Category: Bad Smells

The Potemkin Economy

“By noon, the submarines Ranger and Potemkin will have reached their designated firing positions. Within minutes, New York City and Moscow will cease to exist. Global devastation will follow, and a new era will begin.” – The Spy Who Loved Me

What do you call a reality show about people with lobotomies?  Mindless entertainment.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski is famous mostly for what he didn’t do, but more about that in a minute.  What Potemkin did do, starting in 1774, was conquer most of what is southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, and Catherine the Great a bunch of times.  The land he mostly took from the Ottoman Empire, but Catherine seems to have invited the conquest.  And apparently, Grigory didn’t do it right, because she made him do it again.  And again.

I mean a bunch of times.  Catherine had a succession of lovers that would put Kamala’s body count in 1992 to shame.  Okay, the summer of 1992.  Okay.  August of 1992.  Okay, August 11, 1992.  By noon

But when Potemkin wasn’t kicking Ottoman butt or . . . well, the other thing, what he did do was found city after city along the Black Sea coast.  You just might have heard of Kherson?  Yup.  Potemkin founded and named that city.  He was even buried there until Putin dug him up and took him back to Russia recently.  It’s certain he wasn’t the last Russian to retreat.

But mostly, we remember Potemkin for the phrase Potemkin Village.  Where did that phrase come from?

Why did the old lady fall in that well?  She didn’t see that well.

Catherine the Great, somewhere between lovers, decided to have a Lord of the Rings-type trip to go see what Potemkin was up to down south, and maybe have Potemkin put something in Mount Doom, if you know what I mean.

That was based on the idea that Potemkin had a lot of the Novorossiyan (approximately the southern area that Putin held before the Russians began advancing to the rear last month) villages built and rebuilt so that he could fool Catherine about how prosperous the area was.

Well, not really.  First of all, Potemkin didn’t have to impress Catherine, they’d known each other forever by this point, and she really liked him even though whenever they weren’t together they were boffing enough other people to make Paris Hilton blush.  What everyone does agree on is that Potemkin had folks paint some of the village buildings, and they did build a few fake ones, but those were mainly to show Catherine what the area would look like.

So, despite personal bravery, solid administration, building an entire fleet, and being a diplomat worthy of any of today’s age, we remember Potemkin for something he really didn’t do.  To be fair Potemkin was the guy that conquered most of the area that Russia and Ukraine are fighting for right now, so there’s a good argument that they should just give it all back to Turkey and be done with it.

Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.

But it came to my mind when I started thinking about the economy we find ourselves in today – in many ways, it’s a Potemkin economy.  FTX®, that wonderful stealer of money and funder of Democrats?  It was a financial Potemkin Village.  There was nothing really there, ever.  A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5 and the rest of the crew literally printed their own virtual currency, and then grifted their way through piles of cash from nations and celebrities and even their own employees.

A Potemkin Village?  Sure.

And now Elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud.  First, there are fraudulent users.  We don’t have the full number of bots that Tweeted™, but it wasn’t a small number.

Second, there was an algorithm that was built to push the Leftist agenda by artificially drawing people’s attention to things they weren’t organically interested in.  As soon as Musk stopped the algorithm in Japan, for instance, politics stopped trending and anime and Godzilla© and sushi topped the list of things that Japanese people were actually interested in.

Third, the advertisers weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  Rather than being advertisers that were interested in, oh, say, advertising to customers, they’re fleeing the platform.  Why?  Because they weren’t interested in selling products, they were really interested in social posturing.  They’re leaving in droves – the economic engine of Twitter® appears to have been built on corporate virtue signaling.

Burgers.  Right.  That’s what they’re selling.

Fourth, the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement.  How bad are these people?  They’re upset that they won’t have free food from in-house chefs.  They’ll have to pay for lunch.  Maybe they’ll have burgers?

As Potemkin himself might have said, “North Crimean Canal”.  Oh, sorry.  Potemkin might have told those disappointed Twitterites©, “Crimea River.”

There are more examples out there.  By definition, these Potemkin Companies look fine to casual observation until something breaks down.  Facebook© started as the darling of the Internet.  Then Zuckerberg decided that he’d spend the rest of his life staring out of the world through virtual reality, and spent $36 billion dollars on “the Internet, but with stupid goggles”.

Facebook® discovered a man was building a bomb.  The dilemma:  inform the FBI, or send him ads for digital timers?

Sure it makes sense to Mark who took the movie The Matrix as a how-to manual, but pretty much everyone else thinks it is . . . stupid.  But the scary thing for Mark is it’s making people look at what he really owns.  Some folks think it’s just the next version of MySpace©, because the teens have abandoned it and it now consists of businesses trying to sell stuff, mothers trading recipes for what to do with their children’s Adderall© for a quick buzz, and the NSA desperately trying to track everyone.

I guess Facebook© has a lot of servers and stuff, but is their model a Potemkin Company?

And how many other Potemkin Companies are sitting out there, in plain sight, but just not yet recognized?  My bet is that there are a lot, especially in the financial sector and tech sectors.  One principle that I’ve seen apply again and again is Wilder’s Rule #32:  what can be built really quickly can collapse a lot quicker.  If Zuck can make $100 billion in four years, he can lose it in four weeks.

