Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

Civil War Weather Report #7: All Eyes on Virginia

“Who do you favor in the Virginia Slims tournament?” – Top Secret

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Don’t put in extra hours at the clock factory – they hate that.

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

I didn’t expect to move the clock up this month, but yet, here we are, and it’s all due to Virginia.  More on that below.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Flashpoint Virginia –Updated Civil War II Index – Virginia and Rallies and Aesop – Links

Welcome to Issue Eight 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 II, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), and Issue Seven is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Organized violence seems to be lower this month, as you’d expect in winter.  Or perhaps AntiFa® is just on a snowboarding trip to Colorado so they can get some dank weed?  Societal violence tends to drop as it gets colder, because people look stupid rioting in knit hats and parkas.  Well, people look stupid rioting in any weather, except for the South Koreans who have rioting down to a spectator sport.  South Koreans riot about, well, anything.  It’s like living in San Francisco, but with less poop.

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The Korean beef riots?  Udder madness.

YouTube® announced a change in the terms and conditions for video creators that would go into effect December 10, 2019.  The major change (of concern) was that YouTube© announced that they would delete accounts that, in YouTube’s™ sole opinion, weren’t commercially valuable.  There were several creators that I watch on a semi-regular basis that were quite upset – this was proof that YouTube™ was coming after them.  Several refuse to put controversial videos on YouTube® at all now – they save those videos for other sites, like Bitchute©.

As far as I can tell, most of these channels are still up and running.  Several that had been demonetized for political content even had monetization restored.  Like the end of the world in 2012, the dread YouTube® apocalypse is currently overdue.

Switching to Twitter©:  their most notorious purge in the last period was Danielle Stella, a candidate for congress running against that paragon of virtue, Ilhan Omar.  Stella’s offense?  She tweeted:

“If it is proven @IlhanMN [Ilhan Omar] passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged” – I agree with Ms. Stella, that hanging people who collaborate against the United States with foreign governments is a good thing.

But I will never trust her because of sage advice that my brother gave to me one afternoon while driving:  “Never trust a person who has two first names.  Like Scott George.  Or George Scott.”  He was proven right when George C. Scott stopped by our house and ate all of our mayonnaise.  Man, that man loved his mayo.

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I guess the decided they should see other siblings.

Twitter® has also admitted a practice they had long denied, but was obvious:  they shadow ban people – you can type away all you want, but no one is really going to see your Tweet™.  How better to control a populace than to let them think that “bad” opinions are ignored?

Flashpoint Virginia

Since Virginia has been changed from state controlled by the Right to a state where Leftists hold all major offices and control the legislature, the Left has had a great desire to spike the ball and exert complete control.  That control is focused on Leftist goals.  The first Leftist goal mentioned?

Elimination of many Second Amendment rights, including banning ownership, with no grandfather provision, of “assault” weapons.

It also goes much further, and bans parts of rifles the same way an entire rifle would be banned.  Outside of cloning Stalin, elimination of private gun ownership is a primary goal of the Left.  It is also a trigger on the Right, and this legislation couldn’t be more tailored to antagonize the Right if Rosie O’Donnell read it as an alarm clock message.

As political battles go, this gun ban is an uphill one, even for the Left.

What is unusual here is the reaction from localities.  More than 98 bodies (counties, cities, towns) as of this writing have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” – and have vowed to not cooperate.

The Attorney General (a Leftist) has issued an opinion that the counties can’t just ignore state law, they have to follow it.  Therefore?  The Governor (a Leftist) has requested $100 million extra for incarceration and $4 million for an 18 person gun ban team.

It’s not enough.

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Sometimes you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.  Like me in my first marriage. 

The Left owns all of the levers of government.  So what do the people that want to keep their rights do?

Form an opposing governmental structure.  Those are the Second Amendment sanctuaries.  Like it or not, these declarations are the first step towards a unified governing structure that opposes the Leftist government in Virginia.  For a civil war to occur, you have to have civil structures.  I had expected them to form along the lines of opposing state governments.

But the societal divisions in 2019 exist more along the rural/urban divide than the old northern/southern divide.  In my home state, it’s very (from a combined vote total) far Right, so my entire state would likely pitch in.  Given this new circumstance in Civil War 2.0, renegade counties make sense in a state like Virginia.  And despite anything the Attorney General might say, should a significant (20%?) percentage of Virginia’s population – an armed 20% of the population – decide a law isn’t valid?

The law won’t be valid.

Laws exist in the United States because we generally agree with them as a group.  Does everyone agree to all laws that are on the books?  Certainly not.  But when there is determined opposition to a law or group of laws (marijuana legalization, illegal alien sanctuaries, Second Amendment sanctuaries) an attempt to enforce the law will nearly instantly make the government look weak, ineffectual, and illegitimate.  And when that determined group takes over a legitimate arm of government?

We’re one step closer to war, and this is why I moved the clock.  The Left is moving quickly, and in Virginia, I think it’s still a very dangerous game of chicken.

I think they’ll end up blinking, and swerving off at the last minute.

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs, with full bikini treatment.

Violence:

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Up is more violent.  Violence dropped a bit, and I imagine it will remain low for the winter, though it edged up a bit in December.  April and May will likely see increased incidents, assuming we end up okay in Virginia.  And assuming we don’t run out of suntan lotion.

Political Instability:

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Up is more unstable.  It skyrocketed this month.  Tension was high in the first place, but impeachment increased it significantly.  Don’t expect it to go down soon.

Economic:

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Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in November.  It was a one month recovery.

Illegal Aliens:

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Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in.  The numbers are down this month, and if you put them in context, winter is normally a lower time for illegal immigration, which will pick up in the spring.

Virginia and Rallies and Aesop

There is a large pro-Second Amendment rally planned in January 20, 2020 in Richmond.  Since I started paying attention to such things, I’ve noticed something – that people on the Right don’t live in Washington, D.C.  Why we would go to protest there escaped me.  Statistics back this up – in 2016, nearly 95% of voters voted for Leftist candidates.

For a group of citizens that support the Right to try to protest in D.C. is silly.  Protestors in D.C. are in hostile territory.  From observation, cities attract Leftists.  The larger the city, generally the farther Left it is.  Richmond, Virginia is no different.  It voted nearly 80% for Leftists in 2016.  Richmond is hostile territory for the Right.

But yet the rally is planned.  Aesop over at The Raconteur Report has covered why this rally is a bad idea, in detail here (LINK) and here (LINK).  Read the comments, and also the links to previous posts that he suggests.

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Read it all before you attend – or before you organize.

Links

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Please leave links either in the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you’re shy.  If you email me, I won’t say that the link is from you unless I get permission.

From McChuck.

From Glenda.

From Bob.

From Vote Harder, over at The Burning Platform:

From Ricky:

 

A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

I predict: these are the funniest predictions for 2020 you will read in 2020.

“Predictions are hard.  Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

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Okay, some people do pretty good predictions.

Once upon a time I tried to do real predictions.  The big downside of real predictions is being wrong sometimes.  I’d much rather be wrong all of the time, like last year (Silly Predictions for 2019. Bonus? Golden Bikini Force.), so here are my stunningly incorrect predictions for 2020:

January

  • The Senate takes over the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. Because of poor ticket sales, the trial is cancelled, but people who had reserved tickets were given a 20% off voucher for the Nirvana® reunion tour.  I’d love to bum a ride with you guys – I’d call shotgun, but Kurt beat me to it.
  • Joe Biden suspends his presidential campaign for Black History Month© so small black children across the nation can have the opportunity to pet his wet leg hair. When informed that Black History Month is in February, Biden suggests to the reporter that they bare knuckle box, because he’s “tired of your stupid malarkey, 23 skidoo, Tippecanoe and Tyler too!  Cockroaches!”  Biden calms down later after getting some tapioca pudding and watching Price is Right®.
  • Hillary Clinton asks the question, “Do you want to play a game?”

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Chelsea calls Chardonnay “Mommy’s Monica Juice.”

