioned some time ago, life isn’t about comfort, either.  Life is much more than that.  In the book, Denisovich takes outlandish pleasure at what we would consider bare minimums.

That gave me perspective.  Again, that’s not the insight grenade I took from the book, but it’s close.  When is the last time you really thought about the salad you were eating, savoring the crisp crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the Caesar dressing, and the hard, yet yielding texture of the Parmesan cheese?

Each and every bite is a taste no king or potentate could have had out of season.  I can have it every Tuesday.  Or Thursday.  Or any other day ending in y.

I know it was a bad joke.  Everyone romaine calm.

In many ways, I often overlook the luxury I’m surrounded by.  I can get a fresh tomato in the depths of winter, and when I bite into it feel the taste of a spring day erupt.  I’d add in red roses in winter, but The Mrs. knows where the rose bush grows if she wants a few.

Our world is filled with unimaginable convenience.  Our world is filled with unimaginable abilities to entertain and distract.  Like I said earlier:  our world is filled with excess, but it might not always be.

In Solzhenitsyn’s world, well, a luxury is an extra ration of rough bread made from poorly milled grain.  Solzhenitsyn knew what he was talking about:  he spent years in a GULAG for saying in a letter to a friend during the war that Stalin wore granny-panties.  Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was a mild criticism.

In a letter.

So, off to GULAG.

In the GULAG, Solzhenitsyn got cancer.  Ouch.  He survived.  And, when Nikita Khrushchev was leading the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn actually got to publish some of his critical commentaries on communism.  Why?  Khrushchev wanted to remove every bit of the stain of Stalin from the U.S.S.R., so Solzhenitsyn was his guy.

The Soviets made the best bread in history – people would wait in lines for days for a single piece.

That didn’t last long.  In most cases, commies want to show the world (and their own citizens) that no one can escape.  Sadly for them, Solzhenitsyn was too famous to pop into prison, and too outspoken to leave among the citizens.  That sort of thing happens when you win the frigging Nobel Prize.

So?

They booted him.  Stripped him of his citizenship.  He lived in the United States until 1994.  Famously, he predicted the future of the United States in an address to Harvard® that he’d be lynched for today.

How cool was the address?  It contains these lines:

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism.  Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

Read The Whole Thing: (LINK)

What irritates me the most is that on a long weekend when I was a kid, I probably could have gone, met the man, and bought him a beer.  If I could write just once the wisdom that Solzhenitsyn gave in just that one speech I could go to my end a happy man.

Was it a missed opportunity in not just getting in my car and driving to find him?  (I even had a copy of his book at that time.)  If I regretted things, I’d regret that I never did buy Solzhenitsyn a beer and gave Gorbachev a wedgie.

Okay, I’d like to give both of them wedgies.  Atomic wedgies.

Solzhenitsyn later moved back to Russia, his citizenship restored, and they gave him a nice house.  Spoiler alert:  he didn’t do it for the house.

He did it because, as he said in his speech to Harvard©:

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage.  No one on Earth has any other way left but – upward.

This is why we do it.  This is why we put that one foot in front of the other.

“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.” – Solzhenitsyn

It’s who we are.

It’s what we are.

Anybody need Doritos®?  Oh, and remember, Solzhenitsyn outlasted the Soviets.

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

The Way The Constitution Dies

This is a repost, but one that has some meaning to me on the start of Memorial Day weekend.  Please, all of you be safe.

point4

Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence.  As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us.  My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America.  It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area.  Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily.  Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before.  I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did.  They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade.  These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal.  Bastogne.  Chosin Reservoir.  Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944.  His sister was a friend of my father.  As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math that I would later learn, though he was doing it decades before I was born.  He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18.  No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name.  Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism.  The value of the Constitution.  The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church.  Those boys who traveled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving.  The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them.  And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny?  Yes.  