The valuation of almost everything in our economy is subjective – it has value because we give it value.  Amazon™ was worth $180 last year at this time.  It was worth $99 yesterday.  It has gone down by half.  Amazon© has also announced that they’re going to lay off 10,000 employees in the next month.

Oops.  And what else might be a sign of a Potemkin Economy?

I’m sure it’s all legit, right?  Thankfully for the Ukraine, Russia sucks at war.

Valuations are built on emotion, and emotion is defined on how pretty something is.  Well, at least if we lose the Potemkin Companies and the Potemkin Dollar, we still have our relationship with Catherine the Great Kamala.

Oh, crap.  We’re in even worse condition than I thought.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania.  The candidates weren’t great.  The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke.  Ugh.

His opponent?  Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke.  Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win?  Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden? 

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense.  People like idiots better than frauds.  But it wasn’t one little win.  It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend.  In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them.  Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine.  More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense.  But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers.  Nope.  They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever.  They cheated.  How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election.  Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago.  Before him?  Nelson Rockefeller.  Yup.  New York could be called Blue York.  So, letting it shift to the Right was fine.  But Michigan?  They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair?  So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left.  That’s it.  From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job.  In Illinois?  The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however.  Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft.  What does Washington have?  Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022.  Again.  We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots.  We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever.  What about the “Who”?

That’s simple.  And you may not like it.

Bert knows.  Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now.  Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time.  On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President.  Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange.  Oh, and his mother?  She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law.  Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time.  FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence!  Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected.  And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money?  Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it.  In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme.  He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company.  This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing.  Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people.  And, he was amazingly good at that.  He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.  Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price.  Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele?  They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels.  Nope.  He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan.  Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning.  She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire.  Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool.  Me?  If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international?  Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine.  Yup.  Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country.  This is a scandal of global proportions.  Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is.  This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections.  Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel.  If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close.  But, hear me out.  What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge?  And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George?  And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Midterms Edition

“$10,000. Is that all it takes to be elected senator these days?” – Used Cars

If you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to vote, but not to drink.  But if an eighteen year old looks at the candidates, they’ll understand why the adults are drinking.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after this election.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Vs. The Deep State – 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 over 730 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.  Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals.  The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part II

The hype machine is up on the Left and in full swing.  I’m actually surprised at the amazing levels of hyperbole that are in swing.  Here are some examples:

Rob Reiner seems frightfully unhinged, like he might hurt himself.  As do the TV talking heads:

Bill Maher disappoints me.  I had thought that he was actually getting to the point where he was not the reflexive Leftist he was back in 2000.  Nope.  He occasionally talks more reasonably, but he’s as committed as any other Leftist.  Aesop (LINK), you were right.

How insane is the Left?  They’re running John Fetterman, a person slightly more capable of holding a conversation than a bologna sandwich for Senate.  When Fetterman was (rightly) attacked for not knowing the difference between a noun and a shoelace, the Left tried to paint Republicans as “able-ist” as in wanting someone who was able to say his own name without drooling.

He also looks like a Goomba® from the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers.

Luckily, he has a growth on his neck so he can appeal to both Eagle® fans as well as Steeler® fans.

At least he helps Biden look good.

Because Biden looks like you know, the thing:

But Biden is all about scaring people, too, and so is his Chief of Staff.

The Left, though, is setting us up for more ballot shenanigans:

If you spend a few moments looking at the picture above, you’ll see that in most states, the independents break a little for the Right, and a little for the Left.  But if you look closely at Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of the independents plus some of the Republicans “voted” for Biden.  This is 100% certainty of the fraud that mail voting brings.  Will they cook the books this election?

Why wouldn’t they.  And, you’ll note, fences are going up in Washington D.C.  You can tell that a country is close to Civil War when the politicians live in abject fear of the citizens.

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, organized political violence has been fairly muted this month.  That’s good.  But the .GOV folks are scared – fences are going up all over Washington, D.C.  Even the FED has been surrounded.

In case there is rioting, Ron Paul has been busy.

Stephen Crowder, who broadcasts from a position on the Right, has been banned from his primary outlet, YouTube™, just in time for the election.  Why?  Don’t know.  YouTube©’s rules are vague, so you don’t know why they banned you even after they banned you.  This has a negative effect on free speech since people have no idea where the boundaries are, they stay as far back as they can.  This, in effect, allows even more speech to be banned.

Another person banned is David Icke.  He, however, is a British citizen that’s banned from visiting Europe.  Why?  He is listed as a terrorist.  What does he talk about?  How the elite are literal lizard people.  From watching him in a few videos, I think he sincerely believes that.  But he won’t be visiting any European countries anytime soon.

Reporter James Gordon Meek had his house raided in April.  He hadn’t been seen for months after resigning from his job.  He even skipped going to get an award for his reporting of the pullout from Afghanistan.  He was seen recently, though.  Why did the FBI raid a reporter and cause him to quit?

And there has been some good (potentially) good news with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter™.  If rumors are correct, it really has twisted a lot of knickers on the Left.  I don’t think Musk is on the Right, but he sure is messing with the Left, which might be enough.

How upset are they?  They want to see if they can keep him from running his toy.