February

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg sees her shadow on Supreme Court day, assuring us of six more weeks of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Tom Brady’s body reconfigures itself into a new form on national television during Super Bowl® LIV. His new body appears like a low slung muscular tank, and Brady “throws” passes by expelling the football explosively downfield from a brand new fleshy orifice designed by Bill Belichick, based on the anatomy of a platypus.  Sadly, this doesn’t help the Patriots© at all, since they were eliminated earlier in the playoffs and are not even playing in the Super Bowl™.
  • The New Hampshire Democratic primary is won by Kim Jong Un. Unfortunately, it was actually Hillary Clinton being mistaken for Kim Jong Un after her next round of plastic surgery.  Rumor is she was secretly pleased to be called Dear Leader instead of the usual nautical term, “Seaward.”
  • Brexit happens on schedule, but Boris Johnson’s hair stages its own Borexit and joins the Labour Party.

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I guess technically we’re all undead, but Ruth takes it to the next level.

March

  • Super Tuesday, a collection of 13 primaries is held on March 3rd. The top three Democratic finishers are Johnny Depp, Harvey Weinstein, and a resurgent O.J. Simpson.  Nancy Pelosi states, “We are so proud to have our Democratic values and inclusivity on display in these results.”
  • Patrick’s Day replaced by a new gender and religion inclusive holiday: “Buy Expensive Green Things and Drink if You’re Not a Muslim Day.”
  • Joe Biden again suspends his presidential campaign, noting that he needs to focus on saving lives by using his true talent – being able to detect diseases in women by holding their shoulders and sniffing their hair while standing behind them.

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“Don’t thank me . . . now.  Thank me later.  Want to play with my leg hair?”

April

  • Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, is discovered eating living children on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion while in blackface. After calls for his resignation, he noted that it was, at most, a “youthful indiscretion.”
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg develops a desire for human flesh much like Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves, and soon appears to be no older than about 30.
  • A vortex connecting our dimension to another dimension containing hellish beasts is accidently opened by Pentagon scientists. This is almost exactly like the plot to the Stephen King novella The Mist, though not in a legally actionable way, at least according to my lawyer, Lazlo.

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“How could I make this worse?  Oh, yeah, I’ll go after the guns.”

May

  • Beto O’Rourke, while no longer a presidential candidate, decides to create an anti-gun organization, PistolsMakeScared (PMS®). He noted, “I really needed something to do while my wife has quality time with her boyfriends.”
  • France declares war on Canada on Tuesday morning. France surrenders to Germany later that afternoon, declaring Paris an open city.  The Germans refuse the surrender, indicating they can’t determine the number of troops required to defend France, since that’s never been tried before.
  • Australians will discover a spider that is the size of a cat, is as fast as a mongoose, has a diet of eagles and crocodiles, and is as poisonous as a middle school girl’s Instagram®. They name it “Dave.”

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Pictured:  Australian infant’s crib mobile.

June

  • LGBT Pride Month (June) officially replaced with LGBT Smug Condescension Months (June, July, August).
  • Elon Musk unveils a Kleenex® dispenser that automatically pops up a new Kleenex© every time you take one out at a base price of only $45,000. 25,000 people place a deposit, even though there’s a two year wait.
  • Chick-Fil-A® decides to start serving food on Sunday, adding hamburgers to their menu, and encouraging the worship of Satan as part of a new marketing campaign. “We’ve got to change with the times,” said their new spokesman, Lena Dunham.

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I mean if you have to choose between values and a tasty sandwich . . .

July

  • The Democratic Convention is moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Malmo, Sweden as the Democratic Committee considers it unfair that people outside the United States have been denied a vote. Greta Thunberg, noted school dropout, is nominated.  Her vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is quoted as saying, “I’m thrilled to be behind her.”
  • The Republican Convention is held in a hollowed out volcano somewhere in the South Pacific. Donald Trump is nominated as the presidential candidate, and in a surprise move, he is also nominated to be vice president.  “Job’s too easy.  And I need someone whose I can trust to be vice president.”  Trump also adopts a pure white Persian cat with a diamond collar.
  • The 2020 Summer Olympics® open in Tokyo. Bingo is not an approved Olympic sport, primarily because the Japanese are still a bit superstitious about “B-29.”

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We now know what Paul Tibbets would do for a Klondike Bar®.

August

  • Google® is found to be censoring ______, ______ and _____, and working with Facebook™ and Twitter© to also censor _____. It is feared that the election might be impacted because ____ ____ ____, ____ and ____.
  • Elon Musk unveils an electric reusable coffee mug – he calls it Teasla©. Initial claims are that it is autonomous and can be used for both hot and cold liquids.  It also requires the new Teasla™ Supercharger, which can recharge it in 70 minutes using a 50’ by 50’ solar power array costing only $25,000.  The mug weighs 43 pounds.

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(Pssst – it’s in the trunk.)

September

  • For the second straight year, September is again cancelled by general consensus.

October

  • Two televised presidential debates and one televised arm wrestling contest are held. The planned presidential MMA bout is cancelled when Greta Thunberg tests positive for high levels of testosterone.  She is furious, “How dare you assume my gender?  You have ruined my fight plan.”  She then proceeds to spend all of her campaign funds on a live commercial showing her eating seven pounds of mashed potatoes (no gravy) in one sitting while scowling at the camera.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, emerges as a dark horse third party candidate after having emerged from the Pentagon’s dimensional experiment earlier in the year. “Everyone can be an American,” he hissed through clouds of sulfurous vapor.  The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that his alternate universe was “technically America” so he was a valid candidate for president, despite him being seven stories tall and covered in an exoskeleton made of material from neutron stars.

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Never take potatoes from a testosterone-raging Swede with fetal alcohol syndrome.  It’s a rule I live by.

November

  • The 2020 presidential election is held on the third. California immediately protests because the Electoral College now has fraternities, and no one asked California to join one so she could go to that cool Kappa Sig kegger and maybe hook up with Montana.
  • Donald Trump wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Democratic candidate Greta Thunberg says, “That is not enough – it makes a mockery of our democracy.  You must also defeat me in a best-of-seven game of Jarts®.”
  • Joe Biden celebrates his 78th birthday.  His hair and teeth turn 22.

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Many a G.I. Joe® experienced a fatal chest wound to Jarts™.

December

  • Santa Claus is now required by the 9Th Circuit Court of Appeals to be race, gender, and species neutral when used in any public school setting. Ironically, this has the effect of making most kindergarten pictures of NuSanta™ highly accurate.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, decides that he will use the fame from his presidential run to launch a top tier tequila as well as a chain of animal shelter/fast Asian restaurants in the Midwest.
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg looks down on the lights of the city at night from her perch at the top of the Washington Monument. She smells, senses, and sees the life below her.  The life that she drains, person by person, to prolong hers.  Then . . . a target.  She aims her bat-like wings to take her quickly down the side of the monument, and then to strike.  Ahhh, fresh blood.  Ruth feels the gravity drawing her down as she leaps . . . .
  • National Park Ranger Report, 12/22/20: Bat killed by hawk near Washington Monument.

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To all:  Happy New Year!

Happy Penultimate Day 2019, and the Biggest Story of 2019: Society Unravelling

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing!  I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

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If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one.  I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.

If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations!  It’s Penultimate Day!  This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30.  Why Penultimate Day?  Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone.  We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone.  After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home. 

I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012.  As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar:  “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.” 

Or my translation may be off.  Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©.  Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.

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Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.

You can join in on Penultimate Day, too.  Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house.  Then, don’t buy one.  Finally:  eat Italian food.  Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.

My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year.  In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust).  The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.

In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.

The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year.  And it’s not just in the United States:

  • Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
  • Yellow Vest Protests in France.
  • Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
  • Impeachment.
  • Left and Right Polarity.
  • Your family at Thanksgiving.
  • AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
  • Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.

We know trouble is coming.  The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2.  How divisive is society today?  In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2:  Electric Boogaloo.  This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo.  This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2:  Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.

Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech.  Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®.  Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.

