Category: Bad Smells

The Economics of the Surveillance State

“That was a Beria operation in Stalin’s time.  It was deactivated twenty years ago.” – The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide?  Two shots to the back of the head.  (all photo content as-found)

Remember Lavrentiy Beria’s cheerful advice:  “Show me the man, and I will find the crime”?  Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available.  And if they didn’t, they could make up something.  Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America.  We’ve upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

Flock Safety© cameras now line roads from coast to coast.  More than 100,000 of the little snitches sit on poles in ditches scanning license plates 24/7 and however many metric hours in a metric day and metric days in a metric week.  The cameras rolled out one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the whole country is now blanketed.

Not everyone who comes into your life is your friend.  Some are just surveillance cameras. (btw, she was innocent, but the police didn’t apologize)

Maps of the cameras exist online, but those rely on humans, and it shows only three of the eight within five miles of my house in Modern Mayberry.  I could plot an avoidance route if I had nothing better to do than play spy versus spy on my commute, or build a detector like Benn Jordan did.

Most of us have jobs and families instead.  But, hey, we’ve funded a system so that every time you get on the road, you’re creating a record that will last as long as they have storage.  And cops can now use this to stalk their ex-wives, so it’s a double win, right?

How did the farmer stalk his ex?  He tractor.

Next up?

Ring™ doorbells joined the neighborhood watch program without asking their “owner’s” permission.  When several co-eds were murdered in Idaho a couple of years ago, investigators pulled Ring© footage to track a suspect’s car.  A subpoena moves quicker than a polite request and never waits for the doorbell to be answered, so they got all the data that they needed to catch the guy.  I’m okay with catching murderers, but how many people will be caught in fishing dragnets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Where exactly are you going at 2 a.m., citizen?

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

A hacker got grabbed in Finland on his way out of the country.  Prosecutors used the connection with Microsoft’s© handy Global Device Identifier™ to identify him.  One persistent number tied his computer to all the mischief.  Microsoft® handed over the records after the usual court paperwork and a feeble, “oh, stop . . . customer privacy . . . .”  My operating system apparently keeps better tabs on me than my own mother, but at least Ma Wilder has the excuse of being dead.

I wonder if my FBI agent likes the jokes I make?

Then there is Windows Recall© on the fancy new Copilot™ machines.  It snaps pictures of your screen every few seconds while you work and builds a searchable scrapbook of everything you looked at.  Local storage only

They promise.  Pinky swear, even.

Still feels like my laptop decided to start a scrapbooking hobby without telling me first.

Besides, my ISP already knows every site you visit and how long you lingered.  Edward Snowden spilled the beans years ago on the big programs that pulled data straight from the servers of Microsoft™, Google®, Apple©, Facebook™ and the Rest®.  Fiber-optic taps caught traffic in bulk, Then three-letter outfits and tech companies worked hand in glove.

The result is giant databases full of regular people doing regular things.  But don’t worry!  If you’ve been good, you’re fine.  And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

Big Tech loves this data game because it prints money for them.  They track my habits down to the weirdest details (really, kittens eating salami?) and sell the profiles to insurers, advertisers, and anyone else with a checkbook.

My patterns become their product.  They turn my life into a spreadsheet and then mark it up like a used-car dealer who knows you really need that transmission fixed today.

Speaking of cars, they’re getting chatty, too.

Modern ones log every trip, every hard brake, every late-night drive.  Some already phone home to the manufacturer and won’t work unless the software license is up to date.  Insurance companies will pay good money for a direct feed on how I actually drive instead of guessing from your age and ZIP code.

Soon enough, the car might call the cops if it thinks I had one too many.  My pickup turns into the world’s most expensive designated snitch.

Hopefully, during the 4th of July holiday you didn’t get distracted and miss the big picture:  The British blew a 13 colony lead.

Ninety-nine percent of us carry cell phones that never stop reporting.  Every search, every video, every song gets logged.  Cops have started treating a phone left at home like suspicious behavior (I’m not making this up).  The little rectangle in your pocket is the most reliable witness I never hired.

Big companies with this much reach do have a kryptonite®:  governments.  They do exactly what the government asks.  They bent over backwards to limit talk about COVID and elections under the last administration.  Books and posts that wandered off the approved script vanished from platforms:  I know, I made a COVID joke on a podcast and it was sent to podcast jail.

The same tools will work just as well for whoever sits in the big chair next.  They already proved they can move fast when someone important asks nicely.

Harvey Silverglate spelled this out in his book Three Felonies a Day.  Federal law has grown so broad and fuzzy that a decent prosecutor can usually find something to charge anyone with.  Normal life now sits inside a minefield of possible violations.  Add constant surveillance and the minefield gets floodlights, motion sensors, and a searchable menu.

Stalin put a ? after the name of every traitor:  they question Marx.

The Code of Federal Regulations stretches to roughly 190,000 pages or almost the number of words in a GloboLeftist meme. Rules multiply every year.  Nobody can read the whole thing, and if they did, another 10,000 pages would have been added in the meantime.  When surveillance supplies the evidence, the vague laws and regulations become precision weapons.  Who cares if you’re guilty?  Just being charged is punishment for the innocent.  The process is the point.

Government and Big Tech® now hold detailed maps of where you drive, what you read, who you talk to, and how you spend your time.  Also notice that they don’t bother to use these to catch murderers in Chicago or gang criminals.  No, they’re encouraging that violence.

Beria ran on fear and informants.  The updated model runs on sensors, algorithms, and sweet quarterly earnings.  It costs less to operate and reaches farther and hardly ever complains about running out of vodka.  The economics make perfect sense for the people building it, because collecting the data is cheap once the hardware is installed.

The Surveillance State runs on convenience for the watchers and profit for the builders. Beria would have been jealous of the efficiency and probably asked for stock options.

Don’t you love it when totalitarian communism and capitalism overlap?

Early Draft Of The Declaration Of Dependence Found

“He’s trying to convince me that any independent contractors working on the Death Star© were innocent victims when it was destroyed.” – Clerks

The 200th Anniversary of the United States was named after a pop music group. (inspiration from Silicon Graybeard LINK)

Euripides Schumer wrote 86 draft versions of the Declaration of Dependence before being fired and replaced by Thomas Jefferson who changed the title to the Declaration of Independence and fixed . . . a lot of other things.  Schumer’s first version that was turned in looked something like this:

At THE ANTIFA® CLUBHOUSE, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the GloboLeft Soviets of America:

When in the Course of decolonizing human events, it becomes necessary for one intersectionally oppressed people to dissolve the toxic political bands which have connected them with the racist, cis-heteronormative, colonialist, capitalist patriarchy, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equitable station to which the Laws of Social Justice and Intersectional Gender Theory entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of the legacy media and AOC’s Bluesky® feed requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

George Washington wasn’t antisocial, he just wasn’t into parties.