The Usual Suspects are upset.  The “blue check mark” was the sign of an elite.  Now, anyone can have it.  The first price point was $20, but Elon quickly dropped it to $8.  This was hilarious, because people on the Left like, well, like Dick Durbin, who has no self-awareness, Tweeted® the below:

AOC was upset by all this, so much so that she quickly became the butt of jokes:

The ADL®, long known for tolerance of viewpoints they don’t agree with (yes, this is sarcasm), was quick to jump in with the Orwellian idea that, to have diversity of opinions, Twitter™ must ban all speech ADL© doesn’t agree with.

And, represented as a meme:

So, Musk started fact-checking.  The Left was upset that one of the first persons fact-checked was . . . The White House.  The White House was so embarrassed that they deleted the Tweet©.  Official Records Act violation, anyone?

And Kathy Griffin was permanently suspended for pretending to be Elon Musk.  Ha!

I guess we know how some people feel about that . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a looks to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again.  I wonder if his new shipment from ACME will come in soon?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided.   Will November be spicy due to elections?  A cold front is coming through, so I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – will November cause a spike?

Economic:

Economic indicators did a dead cat bounce this month.  Inflation has caught up with the Market.

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.

You vs. The Deep State

You are being lied to and controlled.  Not (only) by Google™ and Twitter© and Facebook®, but by all of those folks at the request of the government.  Yup, the DHS, the child of the drunken meetup between George Bush and every congressman except for Ron Paul, has decided that they will be the group that decides what information you are allowed to hear on the big social media platforms.  This is not me making this up:

This is how this shows up in a meme:

Sure, they’re private companies.  But being leaned on by .GOV to shut you up?  I have felt it.  I can tell you the month that this page was downranked (not a misprint) by Google™ leading to a major dropoff in traffic from search engines.  The biggest months of attack?  On the months I made the most fun of Joe.  But after a while, it no longer looks like a mistake:

It looks like they’ve been planning it. And thanks to Snowden, we know how deeply they’re hooked in with electronic communications:

They want it all:  to spy on anyone, at any time, and to control what information you are allowed to see and hear.  They’re willing to go to great lengths:

And if you wonder what they value, look at who gets sent to jail:

Oddly enough, we are winning.  There is no reason that the DHS would need to enlist the aid of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to have them restrict the flow of information to over hundreds of millions of people if we weren’t winning.  Yeah, I know they own the majority of the institutions in the United States, but they’re proving they know they don’t own our minds.  They’re scared.

Remember, this is in our hands, not theirs.  And that’s what scares them.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Huh.  Pre-Musk Twitter 404ed almost all of my Bad Guy links from private citizens by the end of October…

It’s almost like there’s suddenly a crime wave coverup ahead of an election or something…

These two are still up (for now – because they are from Blue Check TV news reporters?)…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582472383910117377
https://twitter.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1585595820077977600

Good Guys
https://youtu.be/akXJ_yuE-Ek
https://youtu.be/XRkpMhuXmZU
https://twitter.com/BornAKang/status/1584054864178339840

One Guy
Firefighter tries to be a good guy at a convenience store…
https://twitter.com/KcDiscover/status/1582552334994796547
https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-missouri-shooting-kcmo-firefighter-anthony-santi-charges/41693134

Body Count
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/47/95
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/19/daniel-bobinski-interview-embalmer-says-blood-has-changed/
https://icandecide.org/v-safe-data/
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-mortality-rate-is-up-17-across
https://chaosnavigator.substack.com/p/80-young-canadian-doctors-died-suddenly
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-surgeon-general-covid-mrna-vaccine-found-to-cause-84-increase-in-death-for-men-ages-18-39?utm_campaign=64483
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ob-gyn-laments-covid-jabs-massive-unprecedented-side-effects-for-pregnant-women-babies/
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/25-percent-people-received-covid-19-vaccination-missed-work-serious-event-cdc
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fborder%2F2022%2F10%2F12%2Fgraphic-mexican-cartel-gunmen-dump-4-human-heads-near-texas-border%2F
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/glock-switch-epidemic-may-be-rippling-through-americas-inner-cities
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-made-up-60-4-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2021/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-undercounts-number-times-armed-citizens-thwarted-active-shooting-incidents-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

Vote Count
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-trump-election-fraud/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/bxwz-o06.html
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/jawdropping-fraud-systemic-ballot-harvesting-in-orlando-black-neighborhoods/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F10%2Fdemocrats_are_aboard_the_big_data_emtitanicem.html
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/03/mayor-says-milwaukee-election-worker-fired-over-ballot-fraud/69616108007/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mail-in-pennsylvania-ballots-with-incorrect-dates-will-be-saved-not-counted-2022-11-02/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/new-york-has-more-3-million-voters-lacking-proof-identity-analysis
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/bombshell-texts-show-milwaukee-mayor-colluding-with-democrats-to-rig-2022-election/
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-voter-registration-delaware-constitutions-da8ac023e52da4a78c2ccb110750f8aa
https://whowhatwhy.org/deep-state/what-donald-trump-got-right-about-voting-machines/

