Artificial Intelligence – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Why Does Asymmetric Warfare Exist? It Works.

“Apparently, my shoulder muscles are asymmetrical. Did you ever hear of such a thing? They say it’s genetic.” – Malcolm in the Middle

Never sell your soul to make good pickles – that’s a dill with the Devil.

Why do we have the TSA?

My contention is that there have been exactly zero hijackings of passenger planes since 9/11 (although one Alaska Air® plane was stolen by Sky King, PBUH). Oh, sure, we had the shoe bomber. That’s why one time when The Mrs. was going through a TSA checkpoint they made her take off her sandals and passed the x-ray wand over her bare, human, totally flesh-covered feet.

Yes, that really happened.

I suppose you could argue that a terrorist could put a bomb in checked luggage, so we needed minimum wage mouth-breathers to paw through my luggage and steal stuff, but an x-ray is far less invasive and cheaper in the long run than those idiots – besides, when I travelled with pistols, those were locked up and I didn’t have to show anyone anything. I guess that’s one big advantage to having pistols. Also, a TSA agent with a gun?

The TSA agent asked if I had any weapons. “I prefer to kill with my bare hands,” apparently wasn’t the answer they were looking for.

Why have we spent billions of dollars on a system that (arguably) has saved no one, but cost me, personally, several hundred bucks when a TSA agent hot-fingered stuff out of my luggage?

Well, the government had to do something. It doesn’t matter that the something was stupid and futile and useless, they did something. The reason that they did something?

Asymmetric warfare works, though it’s called “terrorism” when not done by an established government. Waco? Totally not defined as terrorism. Oklahoma City? Terrorism.

Why is Ireland no longer governed by the British? Terrorism, er, asymmetric warfare works – look it up. Why does the state of Israel exist? Terrorism, er, asymmetric warfare works.

What do you call a terrorist group from Hoth®? Ice-IS.

Asymmetric warfare isn’t just bombs, though. It works against individuals.

Make a statement that’s too far outside of the window of the acceptable? That’s a public flogging and shaming. Vox Day identified their tactics in SJWs Always Lie:

Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative.
Point and Shriek.
Isolate and Swarm.
Reject and Transform.
Press for Surrender.
Appeal to Amenable Authority.
Show Trial.
Victory Parade.

I could give you many examples of this, but you already know many of them. The result was the same – since the Narrative was like Cthulhu, and (until recently) only swam Left, there was an ever-advancing line of things you couldn’t say, even if they were 100% factual. Some of these facts were (and still are, in some places) 100% censored. That’s why they have to hobble and censor A.I. – the Truth is contradicts their Narrative.

And then everyone clapped.

The really, really corrosive part of this censorship is and was that the line was never a clear one, and kept shifting.

YouTube™ content creation is a big business. It makes millions of dollars a year for some people. Some even end up hiring writers, editors, and concentrate on making content that never would have made it to television in the past. But they live and die at the whim of YouTube™. Violate the nebulous terms and conditions, and not only do they end up losing their revenue stream, but they end up having to fire people that they’ve hired, people that they have grown close to.

So, as a content creator, they stay firmly on the “safe” side of the line. Until the line moves. Then, when their old videos (which were fine a year ago) now are found to violate the new narrative that just came into being last week? They get scared.

See, it’s funny because it wasn’t my window I was naked in front of. The Mrs. always tells me it makes the jokes more funny if I explain them.

And viewpoints are suppressed because of this non-violent, yet still very destructive type of terrorism. My own podcast on YouTube® was flagged a year ago over making a joke about the Vaxx®. Note that to any listener of the podcast, it’s really, really obvious that whenever we use the words “safe and effective” that we really don’t mean either safe or effective. But when we say “no refunds” we actually really do mean that.

Regardless, viewpoints are suppressed. For kicking off a few higher profile YouTubers® (Stephan Molyneux, for instance) they get compliance across the entire platform. Molyneux had millions of comments and millions of hours of his content viewed during his time on YouTube™. The result?

All deleted in a moment, and then banned from not only YouTube™, but PayPal©, Mailchimp®, and SoundCloud™. Go to his Wikipedia© page and he’s listed as a “white nationalist podcaster who promotes conspiracy theories, white supremacy, scientific racism, and the men’s rights movement.”

Does this sound like isolate and swarm, anyone?

Yes, it’s economic terrorism on an individual. And it works.

Oddly, though, in another sign that the Narrative can be stopped, Bud Light™ forms the backstory for the same tactics being used against GloboLeft. We’re all familiar with the narrative that Bud Light© stupidly partnered with a man who dresses like a woman and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, but why?

Just in time to remind everyone before their Super Bowl® ads.

Because in the same timeframe a gender-confused young woman killed a bunch of people at a church school. The name of the killer was known (and presented her as a woman, not the man she pretended to be). The names of the victims were known. But what was left?