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when.  A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built.  There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms.  These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years.  It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

rangers

Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens.  Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population.  A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American.  10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night.  The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there.  I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by.  She spoke no English.  One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?”  I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.”  It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States.  I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers.  Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom.  This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark.  I love England.  I love Denmark.  I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee.  Or Amerikansk in Denmark.  My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English.  They wouldn’t be Danish.  They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.”  Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish.  I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria.  One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060.  The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp.  These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity.  They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government.  Division is the strength of these politicians.  “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?”  “Abolish ICE.”  “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.”  “Living wage for all.”  “Common sense gun laws.”  Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take.  They don’t get any of this from their family, either.  Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.  It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution.  It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text.  On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all.  But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four.  Change that number?  Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything.  It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it.  The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

The Alice Cooper Economy

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.” – Used Cars

I apologize – I didn’t mean to rehash a potato joke.

I had saved my money. It was near my birthday, and we finally went on a trip where I could spend it in the most elementary school way possible.

Living on Wilder Mountain, as I have noted before, we were a good 45 miles from the nearest movie theater. We were so remote, there was only one escalator (at the JCPenney’s®) within at least 120 miles of us. At that time, I think there was only one elevator (on a two-story building, no less) within the same range.

But on occasion, Ma and Pa would get a wild hair and we’d drive into a nearby largish city. What was large? More bars than churches. We only did that a few times a year, and I was excited. I stocked the backseat with comic books and off we went.

I took my few dollars ($10?) and bought a cassette. It was the first music purchase I had ever made with my own money. My music collection until that day consisted of three handmedown cassettes from my older brother, who for legal reasons I’ll call “John Wilder” since that’s his name, too. Turns out my parents got me in a poker game with a band of outlaw bikers. Their ante? An old Slim Jim® beef stick.

It was a rough day for them when they lost that hand.

Yes, this was one of the cassettes. I’ll never forget, “I’m leaving, on a small single engine plane, I don’t think I’ll ever be back again.”

All kidding aside, my brother’s first name really is John Wilder as well, but he gets a bit upset when I call him Juan, too. I think it’s because he’s older than me and all.

Anyway, the cassette I bought was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. After the clerk pulled off the big plastic “don’t steal me” antitheft device, I was thrilled. I poked my fingernail under the cellophane wrapper and skillfully slit the clear plastic open. The ride home was going to be over two hours, and I had a fresh set of C-cell batteries in the cassette player (mono) which was also a handmedown from big brother John.

Yup, that’s Groucho on the album cover. How he got there, we’ll never know.

As I slipped into the back seat of the Chevy® Impala™ coupe that was Pa Wilder’s 400 cubic inch pride and joy, I shared the backseat with the cassette player and Alice Cooper.

The Sun was bright as the pavement slid underneath the Impala™’s wheels and as Pa put his foot into it in the mountain air.

I hit play.

I don’t think it was quite seven minutes into side one of the tape when the cassette player stopped making noise. I hit “eject” and saw the carnage. The cassette player, which had never, ever eaten a single tape, had not only feasted on my brand new tape, but had also . . . broken it. No rewinding it.

The tape was dead. Oh, sure, I tried to resurrect it for a month with all manner of ideas that came to my fevered elementary school mind, but not one of them worked. $10, a fortune to me, gone.

I still liked Alice Cooper, though.

Yes, officer, that was the one that did it. I’m sure.

Eventually, my finances improved and I managed to get several Alice Cooper albums, and I had learned. I bought the album on vinyl and then copied it onto a blank cassette tape. I bought the album for Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits for myself the second time with my sixteenth birthday money.

Although it wasn’t on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, the song Generation Landslide by Mr. Cooper was always a fun one to listen to. It also has these lyrics:

Sister’s out till five, doing banker son’s hours
But she owns a Maserati® that’s a gift from his father
Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

Give it a listen. Good stuff.

As a banker’s son, (even from a small farm bank) I liked to imagine what a Maserati® might be. There was no Internet, so it was obviously Italian, but yet not made of pepperoni.

Even though I was a banker’s son, I ended up driving an old GMC™ pickup with the most gutless engine that GM© ever dared put under the hood of a pickup, vinyl bench seats, and rubber floor mats. It wasn’t a Maserati™, but the local fräuleins didn’t seem to mind too much.

I loved that truck.