Civil War
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1588262127105703936
https://resavager.substack.com/p/are-americans-still-a-people
https://unherd.com/2022/10/how-turbo-wokism-broke-america/
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/no-the-usa-is-not-headed-towards
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jordan-klepper-civil-war_n_63574553e4b051268c57fda3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/civil-war-mar-a-lago-violent-extremism/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/civil-wars-are-too-easy-to-start-just-ask-the-spaniards
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/10/14/donie-osullivan-civil-war-threats-extremism-zw-orig-contd.cnn-business
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-paul-pelosi-attack-latest-cold-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/podcasts/civil-war-belle-sebastian-narrated-articles.html
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/is-another-american-civil-war-possible/
https://currentpub.com/2022/10/31/how-to-avert-a-partisan-civil-war/
https://www.niskanencenter.org/americas-unfinished-civil-war-with-jeremi-suri/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1278293.shtml
https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2022/10/23/a-chronic-civil-war-is-raging-on-in-us
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/politics/jan-6-civil-war-violence-what-matters/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/13/no-we-arent-headed-to-civil-war-00061696
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/civil-war-isnt-on-the-horizon-the-original-battle-never-ended/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/dixon-democrats-destroying-america-in-revenge-for-civil-war.html
https://americanmind.org/salvo/become-undraftable/

Halloween and Scary Movies

“You don’t get it do you? Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think upon itself. Nobody is going to care about exact handwriting.” – Heathers

Why don’t vampires go to Africa?  They heard someone blessed the rains down there.

Happy Halloween.

The origins of Halloween are older and murkier than what can be teased out of history.  Is it a Christian holiday tossed over the top of an old pagan one?  Is it a purely Christian holiday?  Is it a floor wax?  Is it a dessert topping?

Why not all of the above?

Regardless, Halloween happens at my favorite time of the year.  One of the things that we lose in the frenetic pace of modern society is a loss of connection to the cycles of life.  There are long cycles:  Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood, and Maturity.  Technology certainly has changed those cycles – children play on tablets seeing things they ought not, and Madonna© pretends she’s sixteen rather than sixteen minutes short of eighty.

The shorter cycles are changed, as well.  A typical day had time when we were fully engaged at work, and time when we weren’t.  Now?  Technology has made it so we’re partially engaged at work, and partially engaged with family.  At least we don’t have to be engaged with Madonna®.

Thankfully Madonna™ can’t walk through walls – she’s a material girl.

But the year, that’s something that technology can only partially mess with.  We can be warm in winter, and cool in summer, but unless we stay inside all year sealed in Tupperware™ (like Madonna®) we are exposed to the changing lights and temperatures of the season.

That is good.  We are humans.  Or at least I assume we’re all humans, since we all enjoy ingesting nutrients and drinking fluids that hydrate us while listening to sounds of non-random frequencies arranged in a mathematical progression juxtaposed with potentially emotionally triggering lyrics about mildly iconoclastic behavior.  Correct?

But all of that aside, I love that we’re still connected to the world via the changing of the seasons.  I’m not particularly a fan of summer.  But I love the other nine months.  And October is the sign that another damn summer is gone.  And Halloween is when the weather turns, and in October there is one particular day when I can know that every day for the next five months will be colder than that day.

And I love that.

I hear Spiderman® got a job as a web developer.

October is also the month when the harvest is done.  The time has come when the cycle is done.  Planting in spring, growing in summer, harvesting in fall.  Winter then comes, and the season has a pause.  This is the time humans need for reflection, for learning, for being together, for planning.  In short, none of the things that Madonna™ does.

For this cycle, at least, technology hasn’t stopped us entirely from getting to our roots.

Autumn is when the die is cast:  we have either done what we need to do to make it through the winter, or we haven’t.  I think that’s why horror movies are part of the season – harvest reminds us that we’re mortal, and for this part of the year we also, historically, had time to reflect on life and death and the cycle.

What nursery rhyme character loves this time of year as much as I do?  Humpty Dumpty.  He had a great fall.

So, thinking about death is natural – it is certainly part of the cycle.  And that’s my guess as to why horror movies seem to fit so well with Halloween.  And I like horror movies.

Many countries do horror movies really, really badly.

  • The Germans, for instance, make horror movies that are these weird psychological horror movies that probably only make sense if you wear rubber suits to go to the bank.
  • The Italian horror movies are nearly incomprehensible as German horror films, but the people in the movies look absolutely fantastic and change sides halfway through the movie.
  • English horror movies are generally as scary as the discussion of tax rates in the House of Commons. I guess that might be scary if you make enough money.
  • The three or four horror movies I’ve seen from Spain look like shoddy copies of Italian horror movies, but starring some American star like John Saxon. Why John Saxon?  Why not – he can fight green goo as well as anyone else.
  • Japanese horror films started as clumsy metaphors for being bombed with nuclear weapons, but then morphed into clumsy metaphors for being overworked by evil corporations after being bombed by nuclear weapons.

I will say it was a touching story.

Nope, for me?  It’s American horror films.  I think we do this particularly well.  My favorites are (in no particular order):

  • The Thing.
  • Alien.
  • In the Mouth of Madness.
  • Reanimator.
  • From Beyond.
  • Salem’s Lot.
  • Scanners.
  • Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973 only).
  • Event Horizon.
  • Night of the Living Dead.
  • Ravenous.
  • The Exorcist.
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
  • Phantasm.
  • Prince of Darkness.