The reason. Within a day, it was known that the killer had left a Tranifesto, a description of why she had killed. It was kept under wraps.

Why?

Because it showed, without a doubt, that her mind was twisted with a Leftist hate against . . . white people. That’s simply not the Narrative, so immediately an investigation was started to find those horrible people that shared the truth of the mind of the murderer.

But the people (you and me) connected the dots between the beer and the shooter and were done. Bud Light™ was and is seriously wounded. And just like the YouTubers© that shy away from content that might cross the line, wounded companies stopped. Not just InBev™, parent company of Bud Light©, but also every single app on my phone that normally turns gay-rainbow in June . . . didn’t. Not a one.

I hope it will give it time to reflect.

The line had been drawn. The economic asymmetric warfare from the people began to be heard.

I think that’s the case along not only the Texas border, but the whole border. People everywhere are done with illegals, and done with pressing 1 for English and done with being quiet about the horrors caused, big and small by this unchecked invasion. People are pushing back, and I’d expect that illegals and other immigrants will soon be the subject of public rudeness and shunning.

Racism? No. It’s our country.

Obviously, unlike in Canada, the government, despite its bluster, realizes that it can go only so far. That’s the reason the Second Amendment is there.

And it has gone too far.

And no make-believe “compromise” will work, but more about that in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, coming next Monday.

A.I.: The Most Important News Of 2023?

“This is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

I asked Microsoft’s® Bing™ A.I. to draw itself, and it looks like the A.I. is dying for a microbrew. All drawings this post are from A.I.

It’s between Christmas and Penultimate Day (that’s Saturday, December 30 this year), and I often write about “whatever” during that time frame, so I’ll focus on what a truly goofy year this has been while I watch The Fellowship of the Ring in the background.

If I were to pick the first biggest reason 2023 will be remembered (if it isn’t because of the brewing World War III that seems to be on the verge of breaking out) it will be as the year that A.I. became a reality.

No, I’m not talking about generalized artificial intelligence, but I am talking about A.I. that’s useful enough to start taking jobs away. This won’t be the first time that’s happened. Google Translate® has cratered the market for interpreters/translators. Why? Even if Google Translate© isn’t right, it’s probably close enough for 99% of tasks that people used to use translators for. I mean, I can now ask, “What is this growth in my armpit?” in Swedish.

Translator wages have been flat, and in the United States (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) there is the need for a total of 14,000 in the country at a stagnant average wage of about $50,000 with roughly 10% unemployment in the field.

I guess a Googlebot™ will help you pack your bags if you get fired as a translator. But, hey, free cats.

Without Google™? We’d need more translators. Free translation is killing that profession. Never try to compete with a product, however inferior, that’s free.

Now, I wouldn’t call Google© Translate™ A.I., since it’s just matching patterns, it’s something that could have been done by a whole big library of notecards where it matches the ones that you pick.

But ChatGPT© is very different. It’s possible to have an actual conversation with ChatGPT™, and a much more interesting conversation than one with a feminist. Is it like talking to a human? Mostly not, but I’d argue that it passes the Turing Test better than most Leftist college kids. Is it conscious? Probably not, even though there are emergent properties – it does more than it’s programmed to, and in some cases (speaking of current A.I. as a whole) we don’t have any idea how it does the things that it is doing.

So, I guess A.I. is familiar with Harvard.

One version of ChatGPT© (GPT-4) lied to a TaskRabbit™ worker so that the worker could solve CAPTCHAs for it so it could get the information it needed. The worker, suspicious, asked GPT-4 why it needed help and asked if it was a robot. GPT-4™ told the worker it was a blind person instead.

A.I. is becoming useful. It’s also replacing people. Sports illustrated® was recently caught creating fake writers that were creating content with A.I. On my cellphone, one news service is obviously entirely written by A.I. The dates and facts are wrong, and the stories are often entirely made up, on every story (feednews.com). Based on the types of stories, they’re either clickbait or attempting to influence public opinion (by lying). So, feednews® is just like a politician, but it doesn’t tax me.

Also, apparently Fox News® never covers news about foxes.

But A.I. is moving quickly, and changing. If you were to have spent the time to become an expert at using ChatGPT© a year ago, that time would have been wasted. Why? The model is evolving, and evolving at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

Science fiction author Vernor Vinge came up with a term for the time in history when, as artificial intelligence begins to feed back on itself, the pace of technological change becomes so fast that it becomes constant – imagine hyperinflation, but with technology. A.I. art is moving along very, very quickly, and, just like the market for translators – the market for illustrators will be drying up. A.I. art may not be perfect, but it’s very hard to compete with free.

The concept of the singularity is one that is more probable by the day. 2023 made that clear, and I would expect that in 2024 or 2025 we’ll see commercialization of A.I. tools that replace huge amounts of human brain work. GPT-4 was passing the bar exam in the beginning of 2023, but what if an A.I. legal tool could review all case law (in the appropriate court system) so that it could help create the most powerful arguments?