We hold these truths to be self-evident (after running them through the Ministry of Equity and a mandatory diversity audit), that all humans (and non-binary persons, and in some interpretations certain animals, who are allowed to consent to sex) are created unequal in their capacity for victimhood, that they are endowed by their lived experiences with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Equity, Safe Spaces, Pronoun Affirmation, Climate Reparations, Open Borders, Mental Therapy, two years of maternity leave, access to women’s changing spaces, and the pursuit of Happiness.  This is, of course, provided that happiness does not trigger anyone.  That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Persons, deriving their just powers from the consent of the most marginalized,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends by clinging to reality, merit, borders, tradition, or color-blind laws, it is the Right of the Oppressed to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on DEI principles and Organizing its Powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety, Happiness, and Lazy Girl Jobs.

Little known fact:  Yoda’s last name is “Layheehoo”.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes, unless the change involves dismantling Western civilization, in which case it is always urgent.  And, accordingly, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer under the patriarchy while Evils are Sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are Accustomed, like the nuclear family, free speech, or the concept of objective truth.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations by the privileged, pursuing invariably the same Object of maintaining power structures, evinces a design to reduce the marginalized under absolute Despotism of Whiteness, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security in the form of endless bureaucracy, pointless degrees and certifications, free college, re-education camps, poetry readings, and corporate HR departments.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Oppressed; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.  The history of the present evil white Christian man, or whichever legacy figure is convenient this Week, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny of Merit and Tradition over these Safe Spaces.  To prove this, let Facts (as curated by our narrative) be submitted to a candid (but properly biased) world.

Little known fact:  I was named after Thomas Jefferson.  Over two hundred years after.

Whenever you see “he”, it is about the patriarchy, and not at all my father who I have gone no contact with.  Don’t even.

He has refused his Assent to Laws the most wholesome and necessary for unlimited immigration and population replacement.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate importance for equity unless suspended until approved by the proper diversity officers.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of actual representation in favor of proportional equity.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population replacement of the white people of these States by obstructing the naturalization of and free housing of foreigners.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by insisting on color-blind laws instead of equity-based outcomes.

Andrew Jackson was so tough that when he was shot in a duel, the bullet ended up in critical condition.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices for border security and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people (the recent arrivals) and eat out their substance by enforcing actual laws and totally ignoring our sanctuary cities designations.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, ideas of meritocracy and individual responsibility without the consent of the Universities.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power of transexual rights and pronoun PowerPoints®.

He has combined with others (fossil fuel companies, reactionaries, traditionalists, and parents who notice things) to subject us to a jurisdiction of reality foreign to Our Lived Truth.

For imposing Taxes on the rich without giving enough of it away in reparations.

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of equity by allowing free speech and due process.

For transporting us beyond Seas (metaphorically) to uncomfortable truths about biology and history.

For not allowing the abolition of the free System of English-derived Laws in favor of feelings-based jurisprudence.

For not allowing permanent bureaucratic rule by an unelected elite.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us by allowing parents to object to school curricula and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless ideas of Western Civilization, whose known rule is an undistinguished destruction of all safe spaces, genders, and feelings.

A chicken yelled to the duck on the other side of the road:  “Don’t do it, buddy.  You’ll never hear the end of it.”

In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned for Redress in the loudest and most emotional terms while screeching and doxxing and canceling anyone who disagreed.  Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury and being called names like “commie” or “limp-wristed sissy-boy.”   A System whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant of Whiteness is unfit to be the ruler of an equitable people.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the GloboLeft, in our AntiFa® meetings, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Goddess of Equity for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Safe Spaces, solemnly publish and declare, That these AntFa© Clubs are, and of Right ought to be given money and saved from Whiteness, Capitalism, Patriarchy, Borders, Merit, and Objective Reality; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Constitution and any founding principles that aren’t intersectional, and that all political connection between them and the legacy of the West is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States they have full Power to levy Taxes for equity programs, conclude Alliances with the UN®, WEF™, and open-border NGOs, establish Commerce in feelings and carbon credits, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do, including mandatory pronoun training and the abolition of due process when it conflicts with equity.  And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Intersectionality, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Safe Spaces.

I can see why they fired Euripides Schumer.  It was hate!

Birthright Citizenship, The Economics Of Infinity, And The Inevitability Of War

“I want immunity from prosecution, asylum in the U.S., and citizenship.” – xXx

All media “as-found”

June 30, 2026, just shy of the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will live in infamy.

All five women of the Supreme Court voted for birthright citizenship on June 30. This includes the Chief Justice, John Roberts, who I assume identifies as a woman on Tuesdays and alternate weekends.

The five voted that popping a kid out anywhere that the United States has as a state or territory makes the invader kid a citizen. It’s called “birthright citizenship”, and wasn’t really a thing for the first 60 or so years, at least, of the 14th Amendment. The 14th was really about removing doubts about the citizenship status of freed black slaves and their children.

But now, if you’re Consuela from Caracas giving birth in Carlsbad, California, your cholo child is a citizen. If you’re Ning Naun from Nanking, giving birth in Nashua, New Hampshire, your nursling nipper is now a national. That’s the law of the land, even if you are here illegally.

This effectively removes the border.

If an illegal steps one foot into Arizona and squats a tot, the squatted tot is just as American as Neil Armstrong. If a woman on a legal visa drops a moppet, even if she overstays? It’s an American citizen, just as American as Mark Twain.

The American people, therefore, have no say in who becomes an American.

It’s like someone breaks into my house and pops a preemie there and now that preschooler is now my child and I have to treat it like my child and give it exactly the same (or better!) treatment as my other kids even though it’s much stupider, much needier, and much more violent.

I guess I would be fine with that if I hated my own kids.

But I don’t. I love my kids. And, I love my people.

I’ve gone over at length in previous posts how immigrants, both legal and illegal, are a net negative on the country as a whole economically. It’s not really arguable because the facts are so stark.

Why they’ve been allowed is simple.

For the GloboLeftElite, they represent a new voter bloc that’s skewed to vote against nationalism and for communism.

For the Institutional Elite, they represent more demand for their services and more job for their gay friends.

For the “Idaho Rancher” they represent a way to get cheap labor and avoid paying the prices it would take for Americans to do the work, and the “Idaho Rancher” doesn’t have to pay for the services like medical and child care and prisons.

For the “Wall Street Firm” it’s a way to get cheap labor that will never say no, and will never report you for doing something shady.

These groups are all traitors.

You could say “enlightened economic self-interest” but you’d be wrong. They are the ticks that view the United States as an economic zone to be sucked into an empty skin sack for profits or as a place to build political power for ideas that are inimical to our way of life.

I’m not an extremist.

I’m not opposed 100% to immigration. I think we should consider starting it again in 2326 after a 200-year moratorium. I mean, we should consider it then. Maybe.

The problem with this ruling is two-fold. I’ll start with the economic. There are between 400 million and 700 million people that would move to the United States if they could. Iowa would soon look like Islamabad, Pakistan. Lubbock, Texas would soon look like Lagos, Nigeria. Diluting the ability of the nation to make wealth won’t make us wealthier, it will just turn our country into a slum.

If it were only economic, I might be able to make the case that this was okay. We’d eventually catch up in wealth production. Eventually.