But in 2021, I think of these lines from the song:

Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

I think about this couplet a lot. It’s not great poetry, but it has always brought to my mind a system, out of control. Everything is moving along, as fast as it can. And then?

Stop.

High speeds bring energy. A lot of it. The kinetic energy of a moving object in a non-relativistic reference frame (trust me, the readers of this blog will call me on that if I don’t mention it) is equal to the mass of the object times the speed of the object, squared.

KE=1/2mv2

That means that an object that is going twice as fast carries four times the kinetic energy.

So, speed matters.

A lot.

And the primary policy of the economic wizards that try to “manage” the economy of the United States is: putting the pedal to the metal is the easiest way to keep the party going. Whatever it takes to keep the economy growing and accelerating in that growth is the policy of the day. Who needs booze when you have meth?

If the economy seems to falter? The only answer is from both our government and the Fed® is, “faster, faster, put more gas to it.”

As most drivers know besides a Biden driving a car, the faster the car goes, the more vulnerable it is to any imbalances. Prudent drivers know when to slow down if the road is wet. Even fools know to slow down when the road is glaze ice. The main thing I try to keep teaching Pugsley and The Boy about driving on icy roads is this: turn or (brake/accelerate). Choose one. Otherwise, things tend to get spinny. Sometimes very spinny.

And it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.

I wonder how this plays out? Who could predict it?

Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:

  • Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
  • Rampant money printing.
  • A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
  • An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
  • Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).

One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.

What’s next, a $50 ribeye?

Speaking of printing, some people are now 3-D printing guns. That’s nothing. I’ve had a Canon® printer for years.

Maybe we can bring it back under control. I don’t know. But I do know what Alice said:

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

La da da da da, indeed.

The Left: Scarier Than You Think

“No, I quite approve of terror, arson, murder, any tool that serves the revolution.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

The Russian Revolution had big goals:  they aimed for the Tsars.

In last week’s post about the Woke Military driving out the obviously patriotic Lt. Colonel Lohmeier (Woke Military Kicking Out (More) Officers), I replied in the comments:

“I hope that they start recruiting from mental institutions, prisons, and inner-city Minneapolis.”

This was actually an attempt at a joke – it’s a riff on a line from Baseketball, the 1998 Zucker Brothers/Trey Parker/Matt Stone movie which is a staple around our house on Saturday nights.  The original line from the movie is:

Continued expansion diluted the talent pool, forcing owners to recruit heavily from prisons, mental institutions, and Texas.

When they film a post-apocalypse movie in Detroit, they have to use CGI to repair buildings.

I didn’t use Texas, because I like Texas and Texans, so I picked Minneapolis because I think it’s on its way to becoming a quaint “Detroit on the Mississippi” where the primary source of amusement is Thunderdome Friday nights.  Large Marge, a frequent commenter, called me on this quip (edits only in formatting):

A)  Military recruits from prison

I am a former Corrections Officer.
I worked at three penitentiaries . . . including a max.

Some of the most intelligent individuals are prisoners.  The most intelligent of them are organized and exceptionally efficient in the use of violence and intimidation.

Although better people than me might question their primary loyalties — gang/club? or Constitution? — I would expect them to continue to hone their adaptive skills in a military setting.

In fact, I would anticipate them quickly establishing a hierarchy and running the joint in no time… while eliminating slackers.  Anybody they cannot eliminate, they recruit.  No middle ground, no spectators.

Two of my ‘adopted’ sons are also Corrections Officers.  Both are Marines, one was a SEAL.  Intelligent, competitive, dedicated, observant.

Ask around, you may discover your assumptions to be the opposite of reality.
And assumptions can get somebody hurt.

B)  Military recruits from inner-city slums

Happens daily.  Pigment is no guarantee of inbred stupidity or ineffectiveness, however, it is a guarantee of tribal acceptance.

Anybody not in the tribe is prey:

If you are alone, they are five.

If you are five, they are a faceless two hundred in a spontaneous leaderless non-thinking swarm . . . they act, then disperse into nothingness.