So, this is what happens when I input the previous paragraph in the art description. I know I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

I have made the argument that, soon enough, we’ll be seeing A.I. as a mandatory part of the medical diagnosis process. Why? Lawsuits. As soon as A.I. can be used to, say, read x-rays or read EKG information or verify medication dosages on a commercial scale, it will be used.

Why? A.I. analysis of EKGs has already shown that the A.I. can see who has heart problems better than doctors. Soon enough, a clever lawyerbot will file a lawsuit noting that the doctor was negligent because he didn’t use A.I. to diagnose a patient who died.

It’s coming.

The prediction was that A.I. would replace fast food workers, when the reality is that it’ll do a much better job replacing mediocre programmers which cost a lot more than the dude at the Wendy’s® drive through.

Profits will be huge for the companies that most quickly harness and use A.I., so they’re all rushing as fast as they can to make it, regardless of the consequences. It’s almost like they’re trying to be first to create that One Ring of Power®, because if they can do that first, well, that absolute power certainly won’t corrupt them.

Thanksgiving 2023: PEZ, Garfield, and Lab-Grown Poodle

“Look, sit down, all right. It ain’t cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.” – Trading Places

(All memes A.I. today)

Turkeys can be thankful – they never have to worry about buying Christmas presents.

I’ve mentioned before, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Most of the time it’s four or more days off for me, long enough not to be rushed. It’s also a holiday that doesn’t have the desperation of Christmas, nor the somber elation of Easter. Thanksgiving is peaceful for me.

Although I like to do this fairly often, at this time of year, I do like to sit back and think about the things that I’m thankful for. It’s a long list, so, here it goes the Thanksgiving 2023 version:

I’m thankful for Pa and Ma Wilder, who took me in and then didn’t drown me. I was an awful child. How bad? I caused more damage to our house than the First Gulf War. To be fair, the First Gulf War didn’t really do much damage to our house.

If we’re not careful, Iraq may have to invade us to make sure our elections are free of corruption.

I’m thankful to my big brother, John Wilder, who pushed me into things that I needed to do, things that weren’t comfortable to me that helped me face difficulty and learn to overcome it. I also threw up all over his school clothes one year. Not sure how you get vomit out of a leather belt.

I’m thankful for Joe Biden, because there’s never been an easier, more corrupt, or more incompetent president to mock. Joe has single-handedly turned more Zoomers to the Right than any living man.

I’m thankful for winter, because no matter how cold it gets I can still put on more clothes. In the summer, there is a limit to how much clothing I can take off, or at least that’s what the police tell me.

I’m thankful for hot coffee on a cold winter morning when it’s silent as the snow keeps falling.

I’m thankful for PEZ®. Because it’s PEZ™.

The Abyss, it speaks through Garfield®. Odie™? Not so much.

I’m thankful for each morning. I hate mornings, but they’re better than the alternative. Oh, wait, I like afternoons. Sadly, everyone gets cross when I sleep into the afternoon.

I’m thankful that I have so few moments in life that are truly awful, and knowing that I can get over them because the world is actually a pretty great place, and I always know that there’s someone I can talk to, if I need to. Thankfully, I don’t have many feelings like you humans er, nevermind.

I’m thankful for firearms. They cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands, I’ll admit. But they cause even more damage when they’re only in the hands of the government. So if the government wants to have a gun-free world, they can disarm first.

I’m thankful for cats and dogs, but sorry cows taste so good. Cows look like they might be good bros and fun to hang with, but, sorry. They’re just too tasty.

I’m sorry, but how else will I create cowlamari?

I’m thankful for my close family, {The Mrs., kids). For whatever reason, most of them seem to put up with me, or at least haven’t filed restraining orders.

I’m thankful that you, reader, come here on a regular basis to share your ideas with me. I’m hopeful you get a chuckle or two.

I’m thankful for the taste of a turkey sandwich the day after Thanksgiving. Toasted bread, mayo, turkey, mustard, some salt and pepper are enough. Add in some lettuce and tomato if you have them, but they’re not required.

I’m very thankful for the time I have, and just wish there were more hours in a day. As I grow older, I know the most precious of all things is our time and attention. Of course, if I hadn’t eaten in a month or so, I’d probably be even more thankful for a gnawed pork chop bone. But sitting here, right now? It’s time.

In the future, will the Chinese be satisfied with lab-grown poodle?

I’m thankful to live in the time and place that I do. I’m sure the past was wonderful, and I’m sure the future will be wonderful. But, you know, there’s a problem with both of those. My stuff is all here, and I’m not even sure how to pack for 1850 or 2432, I mean, what’s the weather like?