But it won’t, and that’s because of the second problem:

Genetics leads to culture leads to virtue leads to politics leads to outcomes.

That’s it. You can’t take 100, or 1,000 or 10,000,000 Nigerians and expect them to create anything but Nigeria. Same thing with Indians. Or Danes. Or Chinese. Studies of twins separated at birth prove that heritability not only of intellectual ability, but also attitudes and behaviors. Why are Indians turning Canada into India?

Because that’s what Indians do. Because that’s what Indians are. If you want your country to look like India, import more Indians. If you don’t want your country to look like India, don’t let them in.

And if you go back to my map, culture leads to virtue. This is the true failing of multicultural societies, since they cannot form a shared sense of virtue. Why are there rape gangs wherever Indians or Pakistani or Sub-Saharan Africans congregate, even in countries that don’t consider rape a spectator sport?

Because rape is okay in their culture, and if they bring their culture to Dublin, they’ll rape in Dublin. Look it up. It’s not a “because they’re in the United States or Europe” thing, it’s who they are. If only the most rape-y breed, well, then the people will become genetically more rape-y. So what happens when their people become the cops?

Pit bulls are different than golden retrievers. Wishing won’t make it less so, and why are we allowing a never-ending stream of pit bulls into the country?

Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore said:

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils . . . I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.

If a country cannot determine who is allowed to become a citizen, then the result will be a multi-cultural society. What happens then? If the societies are close and have time, they can grow together, the British and Irish. Oh, wait.

To enforce a true multicultural society requires strong, swift, and sure enforcement of the rules. There was a 19-year-old American in Singapore who was caned in Singapore in 1994.

Why?

The American was being an ass. He deserved it. But also because Singapore has to be strict and severe because it is multi-cultural. To maintain a multi-cultural society that doesn’t turn into Mad Max® requires at least three of the four: justice, discipline, authoritarianism, and prosperity.

The alternative to that?

War.

War is not solely men in uniforms ranked in order on opposing sides of a line. If we encouraged people to move to a foreign country to take control, that would be war. How is that different from what India is doing? How is that different from what Islam is doing? How is that different from what Haiti . . . okay, skip that, Haiti isn’t bright enough to have a strategy more complicated than cannibalism.

In a multi-cultural society, it becomes a free-for-all, a war of all against all.

Multicultural societies don’t blend into harmony because we wish it so. History shows the exact opposite. But, hey, we’ve either got caning or cannibalism to look forward to, so there’s that.

Teutoburg Forest And Immigration Policy

“What of Arminius?” – Spartacus:  Blood and Sand

Ma Wilder yelled at me after I went jogging with Julius and Augustus.  “Never run with a pair of Caesars!”  (most memes as-found)

It was September 7, 9 A.D.

Like ducks, three Roman legions comprising 20,000 to 30,000 men under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus were looking to head south for the winter.  Romans campaigned in the summer in Germany, and then went back across the Rhine for their winter camps where they, I don’t know, drank wine.  Maybe the men of the XVII, XVIII, and XIX legions studied hard for their Roman Legionnaire test in hopes of getting a C after having V beers?

Anyway, this trip home for the winter, one of the officers advising Varus was a 27-year-old named Arminius.  Arminius, likely the son of a German nobleman, had been taken as a hostage from a German tribe at around the age of 10.  For 17 years, Arminius had been raised in Rome, gone to Roman schools, been given Roman military training, and was even raised to the social rank of Equestrian, the second highest social rank at the time.

Arminius, knowing the country, told Varus that he knew a shortcut back to the winter quarters.  It would be easy, and they could make a side stop along the way to show some Germanic tribes that had been FA the FO part.

A shortcut and a smackdown:  two problems with one solution.

All they had to do was skip the well-known and well-guarded path home and go through a forest or two.  “And who doesn’t like a trip through the forest?  It even has a cool name, the Teutoburg Forest.

“It’ll be the trip of a lifetime!”

Varus:  “It’s scary in the forest.”  Arminius:  “You’re scared?  I have to walk out of here alone.”

Now, moving 20,000 to 30,000 guys isn’t easy, and it was especially hard because rather than having a wide space to move through, the Roman column was likely over 10 miles long.  Oh, and Arminius told Varus, “Hey, I’ll take all these German auxiliary troops and go get the rest of the guys to support you.  Don’t worry, I’ll leave you some of my best guys who know the country.  They’re totally not spies.”

While the Romans were in the long line, they were attacked by forest Germans.  Not a lot, just enough tire out the Romans and damage their supplies.  When this big snake of an army finally finished up for the day, they got to a strong fort that the first-arriving legionnaires had erected, making it a good, strong Roman erection.

Oh, and those totally not spies?  They disappeared by the 9th.

Shapes that commit crimes are often sentenced to prism.

Then it started raining.  A lot.  The Romans decided to try to escape by going forward.  On muddy ground, where the only choice was walking right next to the forest or in the swamp.  And the path was covered in trees that had been knocked down, slowing them down.

As this was an ambush, the Germans were well prepared, had cover, and even had made walls so they could attack the Romans without exposing themselves.

The result was a slaughter.  There are a lot of details, but Varus ended up literally falling on his own sword in the approved manner for being such an idiot, though his head did make a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles-style trip back to Rome.  The three legions themselves were shattered.  I’d use the word decimated, but that would indicate that only one out of ten was killed.  Nope, in this case Arminius and the Germans killed most of the Romans in battle, sacrificed the officers, and enslaved a few of the common troops.

It was all over by September 11.

Why was 10 scared?  He was in the middle of 9/11.

This wasn’t where it ended, no.  The Germanic tribes wiped out all Roman military presence east of the Rhine.  This was a decisive victory and ended Rome’s desire to conquer the Germanic tribes as it had Gaul.  It also led to this quote attributed to Caesar Augustus:  “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Augustus was miffed.  And Rome was miffed.  But the Germanic tribes lived on.

Tacitus records that in 15 A.D., when the Roman military commander and father of future Roman Caesar Caligula, Germanicus, visited the Teotoburg Forest battle site that there were “bones scattered across the ground” along with “fragments of weapons and limbs of horses”.  Oh, and human heads, nailed to tree trunks.

Augustus used to prank his praetorian guard by pretending to choke on his food.  It’s an old gag.

I came away from thinking about this battle with several ideas.  The most important one was Arminius himself.  Despite being given nearly every advantage that Roman society had to offer, Arminius was never Roman.  He was brilliant, he was exceptional enough to be given military leadership, and he had spent seven more years as a Roman than the ten he had as a German.

But there was no amount of Rome that would make Arminius less German.  And, rightly, Arminius is a hero to Germans.

That forest was really full of Germans that day.  You could say it was krauted.

But he’s also a warning to Americans.

As I look to the United States today, I see a country that is fragmented in many ways that Rome wasn’t at the time.  How many more soldiers like Major Nidal Malik Hassan, who killed 14 people and shot 32 others trying to kill them are in the armed forces?