Similar to recruits from prison, these folks are effective at violence and intimidation.
Just do not expect complex thought processes resulting in traditional long-term ‘White Collar’ crimes.
Complex planning is not required for crimes of opportunity.

C)  These A and B elements are not exclusive.

Expect cross-overs.

Flyers can ruin your afternoon.

Large Marge is, of course, right in every respect.

The first point is that the general attitude is that all of the Left is represented by the soy-boy weakness we see from the Left’s poster children.  It is not.

I love being around people like this.  I know that I can easily take their wallets and buy myself something nice with their parent’s money.

Leftism is about power, not rule of law.  What does that sound like?  It sounds like a gang hierarchy.  In truth, that describes the rise of most Leftist groups as they head for absolute power.

Need an example?  Joseph Stalin was a bank robber.  He was a kidnapper.  He ran extortion and protection rackets.  Undoubtedly he was a murderer before the Soviet Revolution ever began and he could update his rookie numbers into the big leagues.

Stalin was a thug.  When the Revolution started, he assumed a military command position and rose to prominence because:  he was ruthless and brutal.

Of course, the mincing idiots in the Alberta Young Communist League won’t be anything but grease between underneath the tank treads of the real Leftists.  If they were all that we faced?  The Revolution would be over as soon as the microwaves ran out of power to heat up the chicken tendies the Alberta Communist Party uses for food.

If you work at the prison library, it does have its prose and cons.

No, if the real Revolution starts, we’ll see the same here.  And the Left will recruit heavily from prisons.  How do we know this?  They’ve already started.

  • California is planning on releasing 63,000 violent felons back onto the street.
  • It is now a bigger crime to defend yourself in Leftist states than to rape or murder.
  • Places like San Francisco have made shoplifting under $950 a “free pass” crime where there isn’t any punishment.

As I mentioned in the last Weather Report – the Chauvin trial wasn’t about Chauvin’s guilt – it was a planned political theater telling cops that the last thing they can do is attempt to arrest criminals.  Violent crime increase is the result.

Communist revolutions since the French Revolution have had the effect of bringing not the brightest and the smartest and the most virtuous to power, but the most bloodthirsty.  Stalin himself initiated purges to every possible threat to his authority for just this reason.

So, Large Marge is right on this point.  The people that the Left will put against America won’t be the weak that they put forward.  What they put forward will be determined by ruthlessness.  Say what you want about Stalin, but he wasn’t dumb.  And he wasn’t a nice cuddly grandpa – he left his own son to die in a POW camp during World War II rather than accept the offered trade for him.

Remember, Joe Stalin was great at carbon reduction.

The leadership of the Left will also be determined by another factor:  loyalty to the Cause.  One of the hallmarks of Leftism is promotion to leadership positions of people who would never have been able to reach a leadership position under the old regime.  A prostitute as commissar determining who of the town’s leaders gets shot for perceived past grievances?  Why not?

In fact, it has always been the practice to find those who have failed in life to promote to power in Leftist countries.  The idea is that competence is less valuable than loyalty, and those who owe everything in life to their devotion to the party are bound to be the most fanatical.

To me, it looks like the FBI office smells like cheap aftershave and burnt hair.

By the logic of the Left, Lt. Colonel Lohmeier had to be removed.  He was competent, but he wasn’t loyal, and never would be.  Why do that when there are dozens of Majors that you can promote who have seen the penalty for not being loyal?

On the Right, there is a desire for more incompetence in the forces that may be sent against the American people for the first time in over 155 years, but we may not get that.  The Majors that follow Lohmeier will likely be nearly as competent, but a whole lot more loyal.  That’s the official army.  Likewise, they’ll probably be working along with shock troops as bloodthirsty as the Leftists that performed atrocities in Paris in 1794, Russia between 1917 and 1933, China between 1949 and 1970, and Cambodia in the 1970s.

So, yeah.  My attempt at humor was just that, an attempt.  Large Marge is right.

This is a warning to all American people who love justice and the rule of law:  never, ever, underestimate your opposition.

(And, thank you, Large Marge, for catching my grammar errors so I can fix ‘em!)

No Post Today . . .