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Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798.  And it was glorious.

Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling:  an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities.  He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.

These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity.  What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?

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Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.

Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?  Mysticism.  Power.  Blood.  He was right.  1919 was crappy, but the 20th Century was about to get a whole lot worse.  He concluded:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yup.  Creepy.  And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.

Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another.  This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages.  There is more food now than at any time in history.  It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories.  It cannot be my hair.  My shiny scalp?  Sure.  Not my hair.

Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite).  Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.

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This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of.  And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .

In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast.  Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait.  Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting.  Right now!  Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.

What do Leftist want?  Complete control.  When do they want it?  Now.  Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump.  Nixon?  Conspiracy to commit a break-in.  Clinton?  Perjury.  Trump?  I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.

Trump is not a savior.  Trump is a symptom.  The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom.  And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.

The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left.  The Right just wants history to stop.  The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well.  The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what?  Things are going well.  Let’s burn it all down.”

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As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?

And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™.  The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism.  As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.

This is the context we see ourselves in today.  All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States.  We are splitting apart.

How does this end?  I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom.  America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t.  There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.

This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties.  Remember folks, you heard that here first.  But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.

Don’t Give Up Too Soon. And If You’re Breathing? It’s Too Soon.

“Will you relax?  You’ve got more paranoid fantasies than Stephen King on crack.” – News Radio

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See, I win.  I don’t read him once a year, and he doesn’t read me 150 times a year.

One of my favorite stories is about Stephen King.  When he was trying to get his novel Carrie published, he sent out the copy to quite a few publishers, and was rejected again and again.  Finally, one day he got the novel back, again.  Still, the novel was as rejected as Joe Biden application to teach at an ethics seminar.

He gave up.  Disgusted, King threw the novel into the trash and went to work.  His wife, Tabitha, pulled it out of the trash.  In one version of the story I read, spaghetti sauce from the garbage had gotten on the cover of the manuscript, so Tabitha typed a new one, and encouraged Stephen to submit it one more time.  He did.

This final publisher, Doubleday©, loved Carrie.  They sent King an advance of $2,500, which he spent on a Ford® Pinto™ because he liked scary things.  But then the paperback rights netted King $200,000.  The novel and movie became hits, and paid for him to quit his job so he could focus on novel writing.  When asked what fuels his imagination, King actually said, “I have the heart of a little boy.  And I keep it in my desk drawer.”  But the real story is that King was exceptionally close to giving up.

King didn’t give up, and managed to give us some pretty interesting stories.  He probably has a net worth of $400 million or so based on his writing – all because Tabitha King pulled a manuscript out of the trash, and they sent it out to a publisher.  One more time.

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I tried to donate blood the other day, but they wanted to know whose it was.

I personally feel that King’s writing quality began to diminish significantly in 1992 along with his reduction in cocaine and alcohol consumption.  I gave up on him around 2005.  He’s like your friend that’s really only interesting when he’s wasted, like Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.

Despite this, Stephen King is undoubtedly a success story even though at this point in his life his Twitter® account looks like Jack Torrance© from The Shining™ after all work and no play have made him a dull boy.  I’m not in favor of King returning to his addictions and having someone convince him that a Democrat is president, but, you know he is 72.  How much could it hurt?

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Now, watch Stephen imagine a microwave filled with cocaine? 

The dead Danish thinker dude, Søren Kierkegaard, (English translation of Søren Kierkegaard:  “delicious pastry” – which I believe is the translation all Danish words), coined one of my favorite quotes that’s appropriate to this post:

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

Said in a different way, it makes sense looking backward to see how Stephen King’s success was built upon rejection.  Likely that rejection fueled him to get better, and by the time he “made it” he had been working for years to become an excellent writer.  It is also poetic that Stephen’s final success was made possible by someone who had more faith in him (Tabitha) than he did at that point.

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How much do you have to drink to imagine an alien clown in a sewer?

I first read the Kierkegaard quote in the mid-1990’s and began to understand:  the worst times in my life were the seeds for the best times in my life.  For instance:

I recall being in 8th grade at a wrestling tournament.  I weighed 145 pounds (14.5 kilograms – you just divide by 10 to convert), which in that time and place was heavyweight, or HWT.  The Mrs. and I refer to HWT as “hot water tank,” mainly because it’s amusing.  The wrestling tournament had been going all day that Saturday and on that cold February night it was dark outside – the windows that normally streamed light into the gym were pitch black, lending an air of importance.

There was a single match left:  the hot water tank championship.  It was me against (who else) another guy named John, in this case John Bishop.  Neither one of us was fat – we were both in pretty good shape.  And John Bishop was strong – very strong – he was 32 and in 8th grade.  But he slept well.

John and I went toe to toe for the entire match, each searching for an opening while being countered.  At the end of regulation, four and a half minutes of wrestling, the score was tied, 1-1.  Since this was a tournament, there would be no ties.

It was overtime.

In overtime, the three periods were short – 1 minute; 30 seconds; and 30 seconds. At the end of the second overtime period it was still 1-1, and the crowd was yelling, urging each of us on.  I had never felt such electricity at any sporting event, and here I was, caught up in the middle of it.  In that last period of overtime, in that last second before the match was done, John Bishop escaped.

I lost, 2-1.

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That was a tough match.  I still have the taste of Muppet® in my mouth.  Did you know they bleed blue?

The crowd actually came onto the mat afterwards, and there I was sitting on that same mat, exhausted.  I can still clearly recall sitting on the wrestling mat, surrounded by people congratulating John Bishop.

It was also the last match of the school year.  I had lost.  I had given it all I had, every fiber of my being, and I had lost.

My brother, John Wilder (yes, his real first name is John, just like mine) was there for the whole match.  He was in college and had spent the day in the gym watching me wrestle because he felt responsibility:  he’s the one that convinced me to try wrestling in the first place.

He sat down next to me on the pine bleachers as I unlaced my hand-me-down Adidas® wrestling shoes – his old shoes.  He put his arm around my shoulder.  He asked me to see the second place medal I had in my hand.  I gave it to him.  He looked at it, for what seemed like forever.

“You really earned this one.  John, I’ve never seen you wrestle better in my life.  I’m so proud of you.”

That moment could have been soul crushing.  It could have been a moment where I decided to give wrestling up.  Instead, that was a moment where I knew I could be better.  I knew deep inside of me, that I could do this, that this was part of who I was supposed to be.  I wasn’t crushed, I was filled with resolve.  Over the next four years I won a lot more wrestling matches than I lost, but that one loss in particular opened the door for all of the success that followed.

And the next time I wrestled John Bishop, less than a year later?  I pinned him inside of thirty seconds.

This has been a repeating pattern in my life when I look back.  Every time that I have been faced with adversity and failure, that failure was the seed for future success.  Losses in wrestling are, perhaps, among the most soul-crushing defeats a man can face.

On the mat there are only two men.  There is no place to hide.  There is no one else to blame if you lose.  It is you.  Only you.  I have seen grown men cry like they had spilled a beer when they lost a match.

As bad as losing a wrestling match is, a divorce is worse.  Even a divorce where both sides agree to part is a very difficult thing, and my divorce was no exception.  Divorces are hard.  They’re also expensive.  Why are they expensive?  They’re worth it.

But my divorce set the seed for eventually finding The Mrs., which led to The Boy and Pugsley.

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I enjoyed this movie.  It finally allowed Country Music to be complete – now the truck could leave the singer, too.

The second lesson is persistence.  In most cases, overnight success occurs after about ten years of diligent effort – thousands of hours of intense practice.  You’d assume that concert violinists, for instance, start with talent for the instrument.  You’d certainly be correct.  But what’s missing from the equation is practice.  The average world-class concert violinist practices more, not less than the average violin player.  A really good violinist still sounds like they’re strangling a cat, but maybe more slowly or something.

Talent gets you a ticket, but practice is a multiplier.  A necessary multiplier.  Einstein said his difficulties with math were much more than the average person – precisely because he was working at the far end of what was understood about mathematics at his time and place.