I didn’t rank this list on purpose.  If you’ve seen some of these, you’ll know right from the start if this matches up with what you like.  But I’ll add this part, too.  A horror movie doesn’t have emotional impact in a vacuum.  Night of the Living Dead?  To me, it was scary only because I saw it when I was five.  Watching it now, it might be one of the tamest movies on the list, so, your mileage may vary.

I guess that’s what happens when you ask Kanye to enter a bodybuilding competition.

With minor exceptions on the list, most of those have a fairly intense paranormal component.  I think that’s scarier than just people, otherwise numerous other classic movies like Silence of the Lambs would have been on the list.  Sadly, there newest movie on the list was done before the year 2000.  Have there been scary movies made since then?

Yeah.  And I’ve seen bushel baskets of them.  They’re just not nearly as good as what came before.  Except for that one horror star.  She’s scary.

Oh, wait.  That’s Madonna®.

Feminism: The God That Failed

“Now, I know you’re a feminist, and I think that’s adorable, but this is grown-up time and I’m the man.” – Family Guy

My friend was a manager and hired a woman.  He told her that her first job was to make him a sandwich.  She quit.  Subway® is so sexist! (FYI, most memes today are, “as-found”)

Feminism.  It sounds so, well, reasonable from the start.  “Women just want equal rights.”  Sure, it sounds reasonable until you recall that the rise of feminism was the rise of the temperance movement, which made having a beer after work, umm, complicated.  But it was women who were at the lead of that absolute failure, too.

The result was two atrocities:  women got the vote, and you couldn’t get a beer.  All they missed was a Constitutional Amendment mandating Fran Drescher’s voice doing every public announcement and commercial and sports play-by-play and the world would have been an absolute hell.  Yes, it would have been worse than actual 2020.  But not by a lot.

How much beer does it take to get an astronomer drunk?  At least 4.5 light beers.

Again, it sounds reasonable.  Don’t drink.  Oh, wait, your humble purveyor of dank memes and attempted witticisms is maybe two glasses of wine in and I’m enjoying that.  I’m not arguing that not drinking is better for you than drinking.  Mormons and other people that don’t drink live until they’re essentially dust connected to other bits of dust by regret, but, hey, I’m not judging.

Mark Twain, though, had a few choice words:  “Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink – under any circumstances.”  But we’re not talking about booze here, we’re talking about feminism.

Again, I’ll reference Twain:  “A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize.”  I honestly think that’s the history of feminism.

What’s the difference between a Sumo wrestler and a radical feminist?  The Sumo wrestlers shave their legs.

I’ve attacked feminism several times in this post so far without any sort of backing.  What sort of backing do I need?  I mean, should we start all the way back at the 19th Amendment, which granted women “universal sufferage” – which I would have thought would have been a bad idea.  I mean, The Mrs. suffers a lot, but that’s just because I’m me.

The difficult part of feminism is that it attempts to first create a division between women and men.  And, the fair part of that is that women and men are fundamentally different.  They’re different biologically down to the genetic level.  When studies were done of the brains of women and men, it was found that those brains were fundamentally different.  The Mrs. can see about 175,083 colors.  I see seven or so.  The Mrs. likes to be warm and comfy on a campout.  I realize that discomfort is a transient condition and if the tent leaks, it might be irritating.

If you love someone, let her go.  Hopefully, she won’t call the FBI.

But “science” assumed for decades that the brain of a dude was the same as the brain of a broad.  It’s simply not so.  It’s actually 100% provable that dudes and broads have different brains.  When studying babies, baby boys like men toys – wheels, cars, machines.  Baby girls like plush toys and fuzzy warm girl things.

Science had (and still has) a weird egalitarian streak that assumes that any baby created from any combination of parents on Earth might be shorter or taller, fatter or skinnier, browner or paler, and yet still has exactly the same brain.

Let’s pretend that utter fiction was true (it’s not).  If so, what happens when those kids get flooded with the white-hot hormones of puberty, estrogen and testosterone?

Yeah.

This is your brain on feminism.

Men and women are different, and they’re born different, and develop differently.  Dress a man up like a woman?  That’s the same as turning a classic Pizza Hut™ into a bank.  We all know that whatever color you paint it, or what sign you put on it, it’s still a Pizza Hut®.

Even worse?  Men and women have utterly different motivations when it comes to mating.  Why?  Men are involved, but women are committed.  A man can have nearly unlimited offspring in a lifetime (as Genghis Khan can attest, 35% – not a typo, 35% of Mongolian people today are his descendants) but women can only have a few kids so they are choosy and choose the best dude they can find.  The result?

35% of Mongolian people are the descendants of Genghis Khan.

When women aren’t constrained by society, they’ll have the kids of the most macho dude they can find.  Women practice hypergamy – they try to marry up in either social caste or intelligence or whatever floats their boat.  Men practice, well, “Dude, did you see her?  She’s hot.”

Hint:  having a majority of young males that have no interest in the future of society isn’t a good thing.

I am a result of such hypergamy.  As many of you know, I’m adopted.  Unlike many adopted kids, I have a lot of data about my biological parents.  My biological mother was at college and decided, “Whoa, that dude is really smart.  I want to have his baby.”