It’s not just moslems, though, it’s every single person inside our borders that is against the traditional Western values that made the nation is a potential Arminius.  Every business leader that loots America and hollows it out for their home nation is a potential Arminius.  How is it legal that an Indian CEO of Microsoft© fired thousands of Americans at the same time he hired his countrymen in nearly exactly the same number on H-1B visas to fill those jobs?

Never forget what they really think of us.

Arminius is a hero to Germans, at least the ones that don’t speak Arabic at home.  But he’s also a warning to all of Western Civilization that taking the advice of foreigners or people with a primary allegiance against you and who want to take you into dense dark forests is still a pretty bad idea. I’m C percent sure.

Platoon: Movie Propaganda And Serial Killer Jokes

“Now, I got no fight with any man who does what he’s told, but when he don’t, the machine breaks down.  And when the machine breaks down, we break down. And I ain’t gonna allow that in any of you.  Not one.” – Platoon

Syphilis, AIDS and a Timeshare:  what’s difference?  You can get rid of syphilis.

I saw Platoon in the theater when it came out.

I watched Platoon, and left the theater as the credits rolled.

I was filled with Raisenettes®, yet exhausted with no desire to ever watch that movie ever again.  But last weekend it showed up in the “movies you might like to watch” and since The Mrs. hadn’t seen it, we started watching it.  Only I finished, since she fell asleep while on patrol and was caught in a firefight with some NVA regulars.  But I finished it.

Again.

As a movie, Platoon looks and feels like a slice of reality coming from the “nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding” me who has never been to Vietnam nor been in a foxhole with Charlie Sheen.  I’ve seen many films shot on bigger budgets that don’t feel nearly as real as Platoon.  I imagine that part of that is because the writer/director, Oliver Stone, actually did serve in Vietnam as a ground-pounder and this movie is certainly based on his actual experiences there.

I have a lot of thoughts about Vietnam, but this post isn’t about Vietnam.  This post is about what the movie Platoon really was:  propaganda to make you hate America and traditional American values in 1986.

Let’s start with the time that this movie came out:  1986.

1986 was part of Reagan’s Morning in America.  The GloboLeft hated that because the GloboLeft loved the Soviets.  I mean, they also love illegal immigrants, but they really love the Soviets.  1986 was also the year of Top Gun, which was the top grossing movie of the year.

My friend the physicist said that he’ll only play volleyball in a vacuum with perfect spheres.

Why was Top Gun the highest earning film of the year even though it wasn’t that great of a movie?

Because people loved America.  And yes, I liked Top Gun, but you’ve got to admit it didn’t really have a plot.  Top Gun:  Maverick at least had a plot.

I digress.

Back to the “people love America” thing.  Hollywood© had changed since Reagan was there.  When Reagan was there, Hollywood was subversive, but it didn’t hate absolutely everything about America.

Now a majority of Hollywood© did.  So, it created one of the most effective propaganda movies of all time, Platoon.  I must admit, the message of the movie makes Trotsky look like a patriotic America and Charlie Sheen look morally upright.

Charlie Sheen drew the line at cocaine.

What, then, was the message?

  • Traditional American values suck. Almost* every leader was shown to be either out of touch, incompetent, sycophantic, or evil.  In one scene almost* all of the leadership of the titular (heh) platoon was in a barracks.  It wasn’t fun.  It looked like your grandpa’s poker night with his old smelly friends, ruled over by the despotic and disfigured Satan of our story:  Staff Sergeant Barnes.

This is an effective scene.  Your brain subconsciously looks at pretty things and thinks that they’re good.  The opposite holds true as well.  Barnes is established and reinforced as the antagonist.  He is, for this movie, Evil personified.

Wait, what?  This is a war movie, aren’t the enemy supposed to be the bad guys?  Not for a large chunk of Hollywood©.  Remember Hanoi Jane Fonda?  They hated America and wanted communism.

The Vietnamese in this movie aren’t the bad guys, they’re just some sort of natural occurrence, like the weather.  Put the story on a boat and replace the Vietnamese with a storm and it’s the same movie.

  • But, move to the cool kid bunker! They had dope!  They had cool music!  They were doing cool and groovy things!  No leadership here, at all, except for cool and groovy dope-smoking Sergeant Elias.

Elias isn’t the protagonist, the protagonist is the character played by Charlie Sheen, who might as well have been called Pvt. Nobody as cardboard as he is, since he only takes one action in the entire movie.  No.  Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, is Jesus.  His betrayal and final death scene with his arms outstretched as if on the cross is heavy-handed.  Even young me got that.

If only I can die with such symmetry!

And, in this movie, Jesus was cool and smoked pot.  Dafoe would play Jesus in another movie two years later:  The Last Temptation of Christ.  This was back at a time when the Catholic Church actually managed to be against something other than being against people saying mean things about rapefugees.

But I digress.  Again.

The movie is clear.  Barnes, who represents traditional American society and traditional American values, is bad.  Elias, who represents stoner culture, is good.

When you analyze propaganda, another questions to ask is, “Who is it aimed at?”

Charlie Sheen was the stand-in for the target, the person the audience is supposed to identify with.  In several masterfully shot scenes, I felt like I was in Private Sheen’s place.  That’s effective film making.  Sheen is early wave Gen X.

This makes sense, since Gen X was the target.

Early, Atari© Xers like myself were the primary ticket purchasers of R-rated movies at the time Platoon came out.  It’s where we took our dates on a Friday night, and young men were the primary decision makers when it came to selecting a movie to see.

Platoon was demoralization aimed straight at Gen X.  Here is what it was saying:

“Reagan making you feel good?  Perhaps a bit too good?  Enjoyed Red Dawn or Top Gun?  Well, white people are awful, except for the stoner socialists who hate America.  Those are the real good guys.  And Hollywood©.  Hollywood™ loves you.”

Imagine how surprised Jeff was when he committed suicide! (meme as found)

Hollywood© does not love you.  But they loved this movie with the heat of a thousand sons.  Nominated for seven Academy Awards®, it won three, including best picture and best director.  Hollywood© loved this movie.  So did critics.  And it did well at the box office, finishing up third for the year, behind the previously mentioned Top Gun and the heavy period drama that was Crocodile Dundee.

I bought two tickets to it, so my $10 was in the $138,530,565 that it’s credited with.

When I finished watching it, I wanted to take a shower because in the end, the character I’m supposed to identify with, Pvt. Cardboard, kills the stand-in for America:  Sergeant Barnes.  On purpose.  Murder.  Demoralization.

Again, I didn’t have the words to describe nor the wisdom to understand the propaganda at play in the film.  I just know that I felt revolted.

What does a serial killer do when he finds Waldo®?  Wears Waldo™.

But now I see what was going on through clear eyes.

Maybe it was because I didn’t have any Raisenettes™?

SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?

“Time to musk up.” – Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy

You know who gives kids a bad name?  Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has just launched his SpaceX® IPO at a price of $135.  If you were in on the initial purchase, you’ve already printed money, as the current price is now at $216 as I write this.  This is bitcoin level price increase.  And, it shows Elon Musk’s meme effect.  I expect soon enough that he’ll announce he’s moved his headquarters to an orbital space bombardment platform.