Finally, you still have to deal with reality.  At no point in my life would any amount of practice and study have made me a great basketball player – my skills aren’t there.  And that’s the point – when you’re going through life you’ll get clues that tell you which way to go.  The biggest clue?  Success.  Success is a guidepost – it tells you where you have relative skill.  Stephen King was continually published in pulp and nudie magazines at the time.  Not big money, but still an indication that he had ability, because everyone read Playboy© for the articles, right?

Find your successes.  Feed them.  Understand your failures and how you can use them.  Work harder than anyone else at becoming great.  And also keep in mind that one phone call, one text, one conversation in an elevator might bring it all together.

Then, in the end, you can look backward and understand.

Or just be a cranky old goat like Stephen King.

Christmas 2019 – Complete With Asian Stereo Type

“Merry Christmas, Argyle.” – Die Hard

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So, true story – Pugsley came home from school, handed me this painting.  “What do you think?”  My response:  “Looks like Frosty is coming to kill me.”  Pugsley:  “Yup, that’s it.”  That’s my boy!

STATELY WILDER MANOR, Christmas Eve, 2019

Yesterday was a quiet Christmas Eve.  About the time I was ten years old, my brother (also named John Wilder*) and I got the ultimate concession a kid could get:  we convinced Ma and Pa Wilder that we should open our presents not on Christmas morning, but instead on Christmas Eve.  At a certain point, this becomes an easy sell.  Get up at 5:30 AM and groggily watch children ripping wrapping paper through the gauze of pain and regret of a Christmas Eve hangover, or have a nice, calm Christmas morning that involves sleeping somewhere beyond dawn?

Yeah, that’s easier than selling life insurance to people connected to Hillary Clinton.

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After leaving the Department of State, Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service code name was “Video.”  Since he was connected to so many high ranking political figures, Jeff Epstein’s code name was “Radio Star.”

Since I’m not a hypocrite, we Wilder’s have done the same on my watch as soon as my kids figure out that Santa Claus and functional socialism aren’t real.  It makes sense.  Christmas has a charm that, like an open jar of mayonnaise left on the counter for a week, evolves.  As you age, the very essence of Christmas changes.

It’s easy to surprise and delight a five-year-old at Christmas.  When they open a present they didn’t even know existed, getting to amazement is easy.  Walkie-talkies in 2019?  What sort of sorcery is this?  I have seen a five year old that regularly uses an iPad® that can access thousands of movies look amazed when confronted with a simple walkie-talkie.  When young, Christmas was a wonder – it was like the rules were suspended for a day.  Ma Wilder even let me out of the cage under the stairs.

But when you have older children, say, teenagers, they have a list.  A long list.  And they know your limits – they know exactly how much you’re going to spend on them at Christmas and they pick their presents to maximize cash consumption.  This year The Boy asked for video game thing.  Since he claims he got a 4.0 at Big State U, we indulged him.  What Pugsley asked for was surprising to me:  he wanted a record player turntable and a stereo amplifier.

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Pugsley’s amplifier was on sale – it was missing a volume knob – I couldn’t turn it down.

When I was near Pugsley’s age, this was exactly the gift I wanted.  I bought him the stereo and turntable he was looking for – honestly, in this day and age I was surprised they even made either of those devices anymore except in backwards stone-age places like Cairo, Calcutta, or Chicago.  Between cell phones and computers being able to instantly access tens of millions of songs and then flawlessly play an endless string of them, why would someone want to own a device that plays a maximum of 22 minutes before you physically have to get up to flip the record over?  Hell, I’m so lazy that if I won an award for being lazy I’d have The Mrs. go pick it up for me.

But Pugsley was certain that was what he wanted.

Pugsley opened up the box with the turntable and then I realized he had no idea what he was doing – no idea at all.  I’m pretty sure he’d never even seen a record played before in real life.  Nevertheless, he set it up the turntable.  Then he pulled out an old album – Queen’s A Night At The Opera.  I hadn’t seen this album in years, not since it had been packed up before Pugsley was born when The Mrs., The Boy and I moved to Alaska.  The Mrs. never even looked in the box – she had asked me when we were dating if I had a police record.

“No, just one by Sting.”

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I’ll admit it wasn’t fair.  But he got even:  one time got me a Cisformer® for my birthday – it’s a car that starts out as a car and stays a car.

My brother had originally bought A Night At The Opera, and in a fit of religiosity had abandoned it along with several other records (Rolling Stones®, Thin Lizzy©, and Sweet™ come to mind) when he moved out to make his way in the big world.  Or maybe I stole them liberated them.  Little brothers do that, you know.  Regardless, I have a dozen or so albums that originated from him.  Or, to make that statement more accurate, Pugsley has the albums now.  As I reflect, I realize even the word “album” is as antiquated as Nancy Pelosi’s virginity.  Heck, it even predates her senility.

Regardless, I realized that Pugsley had no understanding of how to even hold a record.  I stopped him as he began to pull A Night At The Opera out of the sleeve.  After all, an original 1975 pressing of that album might cost all of $8.00, plus shipping and handling off of VinylDan69’s store on Ebay®.

“Stop!  Here, you hold it like this, by the edges.  And then,” putting my thumb on one edge while putting my fingers on the label to stabilize the album, “you slide it into the sleeve like this.  Don’t let it drop – it will cut through the paper sleeve.”  I then showed him how I put the album and sleeve back into the cover – with the opening to the sleeve pointed up so the album didn’t slide out.

I might have left my clothes on the floor, I might have used the same bath towel until it dried as stiff as concrete in the Hoover Dam, and my refrigerator might have resembled a biological weapon experiment prohibited by the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953, but I always took care of my albums.  Nobody likes to hear “The boys are ba-The boys are ba-The boys are ba” for forty straight minutes.  No.  You want to hear that they’re back, and there’s gonna be trouble.  And you can forget about the old trick of taping two pennies to the tonearm, given inflation I’d have to put about $0.50 up there.

Pugsley caught on quickly, and put the record on the player.  He picked up the tonearm, and gently placed it on the record.  It started to slide immediately across the face of the record, quickly, towards the center.

“It’s skating!  Did you take the cover off of the needle?”  The answer, of course, was no.  Soon enough the needle cover was removed, and Pugsley had a fully functional stereo.

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I even hear that the band Europe has a new record out – The Vinyl Countdown.

He took the turntable and amplifier into his room and connected them to a set of Sony® speakers old enough that the rubber around the speaker cones had cracked and deteriorated to a fine black powder.  As I rubbed powder grains between my fingers, I thought that if the powder was hydrated it might reanimate into my ex-wife’s soul, and nobody wants that.

But those Sony® speakers were old:  I think they once belonged to Pa Wilder.  He gave them to me sometime after Sinatra passed on.  It’s at Christmas that I reflect on what kind of a father Frank Sinatra was – if you were bad, no ice in your drink.

I followed Pugsley back and watched as he put an old 45rpm single of mine on the turntable.  He gently set the tonearm down on the edge of the record.  It hissed and popped – a sound I hadn’t heard in decades.  Then this mighty classic of Western Civilization started playing:

Yes, that’s Eddie Murphy singing the “Norton” parts.

Pugsley looked at me, puzzled, as if waiting for some explanation for the audible abomination emanating from his Christmas present.  Yes, A Night At The Opera was my brother’s record.  But this fine Joe Piscopo song?  Yeah.  I spent actual cash money to buy it.  I checked to see if maybe this was the B-side.  Nope.  On either side was the same song:  The Honeymooner’s Rap.  I had spent money, intentionally, to buy this song.

I was at a loss.  How do you explain to a middle school kid that the song was a 34 year old parody of a television show that was cancelled 64 years ago?  And, a television show (The Honeymooners) that I’d only seen one episode of, ever?

Nah, too much backstory.  Plus I’m trying to get him to be wise with his money.  I shut up.

Pugsley:  “Dad . . . this song is so,” he paused, and I imagined him looking for an adjective that wouldn’t be offensive to me on Christmas Eve.  “90’s,” he concluded.