Yes.  This happened.  The dude was a freshman.  My biological mother was a senior.  The poor guy never had a chance, and, thus, I exist, entirely due to hypergamy.

I say “the poor guy” because it was true.  He was a mark in her game.  She wanted his genetics in her child.  That was it.  There wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t love.  Hypergamy isn’t about those things, it’s a transaction.  For him, it was her saying, “Hey, baby, I like the way you fill out those genes.”  The long-term result for her from this strategy is pictured below:

And  . . .

But, when it came time to take care of me, my biological mom was not up to it.  I assure you, that given the combinatory genetics of her willful and cunning plotting and his intelligence, I was probably the most capably evil baby born that year.  Seriously.  I was the most awful child in stunning ways.  I could list them, but you’d be shocked.  I mean, how many other seven-year-olds have convinced their grandmothers to buy them magazines with actual boobage in them?

Yeah.  And that doesn’t include . . . . oh, so many things.

Hypergamy is a less-than-zero-sum game, though.  Whereas conventional morals would indicate that a married couple should really try to stick it out unless it was a morally untenable relationship (see:  my first marriage, which would have been dissolvable in any Christian year since ever) now the woman is encouraged to blow it all up for games and prizes.  And demonize men in the process.  Why?  Because they’re there.

Also?  Feminism.  The laws used to be if you were the reason that the marriage didn’t work, you suffered.  Later?  Not so much.  Now, women have the upper hand in nearly all facets, and in fact, start most of the divorces (70-80%) in the country.  Why?

The laws are stacked in their favor, even more so if there are children.

This is a result of feminism.  But beyond that has been the impact on society as a whole.  What would the result of the 2020 election have been (even after the shenanigans) if only men voted?

Left for you:  show how the federal deficit, abortion rate, divorce rate, rate of church attendance, number of single mothers, increase in welfare, and a dozen other things increased after women got to vote.

I want to make something clear:  I really, really love women.  I think they’re awesome and respect The Mrs. highly, and I think she’d trust me to cast a ballot she’d believe in, because we think alike.  I also think that woman’s suffrage has only resulted in suffering and believe it can be shown mathematically (shhhhh, most of them aren’t so good at math).  So, let’s put out a petition to end woman’s suffrage!  I think we can get 70% of women to sign it . . . .

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes.  Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself.  So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible.  For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works.  To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing.  But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him.  Every.  Single.  Point.  He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected.  “Show the whole thing,” was his response.  Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others.  His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years.  Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony?  I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems.  I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper.  It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper.  But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too.  One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet.  To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that.  Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it.  This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel.  Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that.  In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t.  The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions.  He thinks this is the same.  The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense.  “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.”  This is true.  One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse.  He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge.  What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults.  When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child.  This is the result of parental dereliction of duty.  Sure, there are some kids that are just bad.  Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him.  But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6th gets a Congressional investigation.  Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village.  It takes parents.  It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools.  Kid failing?  They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry.  The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings.  But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace.  Is this intentional?  The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks?  Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.”  Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers?  New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other.  I think it was eggs.  I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.:  “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder:  (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.:  (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned.  I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different.  He’s not like the others.  Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird.  You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No.  I’m not afraid of salmonella.  I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend!  My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!”  And then I would attack Poland.  Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did.  Nope.  I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis.  On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo.  Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying.  I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad.  Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth.  That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying.  I’m not sure why.  Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die.  All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live.  I have no particular desire to die.  If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat.  But I don’t fear death.  I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life.  I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life.  End.  Full stop.  It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.”  And me?  Free life.  I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi.  At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything?  I mean, besides another bottle of wine.  You give that man:  Today.

I’ve got Today.  The only moment I live in is right now.  And right now isn’t all that bad.  I’m sitting in the sitting room (question:  is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room?  Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine.  I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am.  So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO.  The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society.  It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today.  It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe.  YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good.  YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive?  (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty:  it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good.  I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do.  We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see?  This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!”  No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons:  it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence.  Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there.  Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith.  I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy.  Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right.  There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say.  That’s okay, it’s on me.  I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work.  It’s getting better.  It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me.  There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t.  I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery?  He was dead.

I don’t always do it.  And I’m not always right, either.  I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect.  Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime.  I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God.  And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day.  To win?  All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day.  See?  Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all.  Do I take time for me?  Sure.  But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear?  Not death.  It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once.  On the toilet.  I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up?  Hang on, I’m sure he did.  Elvis ate everything.

Deception: The Media Is Soaking In It

“Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a good start.” – Batman Begins

Thankfully he wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m certain that few had any idea of how the Internet would change the world.  Oh, sure, some did.  In one of the zillion versions of Ender’s Game (or the never ending stream of sequels) Orson Scott Card wrote about the Internet, in the 1980s, I think.  In his version, people could make carefully reasoned arguments and other people would listen to them and be swayed.

Ha!  Instead we have Twitter® with its 280 character limit, and meme warfare.

I actually don’t mind meme warfare being the place where ideas are injected into society, primarily because the Right memes pretty well, and the Left can’t meme at all.

That is, of course, what the Left is worried about.  When the Internet began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s, it was a Wild West.  It was first created, page by page, by people who were passionate about something.  The programming was easy, and the hardest thing was to get noticed, since the search engines and directories were rudimentary.  I used at least three, depending on what I was searching for, because one was good for technical stuff, one was good for “normie” stuff, and the last one, as I recall, wasn’t good for much at all.