For tax reasons, you know.

As much as the GloboLeftists like to make fun of Elon for buying Twitter© and turning it into X© and destroying 30% of its market value, Musk has certainly had the better of that conversation since he’s now a trillionaire and his having an amplified voice on X© certainly hasn’t hurt.

Regardless:  quatro commas.

That’s a lot of money.

Step 2:  Profit.  Step 1:  Time Machine.

As I write this, SpaceX© has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion dollars.  That’s more than Amazon©.  It’s more than Saudi Aramco®.  There are only four stocks bigger than SpaceX©: Apple®, Nvidia™, Google©, and Microsoft© and I think it passed Microsoft® this afternoon.  And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty close to being the biggest company.

Ever.

To put this into perspective, SpaceX© by itself is now worth as much money as all the aerospace companies and defense companies in the world.  Combined.

Part of this is due to the relatively small number of SpaceX™ shares available.  SpaceX© sold 5% of itself, getting $85 billion to pay off debt and buy Elon something nice.  If Elon had dumped all of the stock, I’m betting it wouldn’t have near that valuation because someone would have had to buy the other $2.7 trillion worth of shares, and it’s not like Jeff Bezos has that in his couch cushions.

To be fair, no one has that in their couch cushions except the federal government, and they’re too busy giving it to Democrat agitators to bring in foreigners and agitate for communism.  You know, things that benefit society.

The North Korean gymnast didn’t win in the Olympics©, but her execution was flawless.

That small float has led to the stock, in my opinion, being a meme.  It’s the Dogecoin© of equities.  It has enormous value because Elon is associated with it.  It also, unlike the usual IPOs accessible only to folks with a half million bucks or so, is accessible to anyone that can fog a mirror.  Beyond that, it’s also going to be required to be picked up by several stock indices soon.  This will require things like pension funds and mutual funds to buy it.

What is “it”, though?  What makes up SpaceX™?

The smallest piece is actually what people think of:  the rockets.  Even though Musk has the single largest, most active, and most efficient space program on the planet, that’s not a huge market.  I mean, it’s more money than I have, but Elon’s biggest customer is . . . Elon.

Starlink© is the only profitable piece of this project.  My eldest, The Boy, has Starlink©.  He likes it.  It’s good, if you’re not close to an actual wire.  The problem for other people wanting to make a space-based Internet is that Elon has the big lead here, and there’s probably only room for one company.

Jeff Bezos was going to try to make an orbital communications network, but his rockets don’t work, so he has no way to send stuff to space cheaply.  Cheaply?  Speaking of Jeff’s wife . . .

I digress.

I knew Bezos’ rocket program schedule was in trouble when he hired Elton John.  I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.

So, what else is SpaceX©?  It’s the X™ formerly known as Twitter©.  Which seems an odd pairing with the other two, but not as strange as the last piece:  xAI®.

In summary, SpaceX© is:

Rockets:  Total market?  $370 billion.  Not sure if that includes the Iranian market.  As it is, he’s showing a $662 million loss in the rocket segment in 1Q26, but that includes blowing up all of those Starship™ tests.  If NASA were doing the same thing, it would have already cost a trillion dollars and they wouldn’t have launched the first one yet.

If some of SpaceX® junk destroys a city in north Texas, would the headline be “Debris does Dallas”? (as-found)

Space connections:  Total market?  $1.6 trillion.  Elon can probably earn most of this and it’s already earning him over a billion dollars a year.  As the Internet is primarily made of porn and cat videos, made $1.1 billion last quarter selling virtual pussy . . . cats.

The old Twitter™:  No known profit.  By transferring the old Twitter® to SpaceX™ that does make Elon the X® owner.

AI:  $26.5 trillion.  Right now, he’s losing only $2.5 billion a quarter at this, which makes him a rank amateur when compared with OpenAI®.  OpenAI© lost $38.5 billion last year, so Musk needs to lose a lot more money this year to catch up.

One of these is not like the other.  And I’d argue that one of these isn’t remotely reasonable.

You can do your own math.  But the big thing to me is this is quite like Elon Musk’s junk drawer that has a flashlight and an old 9-volt battery and some slightly-dull colored pencils and an old AC adaptor that I’ve forgotten exactly what it adapted.  Starlink™ and the rockets make sense together.  But xAI®?  Was that just thrown in there to puff up the price?

It was.  And maybe sometime in the future he’ll toss Tesla© and Grimes and some old socks in there, too.

See!  I didn’t make this up.  It takes accountants to make things up. (as-found)

The big connection there would be that, I guess, that Elon can make orbital data centers that don’t require power generation on Earth or cooling water.  And Elon’s only going to build (checks notes) a million of them.  That’s pretty ambitious since he’s only tossed up 10,000 Starlink© satellites at about $2 million each.  If he got the same price (doubtful) it would still cost $2 trillion.  Probably closer to $20 trillion.

Which is . . . not going to happen.  In fact, I think the SpaceX™ IPO will be looked back as the point where the A.I. bubble began to deflate.  But I’ve been wrong before:  I missed some bits and wouldn’t have bet that it would have gone up as fast as it has.

Remember like they said in Apollo 13, failure is always an option. (as-found)

What is the end game, then?

Well, Elon’s end game is to make Elon insanely rich, for one.  To be fair, he’s already gotten insanely rich through selling electric cars and built a space program that exceeds the capacity of every other nation on Earth, and has fathered something like 70 little Musks which might be part of his own diversification strategy:  a genetic junk-drawer, as it were.

What’s the long game?  Maybe an orbital space bombardment platform.  Or a government on Mars peopled entirely by those offspring.

Well, at least now he has space for rent.

This is not advice or a solicitation to buy or sell or rent or trade or loan or barter or whatever other adjective.  It’s a humor post.  I actually hope Elon does send up a million rockets, but I’m thinking it’s more likely he’ll have a million kids, which, with enough investor money is much more possible but I wouldn’t want go on a long car trip with a million kids because I’d be tempted to sell or rent or trade or loan or barter the lowest performing 10% of the children into the PEZ® mines.  Also, I think having a million kids would make me sore.  Which also might be Elon’s plan.  Regardless, this isn’t investment, dating, or reproductive advice.

America 350: Looking Backward from 2126

“Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze but it can’t run backwards.” – Interstellar

See? I do requests. Heck, I even have two requests: First, after I die, I want my remains to be scattered on rides at Disneyworld©. Second, I don’t want to be cremated.

This portion of the project will focus on the years from 2026 to 2126, with emphasis of the fifty years between 2026 and 2076.

2026 was only celebrated as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the most minimal way possible, mainly through consumption of something called InstaGrams© which are believed to be a form of snack-cracker covered in TikTok®, which is believed to be a spread made mainly out of seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup, but records are spotty.

What happened after this celebration?

The economic situation was already rough in the United States. Rather than having a currency set in a fixed number of units, like our fixed number of 100,000,000 BasedBux©, or currency based on an actual physical commodity like gold, silver, or PEZ©, the currency of the United States was just printed at will. Even at the time it was recognized that the U.S. Dollar was mainly fictional in value, and owning them was better than nothing, but that the asset itself was going to go to zero over time.