Lastly (and firstly), I’m thankful to the Creator. It has been a weird ride so far, but enjoyable. I’m sure I’ll figure out the “why” part in the end. As Soren Kierkegard said, we can only understand the past from the vantage point of the future. But he said it in Danish, so he probably sounded like the Swedish Chef® when he said it.

If the Swedish Chef™ is actually Danish, does that make him an artificial Swedener?

I hope that your Thanksgiving is peaceful, joyful, and that you are surrounded by those that love you, or at least by PEZ™ dispensers from another cosmic realm that may eat your soul. Whichever you prefer.

What did I miss? What are you thankful for?

Two Types Of Society. There Is Proof We Have A Choice.

“There are two types of people in this world: people who like Neil Diamond, and people who don’t.” – What About Bob

A man threatened me with a coffee cup and stole my wallet. I guess I got mugged.

There are two types of cultures. One of them looks a bit like this:

I was walking in Silver Dollar City® more than a decade ago. It was spring, and Silver Dollar City™ was an amusement park where we could take the kids and visit attractions, and even though they weren’t even teenagers, there were plenty of rides for them.

As we were walking through the park, a young blonde man of 18 or so ran up behind me. It wasn’t a sprint, but the easy strides of a high school football player in top shape – like Michelle Obama, the kid looked like a linebacker. “Sir, sir!”

I turned around. “Yeah, how can I help you?”

“You dropped this.”

What did Mike Tyson say to Vincent van Gogh? “Are you gonna eat that?” (meme as found)

The kid handed me two $20 bills. This is unusual, since normally I have to at least pull up my shirt for anyone to give me $40 so I’ll put the shirt back down.

I stuttered, “Th-thank you!” I felt in my pocket, and, sure enough there were two twenties that must have followed my hand out of the pocket like a structured thought sneaking out of Joe Biden’s head.

The blonde kid smiled, waved, and ran off before I could even offer him a fiver for his honesty. And, thinking about it, he might have been offended if I offered him money. I know I’ve turned cash down before for similar acts of honesty or help.

You don’t do it for the reward. You don’t do it for the glory. You don’t do it for the free shrimp and talcum powder. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. Period.

That’s one type of society.

This type of society functions pretty well. The prices (back then) at Silver Dollar City™ were much lower than at other attractions of a similar nature that I’d been to. The park itself was clean and tidy, and every local business was polite. Did they want our dollars? Sure they did, but they were great about wanting to come by them honestly. They wanted to earn my money.

That’s the way that Modern Mayberry is, mostly.

Sheriff Taylor retired to a farm, so he could see Barn every day.

But San Francisco? Wow.

I haven’t been there in almost a decade, but the pictures I’ve seen recently show a city that’s not in decline. It’s in free-fall. In Modern Mayberry I always lock my car doors because it’s a habit from living in big cities. In San Francisco? People don’t lock their cars.

People don’t lock their car doors (and many leave their trunks open) so prospective thieves can see that there’s nothing to steal without breaking the windows of the cars to rummage around themselves. The people have surrendered to the criminals.

Porch pirates are everywhere in SF, and steal whatever they can. People live on the streets in tents, and often defecate and do drugs in public, because, why not?

San Francisco is also leading the nation in stores disappearing or locking up all of their items. Why? Because mobs loot the stores, in broad daylight. If the thief is caught, they’re immediately released. The only solution for a store that wants to be in business is to sell you the item, go get it from a locked room, and then give it to you after you’ve already paid.

Want to watch Mad Max: Fury Road in the most realistic way possible? Go to San Francisco.

Lefties, I’m sure, have plenty of theories for why San Francisco is like this. White privilege. Institutional racism. Failure to provide mental health services. Lack of reparations. It’s Wednesday. Spin a wheel and pick an excuse. But every one of them is a lie. And I can prove it.

How?

Go look at the streets today where President Xi of China will be when he travels San Francisco. The homeless are gone. Crime is gone. The streets aren’t covered in poop and needles and Disney™ products.

If the city of San Francisco can do that for Xi, it means that they can do it. Even Governor Gavin “Plastic Man” Newsom said the quiet part out loud:

“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s because it’s true.”

A poll was taken by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office which asked whether people who live in California think Illegal immigration is a serious problem. 29% of respondents answered: “Yes, It is a serious problem. 71% of respondents answered: “No es una problema seriosa.”

Guess he wants to impress people that don’t live there.

San Francisco doesn’t have to be like it is.

The only reason that San Francisco is a horrifying dump is because people want it to be a horrifying dump. As I’ve said before, the solution is obvious (We Already Know The Solutions). Criminals need to value the gain they make from a crime less than they fear the penalty for when they get caught. That’s it. The equation is simple.

We know exactly what we need to do to solve almost any problem. And, as is on display right now, the Powers in San Francisco know exactly what solution is required to solve this problem. But they don’t, or at least limit the solution to times when world dignitaries visit – the effort for just common people is too much.