John Wilder:  “80’s.”

Pugsley:  “Whatever.”

I left him to discover music written by obscure musicians who had long since developed careers in real estate or the food service industry.  Oh, Steven Tyler, who now plays a lesbian aunt on the Big Bang Theory®.  I think.

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Well, at least Aerosmith® taught me how to cook Chinese food.  I can now wok this way.

Christmas 2020 is decidedly anti-frenetic.  Yes, Pugsley was attempting to get everyone into the room earlier in the day on Christmas Eve so we could open presents, but he was calm about it – not uncontrollably shaking like a Chihuahua on a chalupa.

The rule is that the youngest Wilder distribute the presents from under the tree.  Pugsley did so.  It’s also been the rule that the youngest Wilder gets to open presents first.  Not this year.  “Okay, Dad, you go first,” ordered Pugsley.

I did.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when I opened a box filled with roasted coffee beans from Alaska that The Mrs. ordered from Alaska.  For whatever reason, my favorite coffee is still Musher’s Blend© from the North Pole Coffee Company™ in Fairbanks, Alaska (LINK).  I have two pounds, thanks to The Mrs.  I had, of course, known this before I asked The Boy to wrap the box.  Disclosure:  I get no money from them.  Just coffee.  And then just when I pay for it.  (Guys at North Pole Coffee:  I’m completely willing to take free coffee.  I have ethics, but, you know, this is coffee.)

So, no real surprises.

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They did a brain scan of her:  “Coffee.  Coffee.  Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee.  Coffee.”

Christmas day will be calm, too.  We’ll have turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  I’m pretty sure that we don’t have any plans at all.  Not having little ones, we’ll get up when we get up, check the news, have some coffee, and turn the oven on to cook the turkey.  The Mrs. already made George Washington’s egg nog (Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE), so I don’t even have anything to complain about.

Where’s the Christmas wine?  I’m not getting up anytime soon.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

*Yes.  My brother and I have the same first name, for reals.  As we were born seven years apart, my parents had apparently forgotten they had another child when I arrived eleven years later, so I stole his name.  That’s okay.  I also managed to ruin several of his dates, end one of his relationships, wreck his car, and throw up on his school clothes one night.  So I guess that makes us even.

Modern Drone Warfare, Cops and Virginia

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police.  One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (2005)

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I hate to make fun of India.  I heard they lost power at their largest mall, and hundreds of people were stuck on the escalator for hours.

I was originally going to write about another topic, but then I saw this article (LINK) about how the Army® was testing a fighting force using a system that combines soldiers, flying drones, and land drone vehicles and I couldn’t resist.  The short explanation of the system is that flying drones are used for real time reconnaissance, and followed up with both living troops and land drones to attack an enemy.  Those are followed up by McDonalds® and Starbucks™.

Based on the simulations that they have run so far, a group of soldiers augmented with the drones was able to attack a defending group of 120 soldiers and win.  This isn’t unusual – defending soldiers lose all the time, just ask the Trojans.  But in this case, the attackers were a platoon-sized group of only 40 soldiers.  They also claimed nearly zero casualties in the simulation, although one participant ran out of GoGurt©.

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This version tested well, except in certain areas of Asia.

This is opposite of all of general wisdom about conventional warfare.  General wisdom (based on hundreds of years of us killing each other) says that a competent defending force has roughly a three to one advantage – that is, 120 defenders is equal to 360 attackers.  In practice, if troops were available you’d probably nearly double the number of attackers to 600-700 troops to overwhelm the defenders and minimize attacker losses.  Yet, the Army exercises showed they’d be able to defeat those 120 defenders easily with only 40 soldiers if they remembered to pay Comcast® for Internet.

The reason that this works for the attackers is fairly simple – the flying drones give nearly super-human information about where the adversary is.  For soldiers, this is nearly a super power – to be able to see and know where the enemy is without them knowing where you are.  It provides a significant advantage so attacks can be precisely planned and ambushes detected.  The Army has recently ordered 9,000 Black Hornet® drones from FLIR™ and they’re going into service – at a price tag of $15,000 each.

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Every single picture of this drone I found was someone looking lovingly at it as it floated above their hand. 

The other type of drone mentioned were land drone systems.  When they first ran the simulations, the Army commander would get information from the flying drones and then bring up the troops and land drones, but that allowed the adversary to know that the attack was coming, so in later simulations the attacking commander tried to bring up the air and land drone forces for a simultaneous attack.  So what did the land drones look like?

My bet is that they will something like the picture below, a combination of weapons and sensors so that the drone can attack without exposing humans.  Sort of a combat Roomba®.

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Want an A.I. uprising?  Because this is how you get an A.I. uprising.

In the article, the author casually noted that the augmented drone/soldier combination wouldn’t be all that effective against Russia.  Honestly, I think he’s being optimistic.  When attacking any state-sponsored military, the countermeasures required to detect and stop the drones are generally far cheaper than the drones themselves.  The only way to completely stop the countermeasures is to increase the autonomy of the drone systems to the point where they’re making a lot of decisions by themselves, or by air dropping lots of vodka for the Russian troops.

Again, defense costs less than building an attacking force.  A great list of ways knock out drones is here (LIST), H/T to the Docent over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) for the link.  He always has pretty interesting links and commentary, so consider dropping by on a regular basis.  History has shown that advances in military technology are generally short-lived.

In many ways, it is nearly certain that the Russians could easily field sufficient electronic deterrents to knock our small drones out of the air, and also potentially use them against us by using our radio communication signals to pinpoint attacks.  The Russians routinely jam our GPS® signals, and it’s likely they’re the reason that my Wi-Fi goes out at 3:00AM, just when I’m trying to upload a post.  Fighting Russia, the advantage probably goes away.  In some senses, increased technological complexity can work against soldiers in a big way – that complexity must be supported by logistics – the average soldier carries twenty pounds of batteries into combat.  If there aren’t spares?  What then?

Similarly, China would likely be immune to such attempts at force multiplication, since they’re making most of our electronics anyway and have probably inserted code that turns our electronic hardware into Pokémon® games if we ever declare war on them.  Though anecdotal evidence indicates that the quality of the individual Chinese troops would be stunningly deficient when compared with the average soldier of the United States, I believe that they have no intention of ever fighting a stand-up war against the United States.  Any attacks China makes will be surprising and asymmetrical and probably focused against Western economic systems.

So who is the Army thinking about using this technology against?

It probably won’t change the outcome in Afghanistan, where the Afghans are fighting a guerilla war using 100 year old rifles and improvised bombs.  They don’t depend on holding ground to win – they just have to tire the United States out.  Drone technology already is saving their lives, but it won’t win the war.  And if it won’t (probably) work as effectively against Russia or China, who are we preparing for?

The Cubans?  Venezuela?  The Great Heathen Penguin Army of Antarctica?

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I’m pretty sure that Barney wore it better . . .

My fear is that the answer is that the technology might be used here in the United States, not by our soldiers, but by our police.  Whereas there are plentiful and relatively inexpensive ways to detect and/or defeat drones by a State actor, the idea of using them to control and defeat a semi-organized and relatively low tech group of citizens seems more likely.

The police are already becoming a military force.  In 1980, there were 3,000 SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raids a year.  In 2016 there were 50,000-80,000 such raids yearly.  Over $5 billion worth of military equipment has been transferred.

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In fairness, he also took a Tour of Italy at the Olive Garden®.

I wonder how much of that technology is in Virginia?  But I’m sure that if citizens give up their guns, the police will turn all that stuff back in.  Right?

What, the cops have no intention of turning it back in?  Maybe the Great Heathen Penguin Army has the right idea . . . .

Sleep? That’s for the weak.

“All persons who die during this crisis from whatever cause will come back to life to seek human victims, unless their bodies are first disposed of by cremation.” – Night of the Living Dead

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Also, remember that sleep is no substitute for caffeine.