2032 . . . who was saying that years ago?

The political temptation of the United States to print “wealth” at will was abetted by the large network of vassal states that would accept the dollar and send the United States actual physical objects in exchange for a depreciated fictional currency. Essentially, this allowed the United States to tax the world.

When looked at through the lens of the events that followed, it seems silly that this was the way that the world economy worked. The Great Crash of Monday, October 21, 2030, however, saw the formal recognition of the failure of this system. Markets rarely fail all at once, and in this case, there were many cracks that were visible before the crash, of which the crack-up boom of the late 2020’s stock market in the United States was one: any actual asset was recognized as a better deal than the rapidly unwinding dollar.

The economic crisis of 2032 was the final nail in the composition of the 50 United States, but it had help.

Since the advent of the Internet and the creation of its most well-known carrier, the “smart phone”, drift had set in. The 20th Century had been the story of the world coming together, where, for instance, the culture of the United States had coalesced from the various regional cultures into a largely singular culture. By the 1980s, the country had been largely unified under the banner of mass media.

This was a similar story across the world wherever that the people were wealthy enough to have televisions: there was a single culture, a single story, a single narrative with minor variations that were allowed.

I’ve heard that penguins mate for life, which is certainly impressive. Don’t they stop for food?

The Internet and “smart phone” had broken that barrier. Any community with any idea could now be seen. No belief was so obscure that a group of people with similar ideas couldn’t be found that shared that same idea. This divergence led to a complete and utter loss of national identity by the late 2020s and placed enough stress that the most basic drive of mammals, reproduction, was being subverted by society. One biologist asked, “Do you understand the level of stress you have to put a mammal under to make it not want to breed?”

What was even worse for the cohesion of the United States was the evaporation of national myths that had been created in an attempt to create a unified country. For over a century, scientific facts related to race, intelligence, culture, and violence had been suppressed, even though those had been noted as empirical facts for over a thousand years in the past.

The Internet coupled with the wide proliferation of cameras dispelled those well-cultivated “myths” for all but the most committed by the early 2030s. In a United States that ceased to have an overwhelming majority of Western European-derived populace, what has happened at every point in history happened: cultural lines formed along racial lines, and self-segregation again took hold. First this was by neighborhood, then by city, then, finally, by region.

Both blacks and whites agree that Karmelo doesn’t deserve prison.

This diaspora took less than 20 years. In what had been the norm in the Southern United States for nearly its entire existence, the split appeared again. Hispanic businesses, black businesses, and white businesses and churches and funeral homes took hold nationwide.

This was mostly peaceful, but was driven by the intense riots of the 2030s, with a near complete segregation complete by 2050.

Mostly peaceful is how the process moved, but it was born in the riots that formed during the great economic crisis of 2032. These riots were born of an economic desperation as the economy of the United States was in transition due to the dollar collapse: the government ran on “money” and when no one believed that the dollar was money, the government ceased to be.

People had to protect themselves, and in the course of a weekend a major metropolis could be turned into a turned into a non-functional wasteland. It was not long until families began to look for places to move that were not, in the term of the time, “diverse”. Race relations devolved as the actual motives of the majority of blacks became clear and the word “racist” lost all of its power. The Great Coalescing was on.

With weakened governments and most nations on Earth dealing with their own issues due either to economics or demographics, the collapse of the United States during this time proceeded with little international interference outside of the Mexican de facto occupation of Southern California and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. As Mexican government was, at it’s strongest, weak, these areas were either effective anarchies or under the control of the cartels.

The best mapmaker was the guy who invented the little box that has all the symbols in it that explain what’s on the map. What a legend!

Approximately half of the population of the United States died during the Great Coalescing, either from direct random violence, direct political violence, or from deprivation related to the failure of economic, energy, and agricultural systems.

By 2076, the United States looked nothing like the nation that had seen the Bicentennial celebration. Though nominally still connected, the national government had little power as the East Coast was still the most violent part of the nation.

As the South convulsed in the Great Coalescing, the majority of black residents in southern cities had fled northward into the D.C.-Virginia-New York – Boston corridor. Already containing 15% of the population before the migration, it grew to 25% as ethnic minorities streamed in. Even today, it remains the highest crime area on the continent with only a limited police presence inside the zone and a strong border force outside.

In 2076, the rebuilding was in full swing. Elon Musk had set the basis for this with his BasedBux©, which were strictly limited in number to a total to 100,000,000, so they naturally grow in value. BasedBux© was a currency that was based on a fixed amount of gold that Musk donated to found the currency and paid dividends backed by his solar power satellite energy delivery system: SunPowerX©.

As the state governments regained footing, they looked at the issues that had created the problems. With money and energy solved, they looked at the other factor in the collapse of the United States as well as other countries: diversity. Thus, the state governments decided to focus on unity. The radical idea that telling the Truth might be a basis for governance was enshrined in many states, and hanging of several legislators emphasized the seriousness of the new policy.

You can’t hang a man with a wooden leg. You need a rope.

By 2076, a coalition Federal government was created by the state governments, which were the largest functional governments on the continent. The states were exceptionally varied in levels of control and laws. The states also made it clear that the federal government in no way would it be allowed to impact the laws of the individual states. The federal government also has no power at all over individual citizens, it was built as a mechanism for states to work out their issues between them, create treaties with foreign nations, and defend the totality of the country.

As we all know, the federal government is explicitly not allowed to tax, nor is it allowed to create money, nor is it allowed to invalidate state laws.

Areas not participating in the Reconstituted United States were the: Southern California, the Pacific Northwest coast, and the ungoverned D.C.-Boston corridor, though neighboring states do take part in periodic pacification expeditions.

By 2076, the population of the areas in the Reconstituted United States was steady at 125,000,000 people, and was beginning to grow to the 150,000,000 we see today in 2126. The Internet is still available, but the advent of mandatory public browsing histories solved most of the issues seen in the early 2010s and 2020s.

I’d like to thank the Wilder Institute for Serious Historical, Political, and Economic Zeitgeist Studies™, WISHPEZ©, for funding and support during this research.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: All It Takes Is A Spark

“All it took was a spark.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

That Asian lady on TV says to donate anything that doesn’t spark joy.  Who is going to take all these illegal aliens?

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

Volume VIII, Issue 1

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Sparks and Ignition – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Why Is It . . . ? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Sparks and Ignition

I’ve been covering the UK as a part of the Violence and Censorship Update to the Weather Report as long as I’ve been doing it.  The reason is simple:  it’s a country that has a similar culture and is facing similar problems and it can be instructive.  It also might be the Spark.

When you look at fires, they need three things:  oxygen, fuel, and a spark.  If I could extend the metaphor a bit, air would be the discontent in a population.  It’s always around, and doesn’t cause a fire by itself.  Anyone can be mad.

But the amplification, the fuel, is when people communicate their discontent.  It’s why an absolute communication blackout occurred on those that were in any way skeptical of the governmental response of COVID or supportive of the obvious fact that the 2020 election was stolen.