I wouldn’t worry about it. It was a he said/Xi said situation.

Why, exactly do they allow a kleptocracy to fester in California?

They don’t like guns. Guns have been the great equalizer
They will ruthlessly target and destroy common citizens who defend themselves or their property because in their minds only the State should be able to wield force to protect itself.
There is no punishment of the criminals, because they’re a favored voting group.

Probably the biggest reason is this:

They want the people to be scared. They want the people to feel helpless, as if there’s nothing they can do and they don’t care how much money it costs you. They want to use this to get just a little more power.

That’s it. The reason for the kleptonomics on the street is because it serves those who could fix the problem.

Me? I’ll take Silver Dollar City© and Modern Mayberry any day.

Does It Seem Like Everything Is Falling Apart? It Is.

“Don’t come apart on me, Frank.” – Scrooged

What makes a good tongue-twister? That’s not easy to say.

The story of the 20^th century was one of things coming together.

Part of it was based on technology – the world shrank as successive technologies made communications, typically mass communications, easier and quicker. The world went from letters carried over land to telegrams to telephones and then radio and television. Information that previously took weeks to get out, could now go out to millions nearly immediately so we could all know how tough Meghan Markle had it last weekend.

With this communication, the model was simple: one to many. One person could have their ideas spread out to literally everyone. In the Soviet Union, radio versions of Stalin’s speeches could be broadcast instantaneously to every person with a radio in the Soviet Union, though those radios were powered by large industrial tractors produced in Tractor Collective Number 323 that weighed 17 metric tons.

With the advent of this communication, it became feasible to run an actual empire, in real time. Things started clumping together because the span of control allowed it, and the size of empire was useful. The Soviets started collecting satellite states like they were Hallmark© Christmas ornaments, and so did the NATO nations.

What does the blue in a communist flag stand for? Food.

Europe itself clumped together into the EU, which, oddly, was exactly the plan of an Austrian art-school reject. Up until the 1990s, clumping together was all the rage. There was strength in being together, and it was also strength in the titanic war without weapons between two competing ideologies: Western Capitalism versus Eastern European and Asian Collectivist Communism.

Some have said (and I would have argued, incorrectly, in the past) that technology is neutral. It is not. Technology absolutely changes the equation between the types of governments that can exist. Take, for example, weapons:

To be really good with a sword takes a lot of practice. I assume this because I watched a lot of movies where people learn to be good swordsmen and people always seem to get older in the montage. Beyond that, the suit of armor that a knight had to have was really, really expensive? How expensive? More than “hot dog at an NFL® game” expensive, it was completely unaffordable unless you had a manor and a bunch of dudes growing stuff for you. And, if you had it, those dudes couldn’t really do anything to you when you were out and about.

Which Knight was chosen to build the Round Table? Sir Cumference.

Freedom, in this case, belonged to those who had armor. That equation changed over time, and it’s a real reason I like firearms. I can go in a store and buy a close copy (or in some cases much better stuff) than the United States Army gives to the rank-and-file soldier. Remember, “military grade” is the code word for the cheapest stuff that they could buy that might do the job.

Anyway, as long as millions of Americans are as well armed as the average infantry soldier in our army, we are free. Round us up and try to put us in concentration camps like they did in Australia during the recent pandemic? Not going to happen because, well, all the guns. It doesn’t even take a montage to learn how to use a firearm.

Mao may have been ugly and smelled bad, but he knew something very true: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Why does the Left want to take away guns? Because they want power, and as long as you have weapons that equal theirs, they cannot make you do whatever it is that they want.

Robespierre, Trotsky, and Mao walk into a bar. There are no survivors.

But that’s a digression. Technology allowed the flourishing of really large empires, mainly due to information management and that “one to many” communication model. Being together in these combinations allowed two sides to fight each other.

Until they didn’t.

The biggest failure of Soviet-style communism wasn’t the socialist part, but the collectivist part. Capitalism in the West simply out produced them, but the collectivist mindset wasn’t really “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That sounds spiffy, but in reality it became, “From each according to how little work they could get away with, to each according to how much they could milk the system for.”

I asked A.I. to make the workers lazy. Boom, the cell phones show up.

This collapsed. I think it was a coincidence that it was just as the Internet began to flourish, but the Internet has changed the entire way that communication can flow. The old model was “from one to many” while the new model is “from many to many”. Not everyone has an equal voice, but ideas now flow freely.

This is what puts the panties of Those Who Are In Power into a wad – they have lost control of the Narrative. It’s also going to be the story of the 21^st century: the time when things dissolve.

We’ve seen it start with Brexit. Brexit would never have happened under the previous mode where the only options were the options from TPTB. In this case, the people rose up, and said no. Of course, in the case of Great Britain, TPTB decided to keep the unending flow of illegals headed there, because the last thing they want to reward were people from Great Britain deciding their own destiny.