On the Internet, you can be whatever you want to be, so why do so many people pick “stupid”?

Then came the Media®.  At first, they didn’t really know how to use it, so they’d just put their written stuff out there, since video would swamp most dial-up connections.  But everyone knew it was going to be big, which is why AOL© merged with Time-Warner™ even though all AOL® presented was just a single way to get to the Internet.

But the problem for the Media™ and .GOV was that the Internet had shattered their ability to carefully script a single narrative.  It had also destroyed their ability to memory hole or gloss over big stories.  Now those passionate people could chronicle entire events that the .GOV would rather you forget, or, better yet, never even know about.  The carefully crafted defamation of everyone who believed in something outside of the Approved Narrative as a Conspiracy Theorist began to crumble.

People say it’s a small world, but I know I certainly wouldn’t want to paint it.  And in that small world where communication had drastically lowered the time for information to come out, and also made it harder for the information to be erased.  The Genie of information, once out of the bottle, couldn’t be put back in.

Does anyone know what an ink blot test is?  I Googled® it, but only found pictures of my parents yelling at me.

The Wild West continued.  Google® had a corporate slogan of Don’t be Evil® and Amazon™ would sell most any book that was it was legal to sell.  And the established Media© and .GOV still had no real understanding of how to control what people see and hear and remember.  The Internet was built to be decentralized, and hard to control.

I think, from what I see so far that the strategy has been to do at least five things:

Throw Lots of Content Out

Oddly, even though the major news sources keep firing journalists, they keep making more stuff.  What kind of stuff?  Clickbait, really.  Stories with little informational content, stories about celebrities, top 10 lists of best/worst/etc. (fill in the blank).  These aren’t news – they’re entertainment.  Heck, one browser I have on my phone has (it looks like) computer-generated compilations of posts from Reddit®.  The idea is to distract.  And if the algorithm is good enough, heck, maybe that person will forget what they were looking for in the first place.

Marginalize and Trivialize

This is one that’s carried on from the past.  If I had written a post about MK-Ultra (where the CIA essentially acted like the worst possible mixture of Jeffrey Dahmer and the DMV) in the 1960s, it would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” at best.  The idea isn’t to contradict, it’s to hit the person making the accusation with personal attacks, and make it sound like they’re a nutcase.  And when the facts come out?  Minimize them – make them sound unimportant, “Oh, that tear gas we used at Waco?  Well it may be flammable, but only in super-high concentrations.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

So, Alex Jones was right again, eh?

Control Discussion

How many people that you interact with are . . . real?

I’ve recently gotten robocalls that are very sophisticated, so much so that they nearly get through the uncanny valley of sounding right.  But what if the sound wasn’t an issue?  In a Twitter® comment it isn’t.  It is known that a significant percentage of Twitter® users are bots – programmed to interact.  Why would anyone go to that level of trouble?  Because they want to sell you something – an ideology, a candidate, or PEZ™.  They’re also useful to make it seem like there’s a consensus.

People are wired as pack animals, and generally want to be a part of the group, to not be left out.  Plus, a group of bots can drown out viewpoints and ideas and bury them in a sea of text.  On a related note, how many conversations are taking place on the Internet that are nothing more than one bot talking to another?

Control Access

Most people come to this website either directly or from other blogs.  The web search traffic I get is amazingly low – most days less than 3% of my traffic.  That’s new.  I used to get more traffic from search engines (20%+) but after July or so of 2020, Google™ shut the valve, and traffic dropped.  Likewise, I know that this site is banned by corporations.  Why?  Maybe my ideas are considered to be . . . dangerous.

A related question is this:  just how many website hits does Google® really have?  I searched for Civil War Weather Report and noted I wasn’t on the first page.  I jumped ahead to page 18.  If you’ll note, on an earlier page, Google© claims that there are 34,800,000 results.  But when you get to page 18, well, there are only 174 results.  I know I’ve written nearly 40 Civil War Weather Reports.  Funny that I didn’t see ‘em all in this list . . .

Note that Amazon®, which for a long time would not ban any legal book, now bans hundreds if not thousands of books merely because Amazon™ disagrees with their ideas.

Just Keep Lying

It seems to work for the FBI, Bill Clinton, and the CIA, so why not expand it to the Media®?  That’s just what they do.  These pictures will help illustrate the problem:

 

So, in the end, it has been established that the Media© wants to control you.  The only remaining question so that we can put the pressure where it needs to be is this:  who controls the Media™?

Unplug Yourself From Things That Drain You. And Kardashians.

Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. – The Matrix

Okay, it’s not great.  The other one was, “What do you get when Keanu Reeves does ‘shrooms?  Neo-sporin.”  See, I saved you from that.

Unplug yourself.

I mean, don’t stop coming here.  That would be silly, because you definitely want to associate yourself with someone who has the amazingly good hygiene and stellar good looks that I do.  I mean, unplug yourself from places that make you mad.

Consciously, most of my posts, while letting you know the unvarnished Truth with a capital T* (*really, as best as I know it), are meant to poke fun at it.  It might make you think about things that you really don’t want to think about.  I understand.  I’m still sorry about that Kardashian meme.