Sleep and I have always had a rocky relationship.  If I were married to Sleep, Sleep would have filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment.  For most people, this starts at an early age, but for me it started when I was a very young John Wilder, at around the age of five.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m adopted, but it’s the kind of adoption that involves family members.  The ones that were closest to me before the adoption were Grandma and Grandpa McWilder.  To me they seemed astonishingly old, even though they were in their late sixties when I toddled into their lives at the age of five.

All five year old children are difficult.  I think I was more difficult than most – I found where the electricity entered their house, above a window.  How difficult was I?  I grabbed the bare wires coming in with one hand.   After I got shocked, what did I do?  Grabbed it again.  I was a high maintenance.

But the benefit of being with a grandparent is the word “no” is generally a foreign word to their vocabulary.  I recall discovering that Star Trek® would be on after the news on Saturday.  So, I stayed up to watch it.  Grandma and Grandpa McWilder had already gone to bed, having watched the weather.

Now, I have no idea why they were so concerned about the weather.  They didn’t farm, they didn’t really do anything that would require them to be concerned about the weather, but they watched it every night.  Me?  For the most part (there are exceptions) I don’t worry much about the weather – you can’t change it after all, unless you’re a sixteen year old girl from Sweden.

After Captain Kirk® had finished gallivanting around the galaxy at 11:30pm, I still wasn’t tired.  What was next?  Creepy Creature Feature.  As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature, I was hooked.

What was Creepy Creature Feature?  It was a pair of science fiction and/or horror movies, most of which were black and white.  These were generally not what anyone today would call good movies – the special effects in most of them involved foam rubber, chocolate syrup, and someone imagining what George Soros’ face would look like in 2020.

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This wasn’t the logo my local station used, but you get the idea.

Okay, why on Earth would such wonderful people have such poor judgement as to allow a five-year-old to watch horror movies deep into the night?

Let me explain how I was treated when I visited Grandma and Grandpa:

Grandma McWilder would cook me my favorite dinner, and give me money to buy comic books.  You’re thinking Archie® and Superman© and X-Men™, right?  Sure, I bought plenty of those.  But Grandma didn’t seem to care what a five-year-old bought, and the store didn’t seem to care, either.

This was a far different time and place than today.  If I went to the local drugstore and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me.  Five year old me.  And they would have asked if I needed matches.  While at the drugstore I bought issues of National Lampoon® that had mostly naked women in them.  And while you may have thought that all people were fully clothed all the time before the Internet, I can assure you that it was not so.

They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though.  You had to at least be in sixth grade for hard alcohol.  Beer?  Heck, that’s practically water.

So I bought magazines like this:

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Creepy® and Eerie™ Magazines – the best in 1970’s black and white cartoon gore.  Nothing unusual here, just a woman holding a disembodied hand close to her chest.  Happens every day, most normal thing in the world.

And the drugstore even sold off-brand magazines like Weird™.  These didn’t tell stories as polished as Creepy©, but made up for it with artwork that looked like it was done by crack addicted chihuahuas with an unlimited supply of crayons:

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No, that’s not “Wired©” it’s “Weird™.”  I’m pretty sure I had this issue, but sadly can’t remember a thing that went on in the comic – I’m sure there must be a reason purple-skull man and the werewolf are killing vampires.  Probably California zoning enforcement officers?

Anyway, given that I had Creepy® and Weird© magazines around the house, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on after the television station finished watching invisible atomic brain monsters in 1958’s Fiend Without a Face© get shot by a .45ACP and then dissolve.  When I was five, I thought it was really, really good.  When I reviewed it, I seem to recall that I gave it five blankets over the head.

Thankfully, most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain wasn’t scared because there was no way that these monsters were real.  Mostly, I’d just watch the giant radiation-enhanced spider fight the giant radiation-enhanced cow and then go to bed.

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Not a radiation enhanced cow.

But then one night they showed Night of the Living Dead.  Uncut.  Totally uncut – bare butts and all.  More importantly, all of the zombies eating uncooked (and cooked) humans was in the movie, too.  This was certainly the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and only one or two in the future would ever capture the utter dread that this movie brought, along with the certainty that Grandma’s house simply had too many windows to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse.  Plus, being five, the entire concept of zombies was new to me.  Dead people craving the first take-out food:  people.

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Zombies don’t eat brains with their fingers.  They eat fingers as an appetizer.

After the movie is over, it’s 1:30AM.  Time to go to bed, but I don’t want to walk on the floor because it creaks.  That would certainly draw the zombies my direction.  I finally get up, and go to the spare bed that’s in Grandma’s bedroom where I normally sleep.

After watching zombies eat living humans my five-year-old brain processed certain facts:

  • Dead people might become zombies.
  • Zombies develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
  • Grandma was very old.
  • Old people sometimes die.
  • Therefore, Grandma might become a zombie in the middle of the night.

And:

  • I was made of human flesh.

So, if you’ve ever had difficulty sleeping because you thought your wonderful, kindly Grandma might become a zombie and eat you while you were still alive, raise your hand.

Only me?

I’m not sure that I slept at all that night.

Sleep and I have continued a dubious relationship, and during my life, whenever I could stay up late I certainly did.  But when I was younger, I would never sleep more than eight or so hours at a stretch and  I always avoided naps.  When I was in head start, I would throw blocks at the other kids who were actually good and attempting to sleep like I was supposed to do.  Heck, even before they kicked me out of head start I knew that naps weren’t for closers.

Eventually I got older and I discovered that I really liked naps.  What fun!  My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drifted even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon.  But after graduating from college, work happened. Work started at 7:00AM, and I had to see early morning sunlight.

The break of dawn.  Beautiful, you say?  Not to me – if I want to see a beautiful sunrise, I can look one up on the Internet.

At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes.  And, WebMD© says that weird sleep patterns are not really good for me unless you call heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes good things.  The Internet further states that not enough sleep can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and make me die earlier.

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I slept great last night!  I got a full 73 minutes!

That sounds negative, which makes me wonder how did Edison get by on a steady schedule of only four hours of sleep a night?  Well, apparently he did a lot of napping, which must not have counted.  But he really did get by on less sleep than 8 a night.  A lot less.  And a host of famous people have gotten by with less, even though WebMD™ says they’re all going to die next week.

So, if you’re up too late and can’t sleep, here’s a copy of Fiend Without a Face, courtesy of YouTube® – I hear a remake is coming, but you can enjoy the 1950’s era effects, especially about one hour and seven minutes into the movie.

Just make sure that you have a contingency plan in place to take care of Granny if she goes zombie on you . . .

This is a revamp of an earlier post from when the blog was just starting.  I like this newer version better.

Get Woke, Go Broke: Hallmark Limited Edition

“I hope you don’t mean that.  You’d feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn’t have a family.” – Home Alone

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I’m so woke I started a Green Lives Matter chapter after watching Shrek®.

When The Boy was very small, say four years old, we’d snuggle together and watch television together on Saturday mornings.  One thing we watched on a regular basis was the Hallmark® channel.  Sometimes I’d make pancakes.  It was fun as only a Saturday with your kids can be.

Most often, we’d watch an episode of the High Chaparral® and then an older family movie – movies like Old Yeller™ or The Cat from Outer Space©.  The Boy did note that air traffic control must have been difficult in Never Neverland because of all of the fuel emergencies.  Get it?  Never land?  I kill me.

I’m too young to have seen High Chaparral™ as anything but reruns, but watching it with The Boy was great.  The plots involved good guys and bad guys – tales of honor.  Tales of family.  Tales of manly courage.  Every one of those lessons was one that I’d like to have imprinted on The Boy’s brain.  Sure, maybe I’d have a winter morning nap through The Cat from Outer Space®, but I never slept through High Chaparral©.

Okay, how could you nap after that theme music?

At this point I don’t remember if they stopped showing High Chaparral™ before or after we moved to Alaska, but I did know that in Alaska we didn’t have the Hallmark™ channel, so it didn’t matter anyway.  And it’s been a few years since Pugsley needed babysitting on a Saturday morning.