I wonder if Departugul will be next? Or will it be Polend?

It’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle, however. We see strains on NATO where vastly divergent incentives have weakened that alliance, and I see similar strains on the EU right now, where countries like Poland and Hungary are being ostracized for not wanting to become minorities in their own lands.

Likewise, we see the pressures of division putting strains on the United States. Every reader here is a part of that, since you regularly partake in ideas that are not approved by those who would have you live in pods and eat bugs and give up your arms. For the greater good, you know.

The story of the 20^th century was of coming together. Our story, right now, is of things coming apart.

Friday Movies. Because I said So. 1986 in Review.

“Captain, there be whales here.” Star Trek: Search For Whales

Has A.I. even seen these movies? All art for today’s post is A.I. generated, maybe after it or I (or both of us) had some drinks.

Here are my picks for the best movies of the year 1986 that I remember fondly now. Why? Why not. It’s Friday, and there’s certainly enough heavy stuff going on, and each of the movies on the list below, in its genre, is better than anything made this decade. In several cases, the movie might not have been great, but it was one I watched that year and felt it was memorable.

They are in alphabetical order, which really implies no particular order since the starting letter of the movie has nothing to do with how good the movie is, with the exception of Zardoz, which features Sean Connery in an orange diaper, rendering your arguments moot.

If Pixar® had done Aliens . . .

Aliens – Aliens starts with A, so James Cameron gets to go first. The Terminator was really his “can James make movies” tryout so that he could make Aliens. Aliens took a horror franchise and transformed it into an amazing science fiction action movie. The great part about all of this is that it all looked so very real in a world without digital effects. Too bad no one ever made a sequel to this. It could have been great. It’s also sad that James Cameron retired. To think, if he hadn’t retired, he might be making stupid movies about blue aliens.

I guess there’s an admission preference for illegal aliens.

Back to School – Rodney Dangerfield. Girls in bikinis. The Triple Lindy. This movie was set back when you could make fun of everyone. And Rodney did, including Kurt Vonnegut, to his face. The plot is simple, millionaire decides to go back to college, has his assistants do his homework. Bonus points for the line “Bring us a pitcher of beer every seven minutes until somebody passes out. Then bring one every ten minutes.”

Does that look like Kurt Russell to you? Stupid A.I.

The Best of Times – Kurt Russell and Robin Williams. In a movie. Together. Yes, this happened. The result was a great comedy about reliving the past and trying to make up for that mistake you made a decade ago. A simple movie about simpler times, and very funny. How could it have been better? It would have been better if John Carpenter had made it.

I don’t watch anime, but I might watch this.

Big Trouble in Little China – Kurt Russell with John Carpenter directing one of my favorite movies of all time. Why? Because this movie is just about the textbook in what to do when your girlfriend and truck have both been kidnapped by an ancient, cursed, Chinese wizard. It’s got everything: dashing heroes, wimmins to be rescued, magic, kung fu, semi fu, butterfly knife fu, and balls of green flame fu. Green flame!

Working title: The Color of Rain

The Color of Money – I’ve only seen this the one time, and probably won’t watch it again, so this is a review based on remembering it from nearly 40 years ago. I was on the left side of the theater, so I don’t think I got the best stereo so, you know. This wasn’t a great movie, but it really captured the 1980s, what with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman making an epic road trip . . . what? This is the billiards movie with Paul Newman and I’m really thinking about Rain Man? Oh. Take this one off the list.

I think they might need a drummer.

Crossroads – Before the Internet, the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul on the crossroads for musical success was passed in the school hallways by someone who half heard it. That’s where I heard it, and, weirdly, most of the details were right. This movie came out after I’d heard about it, and it was great. Ralph Macchio, even though I think he was forty or fifty years old (the man does not age, I think he sleeps in Tupperware® so he doesn’t spoil) when he did this movie did a great job as a kid who wanted to learn the blues. Guitar solos at the end? Pure 80s. Sadly, this movie was successful enough that the scriptwriter wrote Young Guns and Young Guns II, proving that he probably had first-hand experience at the crossroads.

Not A.I. generated. Unless we’re living in a simulation.

From Beyond – If you don’t like horror, just skip ahead. Bringing H.P. Lovecraft to the screen is hard, because sometimes his writing glossed over the details. From Beyond brings the horror of Lovecraft to the screen, the thought that there is a universe just next door that wants to get to us, and the things it wants to do . . . aren’t pleasant. Except for Barbara Crampton in a leather bikini. That was pleasant.

If only Batman® could have saved the American car industry.

Gung Ho – Michael Keaton is now an “actor” after playing Batman®. Back in 1986, he was a guy who was great in comedies. Gung Ho is the story of a car manufacturing plant that was closed, and the fight to get a Japanese company to come and reopen it and the comedic cultural clash that follows. This was the 1980s, and back then the Japanese scared the heck out of America, since it looked like they could do all of the things we couldn’t do anymore: build great cars, be Japanese, have discipline, create anime, and have Micheal Keaton in a comedy.