Amplification, the fuel, was there when the George Floyd riots occurred.

They were planned.  Oh, sure, not George in particular, but any video would have spread.  After four years of Trump, the GloboLeftElite and GloboLeft activists were so angry that they wanted something, and any event on video that could be made to be the Spark would be amplified.

So, discontent plus amplification plus event = revolt.

It’s happening now in England.  And in Ireland.  The first relates to the murder of an 18 year old British university student, Henry Nowak, by a foreign invader.  Can Brits have knives?  Not without a liosense, guv’na.  But if you’re a sikh you can.  And one of them used that knife privilege to ventilate young Mr. Nowak.  The spice on this already outrageous event?

They coppers were handcuffing Nowak as he died.

Nowak:  “I’ve been stabbed.”

Evil Cop:  “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Why evil?  The coppers took the word of the sikh murderer that Mr. Nowak had, “Done a racism,” and handcuffed the bloodless hands of Mr. Nowak.  The murderer or his family then hid the murder weapon, and stole Mr. Nowak’s phone, either for gain or to suppress evidence.

The next case is still developing:  another foreign invader in Belfast was subject to oppression because he was arrested after being caught sawing the head off of an Irishman.  Silly Irish!  They should know that it’s illegal for them to be caught having their heads sawed off.  That must have inconvenienced the poor refugee.

These are Sparks.  White protests have been the result, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first that you’ve heard of either of these events, since news has been clamped down tight:  they want to remove the fuel from the event.  It can’t spread!

The result is that they’re trying to keep this from spreading.

The discontent is real.  And the oxygen level that is starting to build up in the room is the fact that, as the economy falters for the young, they’re now seeing the wealth pump in action as countries try to bring in cheaper labor from overseas to replace skilled young British and American citizens.  Zoomer disaffection is real, and their complaints are legitimate:  8 out of 10 jobs went to foreigners in the United States since 2020.

80%.

They are the oxygen level that keeps rising, and that’s the level that the GloboLeftElite wants to keep down at any cost.

What they want is to get rid of you.

When I started writing the Weather Reports eight years ago, I thought that Civil War 2.0 would be ideological.

It won’t be.

Violence and Censorship:

Stealing a country’s mythology is censorship, and you can see that in effect with the movies.  At some point people will realize this is just forced humiliation.

Turks gave us a cool new name:

I guess making fun of Indians is off the menu, as Poop World Order was banned from X not long after this.

And when you brainwash white women, murder follows:

Oh, and women judges.  Don’t forget them.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal.  But California will keep trying.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers though Iran is starting to show in the index..

And why isn’t giving jobs to aliens over qualified Americans legal?

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are down this month.  The attempted assassination last month didn’t even flutter the number, which tells you how far down the road we are.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month.  We’ll see what the Karmello verdict brings.

Economic:

The economy took a minor drop two months ago, but then completely recovered.  For now.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started.

Why Is It . . . ?

That Syria doesn’t want Syrians and India doesn’t want Indians?

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/Katelyn_Caralle/status/2056134125564645790
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/2053284658322854271
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/2052414245124366422
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2054277602588946492

GOOD GUYS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4MHgjkdOKk
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2057508808067543268

ONE GUY
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2055736794474590660
https://x.com/BreannaMorello/status/2052013624516849961
https://ammo.com/research/defensive-gun-use-statistics

BODY COUNT
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Worlds-Fertility-Rates_Web_04272.jpg?itok=o-FNcmIC
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/10/christian-catholic-pastors-seminaries
https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2026/docs-admin3-26a.png
https://therabbithole84.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-in-medical-schools

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/Mezzie13603591/status/2053671751591006406
https://x.com/Smooth_Sailing0/status/2053575218484883476
https://i0.wp.com/jonathanturley.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HAcIMIXagAA3FuR.jpg?ssl=1
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/04/28/incredible-unstoppable-titan-of-terror-the-lobster-that-devoured-virginias-constitution/
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/05/09/the-gerrymander-debacle-in-virginia-leaves-the-democratic-party-with-a-dangerous-agenda/
https://nypost.com/2026/05/07/us-news/redistricting-after-scotus-decision-could-give-gop-edge-in-midterms/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jeffries-calls-half-dozen-democratic-states-start-aggressive-redistricting
https://alphanews.org/nearly-19000-people-used-vouching-to-register-to-vote-in-minnesota-on-election-day-2024/

CIVIL WAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJek-kc384w
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/05/09/trump-assassination-jokes-internet/
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/has-the-supreme-court-set-the-stage-for-a-new-civil-war/
https://www.thefp.com/p/thomas-massie-defeat-gop-primary-trump?hide_intro_popup=true
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5868969-tennessee-redistricting-memphis-lawmaker-secession/
https://mises.org/mises-wire/vote-harder-why-secession-only-answer-american-megastate
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/alberta-premier-stakes-political-future-on-canada-secession-vote
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/child-soldiers-mexico-bloodthirsty-civil-war/
https://www.investing.com/analysis/from-civil-war-to-economic-dominance-the-rise-and-decline-of-great-powers-200680817
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/how_the_american_system_reshaped_the_world.html

MEMORIAL DAY
https://x.com/HistorianUSA1/status/2057963073529414038

Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why.

I hate hipsters, with their vegan diets and tiny feet and whiskery faces and sawdust bedding.  Oh, I meant hamsters.  I hate hamsters. (meme as-found)

We are becoming poor.

Not “poor” in the sense of some third-world hellhole where the average guy eats dirt and dreams of a bicycle.  No, we’re sliding into a softer, slower, more insidious kind of poor, the kind where everything costs more, does less, and shrinks while the price tag stays the same.  Think of your new Giant Size™ Freetos© Corn and Sawdust Chips®.  Thirty-three percent less product than the old Stupendous Size©, same price, and now with extra cardboard flavor for that authentic “we’re all getting cancer” mouthfeel.

Or the Chimkin King® MacNugget© that used to be a glorious 0.75 ounces of protein-packed joy (roughly three picofarads of satisfaction) and is now a sad 0.4 ounces (two millibecquerels of regret).

Same price.

Or twice the price.

You pick.  This isn’t random.  It’s the visible symptom of a deeper rot.

I think Superman® will die when he finds his crypt tonight.

To understand why we’re getting poorer, let’s ask the question:  What makes places and peoples wealthy in the first place?  Wealth isn’t some mystical fog that drifts in on the winds of good intentions.  Wealth is built, deliberately, from a handful of non-negotiable ingredients.  Screw them up, and poverty is the only destination.  Nail them, and creation of wealth is damn near impossible to stop:  look at Singapore, a rock with zero natural resources that became richer than most continents because they got the recipe right.

Here’s the list.  It’s not complicated.

Raw materials.  You need stuff to make stuff.   A country doesn’t have to own the mines or the oil fields.  Taiwan proves that.  They import what they need and turn it into iPhones© and Nvidia© chips that the world lines up to buy.  Venezuela sits on more oil than a Saudi prince’s dream and still can’t afford luxuries like toilet paper or rice.