Needless to say, I have pleasant memories of the Hallmark® channel.  However, in the last week Hallmark® did the craziest thing.  First, a commercial was approved showing two women lip-locking in a commercial about weddings during a family movie where little kids might be watching.  This provoked outrage in the Traditional Religious community, and they complained to Hallmark©.  Following that outrage, Hallmark™ then pulled the commercial, and apologized for showing it.

All said and done?

No.  Within about 48 hours of pulling the commercial, Hallmark® then said they’d be fine with showing that commercial, and their earlier statement saying that they made a mistake by saying that they’d made a mistake was a mistake, so they apologized for apologizing earlier.  Then, at great expense, they redid their apology using llamas.

This was not entirely a surprise:  the CEO of the television portion of Hallmark©, William J. Abbott, said in a November 15 podcast he doesn’t personally view Christmas as a religious holiday.  He probably doesn’t consider churches religious places.  And those T-shaped things that people put on the walls and wear as necklaces?  Just art.

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I swear, with those eyes he looks like some kind of herd animal.  It’s not like he’d be easily swayed like a member of a herd of sheep . . . oh, wait.

Regardless of what you think about gay people, they comprise 1-2% of the population – add in bisexuals, (which, let’s admit it, they’d like) and you get up to 4% or so.  I’m willing to bet that a whopping 0.001% of gay women watch Hallmark®, and probably nearly 0.0000001% of gay men.  Hallmark™ has decided to appeal to a constituency that consists of about a dozen people in the United States and let them determine what commercials are on the Hallmark© channel.

Let’s face it:  regardless of how you or I feel about gay folks, they don’t watch the Hallmark® network.  They won’t watch the Hallmark© network even if it meets every one of their demands because they already have six networks specifically dedicated to gay lifestyle issues.

Why would Hallmark™ fold and apologize about apologizing for their apology?

Because Hallmark© is woke.  Christmas isn’t a religious holiday according to their CEO, silly.  It’s about mass consumption of consumer goods.  That was the real message of Christ, wasn’t it?  I think it was in the Sermon on the Mall Food Court as written in the Gospel of Commerce, 3:16 where Jesus said:  “Oh, ye who purchase goods and services in my name shall dwell in large houses with great credit forever.  Forget not, thy shipping shalt be free for all who order over $50 of these holy goods in a single shipment.  Amen.”

Hallmark© isn’t the first business to make this calculation.  It won’t be the last.

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Silicon Valley is good at getting woke, especially since aliens don’t need sleep.

I started my first boycott of a business back in 2001 or so.  The CEO of Levi Strauss™ came out against private gun ownership.  I was naïve enough that I actually wrote him an email protesting his policy.  At the time, I was a corporate home-office drone who wore Dockers® (a Levi Strauss© product) like they were yuppie heroin.  I put my money where my mouth was:  the last Levi Strauss™ product I have ever purchased was in 2001.

Another example of this illogical behavior was Star Wars®.  The final Star Wars™ movie opens today.  I won’t be purchasing a ticket.  Why?  The Force Awakens.

For the record, I have no problem against strong female characters.  Ripley® in Alien© and Aliens™.  Sarah Connor™ in Terminator©, Terminator 2®, and the very underrated Sarah Connor Chronicles™.  I could go on, but that’s enough.

Rey© in Star Wars™?  An awful character.  But a woke character.  It was so important to a Disney® executive to take Star Wars© in a feminist direction that they didn’t care about story.  They didn’t care about plot.  All they cared about was creating a woman that had no weaknesses, no struggle.  In great fiction, the entire point of the journey of a hero is to struggle and overcome weaknesses and character flaws to find virtue and victory.

Somehow, in a quest for the perfect woman, Disney® forgot Star Wars© was about watching the journey of the hero and thrilling with him (or her) as they grew.  Ripley™ grew – look at her character arc from the only two movies that character was in, Alien® and Aliens©.  Ripley™ went from a competent but flawed second officer to a woman who overcame her fear and took on a xenomorph queen using an exoskeleton loader.  Don’t know about you, but I thought that was pretty hot, even when she was Zuul.  Okay, especially when she was Zuul.

Rey™?  Rey™ was perfect from the first scene, and could use the Force© and a Light Saber© better than a person who had studied them for years the very first day she tried.  Why?  Showing any weakness from a woman is obviously misogyny and part of a patriarchal plot.  Character development?  Nah, that’s for people who aren’t woke.

What has being woke cost Disney®?  A lot of money.  The Star Wars® movies keep bringing in less and less at the box office.  And, as Aesop wisely noted – their theme park Galaxy’s Edge© at Disneyland™ cost over $1billion dollars, and, if videos I’ve seen are correct, is an enormous flop.  The longest line was at the bathroom.  I’d imagine the Disneyworld™ version won’t cost much less, so they’ve invested $2billion in a franchise that has exactly one successful element since they bought it from George Lucas:  baby Yoda®.

Probably billions in profits have been sacrificed by Disney®, all at the altar of being woke.

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If John Wick© and Kermit™ had a baby.

Other companies have done it, too.  Gillette® featured commercials that demeaned the major purchasers of its products:  men.  Nike™ decided that Colin Kaepernick was the best face that they could put forward, and ended production of shoes featuring the Betsy Ross flag because Colin thought it was racist.  Chick-Fil-A®?  Dead to me.

The Boy Scouts of America™?  Yup.  In 1973, the membership was 4.5 million boys.  In 2020, I’m betting the membership is down to 1.4 million or less, even though the population of the United States is up by 50%.  The biggest and steepest declines?  After it got woke.

One Angry Gamer has a large list of similar failures (LINK).  The list has 13 major video games that failed due to wokeness.  Movies and television?  21 examples.  And dozens of businesses, magazines, and other examples of failure.  The most amusing part of his page (which is littered with advertisements) is that it was advertising failed woke shows like Star Trek: Discovery®.  One Angry Gamer was getting money from those that were being criticized on the page.  Genius.

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Remember, not everything is a failure.  The Titanic pool is still filled!

Not every business that gets woke goes broke.  Even though they won’t get another dollar from me, Nike®, Levi Strauss©, and Gillette™ are doing fine.  They make billions in revenue.  I can’t promise Disney® won’t make another dollar off of me, since they have a scheme to annex interstellar space and charge viewers for looking up at the night sky.  But I’ll avoid giving them money every chance I get.  They might not notice on their bottom line, but I will be able to hold my head up.

So, why are companies willing to fail or at least forego billions of dollars in profit, destroy cultural narratives that have been decades in the making, and wipe out institutions that have served real virtue and objective good for over a hundred years?

It’s not their money.

But I do have good news.  I found that High Chaparral® is still being broadcast.  It’s not on Hallmark™.  But I’m pretty sure that The Boy would object to being snuggled on the couch to watch it, him being in college and all.

But he still likes pancakes.  Who doesn’t?

Oh, yeah.

Feminists.

Why the Left Can’t Meme, Complete with Wonder Woman and A Great Elvis Joke

“The Mandela Effect has been an Internet meme for almost a decade.  It’s always been called that.” – The X-Files

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When the governor of Virginia began to realize his gun policy was a mistake . . .

When I was a kid, we lived firmly in the land of controlled media.  There were three networks that we could get on our television.  The difference between them?  The NBC® network showed more science fiction, and also more shows with girls wearing short shorts.  Those poor girls couldn’t even afford bras to wear!

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She also wonders why the producers keep making her jump on a trampoline. 

The daily news came with a similar filter.  There was the local paper, the regional paper, and the really big regional paper.  Mainly we got the local paper and the regional paper on Sunday.  Your choices were limited.  Now you can go on the Internet and search from hundreds of different sites showing dozens versions of the news stories of the day from nearly every opinion.  Then?  You were stuck with one opinion, one line of reasoning.  It was like Rachel Maddow lived in your head, constantly telling you what she thought.