They put a parking lot on a piece of land,
Where the supermarket used to stand,
Before that they put up a bowling alley,
On the site that used to be the local Palais,
That’s where the big bands used to come and play . . . .

-The Kinks, Come Dancing

Normally I try to be pretty good about keeping up the posting frequency – M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern time, plus extra posts to let people know when the podcast is up.  I’m weirdly proud that it’s been a few years since I’ve missed having a post written and ready to go on schedule.

If I can’t be correct, I can at least be consistent, right?

I’m sorry to tell you that today that life intrudes on posting.

I’d like to stress that all of the characters that I write about regularly are healthy and all the Wilders you read about have hugged each other today and still love each other very much and there’s no reason that you won’t hear our tales for years to come.  However, there is still a cycle of life that trumps daily schedules, and someone close to all of the folks here at Stately Wilder Mansion has passed away.

I hope to have a post ready by Friday, and almost certainly will be back to the regular schedule next week.

Thanks to all of you.  As I mentioned recently, (and as I hope it shows) I love putting these together and, just maybe, giving some readers a smile and a (slightly) new way of looking at life from time to time.  It recharges my batteries in ways that I can’t really express.

Again, thank you all.

-John

Woke Military Kicking Out (More) Officers

“When I use the Constitution a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” – Alice in Wonderland

That’s a (then) Captain Lohmeier teaching a recruit to use solitaire.  Note the clever use of camouflage.

A Lieutenant Colonel, Matthew Lohmeier, in the United States Space Force (“Starfleet”) has recently been relieved of command.  As far as I could tell, his job was being in charge of the people who look at screens all day seeing if there are incoming missiles.

I supposed it is an important job because if there were incoming missiles, well, we would have to shoot missiles back or something.  And, so they don’t mistake a snot fleck on their screen for an incoming Soviet-era RT-2PM Topol strategic missile inbound with up to four MIRV warheads, well, I bet they go through an awful lot of screen cleaner.

What did this particular Lieutenant Colonel do to be relieved of command?

Well, first, he wrote a book:  Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.  It’s doing very well – the print version is sold out on Amazon®.  For the record, I bought it on Kindle® just to put some money into Lohmeier’s pocket.  If I have time to read it between now and then, I’ll do a review next Monday.

To the litterbox, and beyond!

If you buy his book, it won’t do anything but make people crazy who disagree with statements like this, which was from a quote from Lohmeier in a recent podcast:

“Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is and should be. That wasn’t just prolific in social media, or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature.”

Members of the military don’t lose their free speech, but they are prohibited from taking part in “partisan” political activities.  Lohmeier was removed for taking part in partisan political activities, even though he noted in a statement to Military.com:

“My intent never has been to engage in partisan politics. I have written a book about a particular political ideology (Marxism) in the hope that our Defense Department might return to being politically non-partisan in the future as it has honorably done throughout history.”

We’ve all seen this taking place.  All branches of the military have been ideologically swapped out during the last 12 or so years.  The fact that Lt. Colonel Lohmeier was willing to (very likely) give up a job that pays somewhere between $95,000 to $140,000 a year with a guaranteed retirement and medical for life says that he is likely committed to what he says.

There’s probably a kernel of truth to that.

And it’s not like he came from nowhere:  Lohmeier is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and was an F-15C driver.  He calls out “diversity and inclusion training” and “critical race theory” and the New York Times® 1619™ Project©, rightly, as Marxist in nature.  The podcast is where he does that here (LINK), so you can listen to it and decide yourself.

There is no way that I could interpret anything that Lohmeier said as politically partisan, unless critical race theory is partisan.  It clearly is not.  It is ideological, not partisan.  I mean, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an ideology, right?

Lt. Col. Lohmeier took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.  Clearly, Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution as it is currently written.  I would argue that any officer would have the duty to call it out, but some of them must have taken the hypocritical oath.

And to The Mrs.:  I promise I’ll fix the problems around the house.  You don’t have to keep reminding me every other year.  That gets old.

But not many would turn down a career that pays pretty well, and also has a pretty good retirement.  The goal is to not rock the boat until it’s time to become hired to a lucrative job by a defense industrial giant like Boeing or Lockheed and make money based on their connections.