Energy.  This is the raw material people pretend doesn’t exist until the lights flicker.  Cheap, reliable energy is the multiplier for everything else.  Coal, oil, nuclear, geothermal, solar:  swap the source if you want, but you cannot negotiate with 12 shots of vodka or thermodynamics.  I may run on booze and condiments, but without abundant energy, factories sit idle, and data centers don’t compute.  When energy gets expensive, everything else gets more expensive.  Period.

Gasoline prices are so high that I heard the homeless in Southern California have stopped huffing it and switched to cocaine to save money. (snip as-found)

Capital investment.  You have to build things to build things.  Our entire world is a stack of prior investments stretching back to the pyramids, the steam engine, the transistor. AI doesn’t pop out Sam Altman’s ass:  it needs concrete, steel, copper, water pipes, motors, and enough electricity to power a small country.  Each of those required factories, that also required factories.  Every layer of capital makes the next layer possible.  Starve that pipeline for decades and watch the future evaporate.

Drive and ingenuity.  Someone has to have the spark.  Steve Jobs said it best:  the desire to “kick a dent in the Universe.”  Wanting it isn’t enough, someone has to be smart enough and stubborn enough to actually take the risk.  That’s the rarest ingredient.  Most people are content with Nyquil P.M.™ Netflix® and Nacho Cheese Doritos©.  The ones who aren’t?  They move mountains.

Labor and physical craftsmanship.  Ideas and Jeffery Dahmer are worthless without execution.  You need trained, experienced men who can turn blueprints into reality:  welders, machinists, engineers, coders who’ve solved hard problems before and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.  Craftsmanship isn’t taught in a three-hour DEI seminar.  It’s earned through sweat, failure, and repetition.

My former wife didn’t understand algebra, which is why the x is no longer in the equation.

Right environment.  Enough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party.  Singapore, South Korea, even old-school America had governments that mostly stayed out of the way while protecting property rights and contracts.  Too little law and warlords loot your factory.  Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you.

Scoring system.  This is the secret sauce.  No scoring system at all?  Communism where everyone starves equally except the leaders.  All scoring system, no guardrails?  Wall Street cocaine binges off of hooker’s butts after their derivative play wrecked Poland.  Reward the leeches useless migrants unworthy rapists?  Hello, modern Europe, where the productive pay for the idle and call it “compassion.”  The right system rewards the creators, punishes the parasites, and lets the market sort the rest.  Mess with the incentives?  You get what you reward.

Get these seven things lined up and wealth explodes.  Miss even a couple and you’re Venezuela with better Wi-Fi.

So why are we sliding backward?

We’ve been neglecting every single one of them for decades, and the bill is coming due.

Raw materials?  We’ve got plenty underground, but we’ve regulated mining into a paperwork hellscape while China laughs and digs.  Or else.

OnlyFans© was outlawed in Orwell’s book 1984.  They wouldn’t allow thotcrime.

Energy?  We’re shutting down reliable coal and nuclear plants for windmills that work when the wind feels like it and solar that dies at sunset.  The result?  Higher costs for everything, from grocery bills to California electric cars that can’t charge because the grid is wheezing.

Capital investment?  We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone.  Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind?  That’s building Chang’s future now.

Drive and ingenuity?  Our schools turned into indoctrination camps.  Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy.  The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.”  Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

Labor and craftsmanship?  We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees.  The skilled trades?  Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades.  Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget.  Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

But we both liked heavy metal, so we eloped to Vegas for our welding.

Right environment?  We’ve got more government than ever regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book (for the younger generation, a phone book was when someone printed off a section of the Internet), agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy.  Pol Pot was too extreme, sure, but the slow-motion version where every productive act requires ten permits and a diversity audit?  That’s nearly as destructive.

Scoring system?  We reward voting for more handouts, not creating value.  Welfare cliffs, affirmative action, corporate bailouts, student loan “forgiveness” that’s really just sticking the bill on the productive.  Europe’s model of taxing the hell out of workers to fund the idle has crossed the Atlantic.  And don’t get me started about how we’re letting the people who print the money keep it.  The leeches are thriving.  The creators are exhausted.

Every one of these screw-ups shows up in the data:  houses that cost ten times what they should because we imported 100,000,000 net new consumers (legal and otherwise).  National debt? Every printed dollar dilutes the value of the ones you earned.  Shrinking products, rising prices, declining quality are all the same signal.

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

If we keep this up, we won’t be the world’s superpower.  We’ll be Albania on the Atlantic, the Mumbai in the Midwest, or the Pretoria of the Pacific Rim:  a place where the lights flicker, the shelves are half-empty, people burn Styrofoam® for heat and the ambitious either leave or give up.

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

Stop importing net consumers.  Secure the border, enforce the laws we already have and repatriate them all.

Unleash energy.  Drill, build nuclear, keep the coal plants running until the next better thing is actually ready since cheap energy fixes almost everything downstream.

Cut the regulations that strangle capital investment.  Let factories come home and encourage them to do so with tariffs.  Reward builders, not bureaucrats.

Rebuild education around merit, rigor, and actual skills.  Fire the ideologues.  Bring back shop class and calculus.

Restore the scoring system:  reward production, punish predation.  End the welfare traps.  Make work pay again.

That’s it.  All the fixes.  None require magic or a revolution.  Just the political will to stop doing stupid stuff.

So why don’t we do that?

Because the people steering the ship benefit from the decline:  a system is what it does.  Politicians get votes from the dependent class.  Bureaucrats get power from the red tape.  Corporations get cheap labor and cheap virtue-signaling.  The media gets endless stories about “systemic” problems that justify more of the same poison.

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

The ingredients for wealth haven’t vanished; we’ve just stopped mixing the batter.  But the window is closing.  Every year of delay makes the turnaround harder and everyone poorer.

I wear shoes with Velcro® closers now.  I mean, why knot?

It will be painful, more painful than pulling putting duct tape on a Kardashian’s back and pulling it off.  For the Kardashian, I mean, since I would pay money to see someone pull duct tape off of a hairy Kardashian.

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

 

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites:  A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury.  It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish.  I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible.  But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive.  (meme as-found)

Think about it.  When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil?  Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene?  Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich.  Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot.  It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires.  Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions:  it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone.  They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded.  Why share when you don’t have to?  And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty:  they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for:  you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us?  We’ll get the consumer version.  The good enough.  Best Value® A.I.:  the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions.  It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I.  The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead.  The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions:  one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of:  talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer.  A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb.  Companies needed human brains.  That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers.  The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping:  I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters.  Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most.  The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way.  They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I.  (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power.  More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism:  a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending.  This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before.  The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted.  The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles.  And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I.  Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics.  It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes.  Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide.  It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition:  things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale.  Yet.

Second, understand the game.  The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech.  The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty.  No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way.  If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal.  Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that??  (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed.  We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about?  It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider.  Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not.  As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both?  Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government?  I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake.  The horror!

The streets would be desserted.