Movies were similar – we could drive 45 miles and choose from two movies.  Well, two movies if you could get into an R-rated film.  The other theater typically had the PG or G-rated film.  If the G-rated cartoon The Secret of Nimh (I wrote about that here:  Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.) wasn’t your thing, you were just out of luck.

Situation comedy was big on television at this time.  Most sitcoms were written from a liberal perspective.  However, the most liberal of liberal writing was, of course:  The Very Special Episode.  This type of episode was so prevalent that it has its own Wikipedia© page (LINK).  As usual, if you go to the Infogalactic™ page (LINK) (which forked from Wikipedia® in 2016), you can see just how many Soviets farther Left Wikipedia© has gone in three years.  It’s not too bad on this topic.

The Very Special Episode took a typical, lighthearted sitcom that normally dealt with “I spilled ink on my dress for the prom” and then dealt with “Mom has HIV because she donated blood to her narcoleptic father who had seizures after saving abused piglets from a burning barn.”  Or spousal abuse.  Or anorexia.  Author Stuart Millard wrote this about a sitcom having a Very Special Episode:  “It was like having your wacky uncle interrupt an armpit fart to tell you about the time he saw a dead body and that’s why he drinks.”

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The Fresh Prince wants you all to know he’s really sorry he started the Vietnam War, and he’s learned his lesson.

In the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, Hollywood® was desperate to make you feel like they feel.  They were desperate that you cared, even if the issue they dealt with has nothing to do with you.  Spousal abuse?  I’ve never even known someone who was an abused spouse.  I’ve known a couple of people who dealt with anorexia/bulimia.  That episode of Cheers® where Diane can’t keep a burger down probably didn’t save either one of them.  But that didn’t matter to Hollywood.  The idea was indoctrination.

There’s a sitcom that’s normally about precocious teens getting in wild, improbable and mildly humorous adventures?  Let’s have the script show one of them taking an accidental phone call:

(Call from Mrs. Murray down the street, who thinks she’s dialed Midvale High School but has mistakenly called Youthful Protagonist.)

Mrs. Murray:  “Is this Midvale High?”

Youthful Protagonist:  “Why yes, this is Midvale High.”

Mrs. Murray:  “I have a note that the principal wanted to talk to my about Bobby.”

Youthful Protagonist:  “Oh, yes, Bobby!  One of our teachers said you sure have a little Elvis on your hands!”

Mrs. Murray:  “He can sing?”

Youthful Protagonist:  “Nah, we found him fat, bloated, and dead on the toilet.”

After that, we’d then have a lengthy episode where Youthful Protagonist learns it’s as wrong to make Mrs. Murray think Bobby’s cold, bloated dead body was found on the institutional tile floor of the boy’s room on the second floor.  It will be nearly as wrong as when Youthful Protagonist causes a suicide and then learns it’s wrong to intentionally call a flight attendant a stewardess, which will be the subject of the next Very Special Episode.

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It’s Christmas, and if you can’t afford an Elf on a Shelf, you can get a Presley with a Nestlé.  The King did have a thing for chocolate.

I recall, thinking in seventh grade that it was a shame that humor didn’t spring naturally from the Right (this was before I found National Lampoon® and discovered that humor was everywhere).  After all, every bit of humor I saw on television and the movies was from either a neutral perspective, or, more commonly, from a Leftist perspective.  Television and movie humor in the 1980’s and 1990’s was based on moving the opinion of Americans from the wholesome fun of the 1950’s and 1960’s to full blown Liberalism.  With the exception of Red Dawn®.  Wolverines!

America had been taught that things like values, strong parental relationships, and strong marriages and strong families were good.  Look at any episode of The Beverly Hillbillies® or Green Acres™.  Both of those shows managed to be hilarious without preaching about, well, anything.  Yet these shows showcased loving families that genuinely cared about each other without being so sickly-sweet that you wanted to choke the writer with a garrote woven from fluffy kitten tails.

The Left began the takeover in the 1970’s.  The slide began when situation comedies emerged that centered on divorced women, shattered families, absent fathers, and infidelity.  All of this sounds amazingly like the Clinton household on a Thursday night.

It was, at first, easy to make fun of the Right.  In 1970, the Right controlled several institutions important to society – military leadership, many college administrations, big business, some older Hollywood® stars, and at least some church personnel.

It’s no coincidence that the high point of enrollment in the Boy Scouts of America™ on an absolute and percentage basis occurred in 1973.  It was an institution of the Right.  It was a target, and it was attacked because it was “square” and wasn’t cool, wasn’t progressive, wasn’t modern enough.  “Boy Scout” went from something one aspired to be, and instead became a put-down for someone with a values structure that didn’t match the new progressive standards where “morally straight” was an indictment, not a virtue.

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Thankfully it’s 2019, so girls can be Boy Scouts, and Boy Scouts can be fathers. 

But the march of Leftists through institutions continued throughout the decades.  Colleges went Left.  The news media became openly Leftist.  Hollywood went from a Left-Right truce to the full-blown Leftism we see today.  And when the Leftists won control of so many institutions?

Comedy ceased to be funny to them at all.  Comedy is making fun of The Man – it’s their weapon.  It is edgy.  Most of all?  Comedy is used as a tool of the Left to make fun of leaders and institutions of the Right.  When the leaders are of the Left?  Comedy isn’t tolerated.  Comedy is an attack.  Thus?  Free speech attacking the Right is to be fought for.  But when the Right wants to use free speech to attack the Left?  That is clearly hate speech, and not protected.  Liberal dads get really mad when you wish them a happy mother’s day.

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“Heck, Greta, you know why?  Because ice cream doesn’t have bones!  Would you like to stroke my leg hair?”

This is the rule when the Left is in charge:

Stalin had hundreds of people arrested in the Soviet Union for making jokes that the state found to be offensive.  Even as late as 1983 a woman was jailed for making a joke the Soviets didn’t like.  I can’t find statistics, but I did find a report that at least some people were executed in the 1940’s for making jokes in Germany.  China?  It’s going on right now – people are spending up to five years in prison for making jokes about Chinese leadership in chatrooms.  I’m pretty sure the Left in the United States is envious of that sort of power.

“Soon,” they think.

The Left knows that people making fun of its authority is the ultimate risk.  A Leftist regime can be treated solemnly.  A Leftist regime can be feared.  A Leftist regime can stand riots.  It can stand disorder.  But a Leftist regime cannot stand being mocked.  Back when Saturday Night Live® was funny, they had this gem (LINK), which sadly I can’t embed, but it embodies the Left to me today.

That’s why it’s really fun to watch when their mask slips.  Greta Thunberg, the recently anointed Ayatollah of Climatecontrolla said, “We will make sure that they, that we put them against the wall . . . .”  Of course she corrected herself later that what “put them against the wall” meant was for them not to be summarily executed, but for them to be taken to fun and challenging carbon-neutral “leisure camps” that she’ll set up along with Uncle Soros.

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And we’re worried about the Russians influencing our elections?

Greta herself is a prime example of the humorlessness of the Left.  After placing a mentally challenged girl on the public stage, they note that it’s awful to challenge her.  It’s even worse to make fun of her, heck they said only schizophrenic people make fun of Greta.  We’ll show her!

Essentially, the Left likes to robe its spokespeople in a protected class status, like a +2 Cloak of Political Invulnerability.  Mock Greta?  It’s because you hate little Swedish girls with mental issues.  Make fun of Obama’s policies?  It’s obviously race.  Ridicule Hillary?  It’s not because she was obviously suffering from some sort of debilitating disease.  It’s because you don’t want a woman to be president.

To them, it’s simple:  Leftists can’t take jokes, so the Right can’t be allowed to make jokes.

Leftism is a religion.  That’s why Marx hated religion – it was an ideological competitor to communism.  And the biggest crime in religion isn’t being an unbeliever.  The biggest crime is heresy, and all Leftists view mocking Leftism and Leftists as the single biggest heresy.

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Reprinted with permission.

Leftists can’t meme – it’s because they’re in the thrall of religious ecstasy.

Maybe we can make a Very Special Episode about that?