Lohmeier won’t do that, since those doors will close pretty quickly.  If his goal is to be a grafter on the system, he’s not doing a great job of it.  Sure, he’ll make money from this book, but I bet it won’t be a lot of money.  Also, Lohmeier might get hired on by Fox® to be a commentator, but that seems unlikely unless he sells out his convictions.

Time will tell.  Oh, and if you buy this, I’m still not gonna make a dime.

But the scarcity of officers resisting the ideological destruction of the United States military tells us volumes already.  When officers are punished with career-ending sanctions, well, the word will get around.  The next officer will be less likely to speak up.

There weren’t any subtitles for the last 15 minutes of Titanic – that makes sense.  I guess a good caption goes down with the ship.

Lohmeier got sacked from command for the biggest sin of all in a Marxist world:  telling the truth.  Of course the new goal of the military is diversity rather than their old goal of killing people and breaking things.  Recently, a recruiting commercial for the Army had as a focus a young woman whose “parents” were two gay women.

Huh?  Just watching this cartoon commercial, you’d get the idea that the mission of the United States military was to be a hiring program for children of gay people.  As I recall, that’s exactly what the guys who hit Omaha Beach were fighting for, right?

Meanwhile, if you look at militaries around the world that actually have a mission that includes killing people and breaking things, well, they have commercials of muscled men doing hard, difficult training to do nearly impossible missions.  Or of jet fighters and artillery pieces creating massive explosions.

Flannel footed pajamas and warm (not too hot!) cocoa – it’s the new Biden military!

Everyone in the United States can sleep more easily now.  The mean guy who cared about the Constitution and rule of law is gone.  We can have people who were hired for “diversity and inclusion” purposes scanning the heavens for incoming missiles.  I mean, only troops that have been through diversity and inclusion training could do that well, right?

Life Is A Struggle: That’s A Good Thing

“The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel. It’s a wonderful way to live. It’s the only way to drive.” – Rush

A computer once beat me at chess.  It lost at kickboxing, though.

The Mrs. and I have recently been playing chess.  It’s not a lot of chess, it’s mainly on Saturday nights when things are a bit slower.  I’ve been enjoying the games.  If I were to guess, before the last time we played, the games tilted slightly in my favor.

I think I’ve won about 30.  The Mrs. was still sitting at, well, zero wins.

30-0.

Don’t think poorly of her.  The Mrs. is going from a standing start.  At one point in college, I lived with eight other guys in a house, and nearly all of the time a chess game was going.  I could generally beat everyone in the house by the end of the school year.  It took a while for one guy, about four months.  First, he wiped the floor with me, then he and I traded games.  By the end of two semesters?

I usually won.  I have played a lot more chess than The Mrs.  I will say this, though, she’s smart as a whip, and when I give her position analysis and show her why she lost the game, she listens.

The Mrs. doesn’t listen like someone who wants to defend why they did what they did.  She listens with the ears of someone who wants to learn, who wants to get better.  There has been exactly zero ego in learning the game for her.

Did I mention that The Mrs. is competitive?  Really competitive?

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has a tooth perfectly centered under his nose, like it’s one-half tooth too far over?  Now you’ll never be able to unsee that.  You’re welcome.

The last time The Mrs. and I played chess, we played three games.  The first game, I crushed her.  By the start of the mid-game, I was up on pieces and position.  It was like a velociraptor in a room full of bacon-wrapped kittens covered in pudding.  Then the next game.  Again, by the mid-game, I was up.  I was toying with her king like a teacup poodle lords over a pork chop, getting ready for checkmate.

Then, she moved.

Then, I moved.  That’s the rule, right?

But my move made it so she had no legal moves left.  The Mrs. wasn’t in check, but couldn’t move.  I was winning, decisively.

But if she has no legal moves and her king isn’t in check?

It’s a draw.  The score was now 30-0-1.