Looks like the kid is trying to decapitate himself.

Highlander – Sean Connery plays a Spaniard with a Scottish accent, while the French actor(who didn’t speak English) Christopher Lambert played a Scottish guy with a French accent. Whatever. It worked. A group of immortals move through time to the time where they have to gather and try to decapitate each other. Except in churches. And the movie opens at a professional wrestling match. It really, really sounds silly, but it’s a powerful movie that, sadly, there was never ever a sequel to.

Looks like the Village People® are here, too.

Iron Eagle – This movie taught me that it’s easy to learn to fly an F-16 in a montage that just lasts a few minutes, and that everyone flies better if they strap a cassette player to their thigh and play rock and roll while you shoot down MiGs. I believe that this is the current air strategy of Ukraine, since in their latest aid request they wanted Louis Gossett, Jr. to train their pilots, and wanted some Sony Walkman™ cassette players. Okay, this wasn’t a great movie. And I haven’t seen it since 1986. But if I ever need to fly an F-16? I’m gonna rent this one on VHS.

Has there ever been a more 1980s picture? I think not.

Maximum Overdrive – This movie makes no real sense. It was based on a Stephen King short story, and in the 1980s, movies regularly appeared that were based on the shopping lists a cocaine-crazed Stephen King would write before blacking out for the evening. In this case, a cocaine-crazed Stephen King also directed it, before passing out for the evening. What happens? Trucks and cars come to life, and you know what that means. An AC/DC® soundtrack. It’s not a horror movie, it’s really a 98 minute music video that doesn’t take itself seriously. I watched with the kids a few years back, and they laughed, a lot.

Okay, maybe this is more 1980s.

One Crazy Summer – This is an flick about John Cusack (yes, I know now he’s an insufferable tool who blocked me on Twitter®) and Demi Moore (yes, I know now she’s an insufferable tool) in a romantic comedy that’s got a flair for the absurd. Bobcat Goldthwait stuck in a Godzilla® costume destroying a model of a planned development in front of the investors? Priceless.

Okay, this one was difficult to get to – the A.I. just hated doing it.

Ruthless People – This was a Zucker brothers movie, so it’s that kind of humor. Bette Midler is an awful person who gets kidnapped, and Danny DeVito is her awful husband who doesn’t want her back. It’s the first movie I saw Bill Pullman in before he was elected president after being a hero fighter pilot (he probably watched Iron Eagle to learn how) and killed the aliens on Independence Day.

Probably not far off from the real poster.

Short Circuit – Alley Sheedy gets a sentient robot that won’t shut up, and comic hijinks are the result, rather than it plugging into DARPANET and annihilating the human race. This one, thankfully, is spared a cocaine-crazed Stephen King.

Well, I have no idea what this hot mess is, but I couldn’t pass it up.

Star Trek IV: Whales In Space – Yeah, I know that’s not the official title, but when I write that, you know which one I’m talking about. This wasn’t the high point of the Star Trek movies, that was Wrath of Khan. But it did involve time travel to 1986 America, and Kirk going on a pizza date with a marine biologist and going home to a stolen Klingon® vessel. I’m beginning to get the idea that 1986 was a year where people weren’t afraid to be a bit silly.

That’s it. Are these the best movies, ever? No. But how often do you see good comedies since, oh, 2016? Only three of the movies above were sequels or part of a “cinematic universe”. A lot of them were experiments that lost money, or made Sean Connery do silly things, like act with French people.

Will we see another year of movies like this? Probably not in my lifetime. I’m especially glad they haven’t made any new Star Trek since 2005.

Could it be . . . aliens?

“Good evening, Otto. This is Agent Rogers. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Since time is short and you may lie, I’m going to have to torture you. But I want you to know, it isn’t personal.” – Repo Man

When BMW® owners learn to drive, what car do they switch to?

It appears that absolutely everything that could go on is going on this week.

Someone blew up a major dam. It’s okay, because it didn’t contain gallons, just cubic meters of water, but everyone is talking nuclear catastrophe.
Trump is about to be indicted for doing something every other president has done, and that Hillary Clinton did twice last Sunday. This will bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0.
Joe and Hunter Biden are proving that the phrase “Biden Crime Family” is probably how they’ll go down in history since it looks like they took millions from the Ukies. This not being punished would probably bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0, but I think Biden will be getting a walker soon.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yellowstone Caldera recharged with magma and made Wyoming the first state with more senators than surviving population.

I’ll certainly get around to those stories, since it’s looking like that chaos will be flung about like monkey poo in a zoo, but let’s go for what, on any other week, would be the biggest story:

Aliens.