My blunder, her draw.  The next game went, shall we say, a little differently.  The start went okay.  Then, in the mid-game?  She took control and by the beginning of the end-game?  I was breathing for air harder than Biden sniffing a teenager.  Which Biden?  Apparently any of them.

What mall did they get this picture taken at? 

Then?  I caught a break.  The Mrs. was up on pieces and position, but I found a way out.  I could keep her king in perpetual check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

Note:  I couldn’t win, but I could make the game as annoying as an 8-year-old asking, “Are we there yet?”

Thankfully, there’s a rule for that.  It’s called?

A draw.

We went from me constantly crushing her, to her lucking to a draw, to me grasping to find a way out of a game without a loss.

30-0-2.

Good for The Mrs.

And good for me.  Now I’m going to have to work to bring my A-game.  And Saturday nights just got better.

Why?

Would it be better if I could crush her in chess every evening like Oprah crushes couch cushions?  Of course not.

I told my barber to cut my hair like he would for Tom Cruise.  He made me sit on two phone books.

The best victories in life are going head to head with someone near your level in skill.  Going all out.  Pushing each other to be better.  I mean, I can beat up any number of third graders.  Honestly, I have no idea how many third graders I couldn’t beat up.

I could do it all day.  It’s really not a challenge.  Seriously, I could beat up lots of them.

But fourth graders?  I mean, I could be at least the third-best player on the fourth-grade soccer team.

Life is challenge.  Life is struggle.

And thank heavens for that.  Or thank Heaven for that?  (Stick with me – this isn’t a sermon.)

Speaking of Heaven, from the time I was just a little Wilder, I caused a *lot* of problems at church.  I distinctly recall that I colored a picture of Jesus with His skin being bright purple.  On purpose.

My only excuse is that I was five and had no glitter.

The Sunday school teacher came up to me and said, “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t purple.”

I replied, “Well, please allow me to retort.  Jesus is God, right?  Well, if He wants to be purple, He can be purple.”

How can you argue with logic like that?  Even kindergartners score some points now and then.  I last saw my Sunday school teacher when I was thirty.  She was really thrilled to see me.  I think she was just happy I hadn’t started the Cult of the Glittery Purple Jesus.  And, yes, all of those things really happened.

But back to heaven, or in this case, Heaven.

When they described Heaven to me in Sunday school, I was as appalled and indignant as a precocious five-year-old can be.

Sunday school teacher, describing Heaven:  “You’re happy all the time.  Nothing bad ever happens.  You wake up and everything is fine.”

Five-year-old me thought:  “Well, that sucks.  It’s stupid.  That sounds boring.”  Even then, I was wise enough not to throw out a level-five heresy in the middle of Sunday school.  Jesus might turn me purple or something.  I’m certainly glad they didn’t teach me about Valhalla then, because that sounds much, much better than Heaven:  Wake up.  Fight and get soused and maybe die.  Wake up.  Repeat.

What did the Vikings call English villages?  Chopping centers.

Sure you teach little kids the things that you think they like.  But me as a little kid?  Peace was the last thing on my mind.  But I’m not alone.

When you look at the life of Jesus, He didn’t spend it sitting on fluffy pillows and eating Ding-Dongs®.  Nope.  If you think WWJD, remember, taking a whip and kicking vermin out of church is within the realm of permissible actions.

Jesus was clear in that:  life is the struggle.

  • Life is not about the easy way out.
  • Life is not about running out the clock in the 20 years until you retire.
  • Life is not about being nice.

If you played your life like a video game, your goal isn’t to have a pleasant but non-threatening experience.  You want to climb the mountain, fight for the fair maiden, and drink from the skull of your enemy.  I want The Mrs. to be kick-ass at chess, so when I win, it means something.

It meant something to The Mrs. when I had to force a draw to save my sorry (rare NSFW word coming) ass.

That, my friends, is life.  Life is the struggle.

And my bet at Heaven is that it’s more like this:

LEVEL ONE COMPLETE.

PREPARE FOR LEVEL TWO.

I started a job digging deeper and deeper holes – but that was boring on so many levels.

Yeah.  Let’s go.  Let’s live life.

Bring.

It.

On.

Take big bites.

Who is with me?