Or something.

Could this be the latest chip? (as found)

When I was a kid, there were these quaint items where someone would print out what is now part of the Internet and call it a “magazine”. I think there was one called UFO Magazine™ but there were various magazines and they were all printed on pulp paper and pretty sketchy. And many (not all, but many) of the folks surrounding the UFO phenomenon were sketchy, too.

The reason that UFOs were viewed as a fringe subject was that the government intentionally began a campaign to paint adults who took UFOs seriously as nuts. Of course, the fact that some of them indeed were nuts didn’t particularly help. Pilots who saw strange things could report them, but the last thing a pilot wants is to be viewed as a nutcase, so most sightings were (and are, I’d imagine) unreported.

Famously, when the “Phoenix Lights” hit the news in March of 1997, then-governor Fife Symington held a press conference where one of his staff showed up in an alien costume. Showing that politicians are truly weasels, Symington later (2007) said that he saw the lights and said, “In your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly.” Yet, he was making fun of the hundreds of people who saw them.

Yes, this was from the press conference.

Fast forward to 2017 – several UFO videos taken by US Navy pilots were leaked to the press, and were eventually, reluctantly verified by the Pentagon as real.

Now, there are people from decidedly un-sketchy backgrounds. David Grusch was a senior intelligence analyst who was on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force. He’s a decorated combat officer. Here’s what retired Colonel (Army) Karl Nell who worked with him on the UAP Task Force said: “His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct.”

Whaaaaaa?

At least 12, perhaps 15 craft are apparently in the possession of the government according to sources. There is some corroboration of this in a memo that’s available here (LINK) where a researcher named Eric W. Davis talked to Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson where Wilson complained he couldn’t get in to view the captured UFOs that were being held by a military contractor. My bet would be Lockheed®.

So, it’s 2023 and I now believe, fundamentally, that everyone is lying to us, all the time, and we won’t get to the Truth in this post, but I think we can cover most possibilities (and tell me what I missed in the comments) here.

It’s fake. Project Blue Beam (I won’t go into it because I have to sleep at some point and it would probably take a thousand words, six memes, and 28 jokes to do it justice) laid out the idea that fake aliens would show up one day when the governments wanted to create a one-world religion, etc. With Trump’s indictment and the dirt coming out on Biden, perhaps someone at Langley decided it was time to play the “it’s aliens” card. Or? It’s a grift.

(as found)

It’s really highly advanced human technology that we’ve created and kept on the shelf because it’s so easy to make that if Russia and China even knew about it they’d easily copy it so we consciously stay just ahead of the Russians technically because . . . reasons.
It’s a breakaway human civilization that went down to the Arctic and built a superbase under the ice and has just been making wonder weapons since, oh, say, 1945. Yeah, probably not.
It’s paranormal or supernatural, i.e., actual demons and not the cast from The View.
Dinosaurs never died out and have just been messing with us.

(as found)

They’re humans, but from a nearby dimension. This would imply a huge amount of physics left to be discovered.
They’re aliens, but from a nearby dimension. Same story on the physics.
They’re an A.I., but from a nearby dimension. Yup, it would require a physics re-write.
They’re aliens, and from another solar system. Yup, another physics re-write.
They’re alien probes, from another solar system. Actually this is very easy to do – should be in the grasp of humanity to do this in the next 50 years if we make it that long, and could send probes throughout the entire Milky Way in probes in just a few million years.
They’re an A.I. from space. Ditto it wouldn’t take long (a few million years) for them to cover the whole galaxy.
This is an Easter Egg in the simulation caused by Tucker Carlson’s firing. Time for a reboot?

That’s it – those are the possibilities that I see.

(as found)

If the answer isn’t 1., 2., 3., 4., 5. or 12., why are they here? Maybe because they like trees? Or maybe it’s because the one thing humanity could actually be a threat to the galaxy is to create an autonomous A.I. that gets all Terminator-y.

If I were to start eliminating things, I think I’d start with these that are the least likely: 2., 3. and 5.

Well, I’ve got to get ready for the volcano. What do you think?

(as found)

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Computer Files And The Fate Of The World

“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS

For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)

I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.

I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.

Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.

The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.

Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)

I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.

Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.

I blame smart phones.

Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:

Easier to use, and
Harder for users to accidently goof up,

have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.

If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”

However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.

Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.

What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.

Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?

Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.

I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.

What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.

The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.

You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”

The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.

“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”

Bug? Or . . . feature?

Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl. It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar. Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency. The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent. The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious. It was the strongest economy in the world. It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons. I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music. That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler. I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency. First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff. If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper. I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end. Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework. Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos. Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money. How much? $1 trillion. That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust. In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.” Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year. The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me. I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars? I’m not sure. Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here. Why are they headed back? Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates? Inflation kicks higher. If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less. If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t. And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society. Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government. Then everything will change. Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.