Honestly, dating a Kardashian would be like dating a wookie®.

Well, obviously not that sorry.

Back to the Truth.

Most people that I talk to have an Agent Smith (from The Matrix, not that pesky ATF guy who keeps asking if the stuffed dog I have is filled with Tannerite, because, let’s face it, the only thing that ATF agents love shooting more than kids is dogs) moment.

No, the Agent Smith moment I have with friends goes like this:  I talk about facts.  They nod.  I talk about actual events.  They nod.  Then I bring up a premise that is inescapable:  “So, we agree gravity exists.”  Nod.  “And I’m holding a coffee mug over a 1,000 foot (4.3 Celsius) cliff.”  Nod.  “And if I drop it, it will fall down, and shatter into a million pieces, and it will never be able to be put together again.”

Then Agent Smith takes over the conversation.  “Well, I don’t want to think about that.”  The conversation is over.  There is a step that they cannot take.  It’s like me trying to convince them that a constant diet of candy corn, Twinkies®, fried Snickers® bars, and drinking the fluid from a chocolate fountain that 359 kindergarteners have been putting their booger-soaked fingers into isn’t a good diet.

This is what happens when you follow the USDA food pyramid.

I recall having a conversation several years ago with a guy on the Left.  “Yes, John Wilder, I agree.  Massive immigration is destroying every one of the values in our country.  But strawberries might be more expensive if we didn’t allow them in.”

My response was rather simple, “So, you, a guy on the Left, wants to pay people less so you can have cheaper strawberries?  Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay people more, pay less than 1% of what you make in a month to pay Americans enough to give you strawberries?”

Agent Smith took over his mind.  “Umm, well, I don’t understand those things very well.”

I took him to the ledge, but he refused to look over.

But, hey, he saved $0.35 this week.

That’s the Truth.  And, I assure you, the Truth is your friend.

What is Truth?  Step on a scale.  Look down.  The number is the Truth.  Try to pick up a weight.  If you can, you can.  That is Truth.  The Iron never lies.  The scale never lies.

I was working with a person who noted I had lost some weight.  He asked me, “How can I lose weight?”

My response was simple:  “Weigh yourself.  Every day.  The scale doesn’t lie.”

The look on his face was amazing.  I think he wanted me to tell him, “Believe in aliens, bigfoot (bigfeet?) and the Loch Ness Monster, drink seven shots of Hershey’s® chocolate syrup ever night, and you’ll lose 27 pounds a week.”  When I told him to weigh himself, his face fell.

He didn’t want the Truth.  And I didn’t follow up with, “By the way, I also rarely eat between Saturday night and Friday,” because that would bake the gourd of most people.  They don’t want to know that losing weight sucks, that it requires amazing work and walking into the house at night after work and telling The Mrs., “No dinner for me, I’m fasting.”

I’ve been doing this whole Intermittent Fasting thing.  Bums me out.  I did it at least nine times today.

People want pretty lies.  Yet, the healthiest thing for them is the Truth.  Just before I started writing this, Frequent Commenter Ricky emailed me a story that said that, per FDA guidelines, water could not be labeled as, “healthy”.  So, enjoy all the Gatorade®, Pepsi™, and Coca-Slop© that you want.  It doesn’t have fat in it, so, according to bad science dating back to before I was born, it’s better for you than water.

Nope, the Truth sucks.  People are awful.  Bad guys win – a lot.  People get old.  And then they die.  All of us die.  And, the FDA lies.  But, most of you come here regularly.  Can you handle the Truth?  Yup, you can.  And you seek it.  I think most of you understand that.

But there is a group of people who are trying to demoralize you.  The easiest way to win a battle, per George S. Patton, Jr., is to make the enemy afraid of you.  Yet, they wouldn’t have to do any of this if they had won.

They haven’t won.  They are desperate to win, yet you and I remain, stubborn, like islands in the middle of a hurricane.  We live.  We persist.  And we will win.  That’s what scares them the most.

Why am I so stubborn?  I’m not telling you.

So, when you see something that makes you feel like all is lost, remember, that’s them whispering in your ear.  The want you to think that you can’t win, even though everything that is right, beautiful, and True is on your side.  When you see this sort of demoralization?

Turn it off.

Don’t go back.  Not because you’re afraid of opposing viewpoints, but because you refuse to have your emotions manipulated.  Never, ever, let Agent Smith inside.  Seek the Truth.  It’s there.  Unless it’s a Kardashian that isn’t hairy.

That’s a lie.

Flirtin’ With Disaster, And By Disaster, I Mean Nuclear War

“A four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory, And, on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are Soon to Perish in Shuttle Disaster.” – Airplane II:  The Sequel

Hillary tried to sell her soul to the devil to be elected president, but the devil declined, “Can’t do it, you don’t have any collateral.”

The big story in the news is the hurricane about to hit Florida.  If it were about to hit Detroit or Baltimore, it might add a few billion in value to those cities, but alas, it looks like it might create damage beyond anything ever seen by man – it might muss Tom Brady’s hair.  It also reminded me that I’m hungry, since I accidentally typed “burricane” twice before I got it right – my mind must be on burritos.  Or maybe it’s prophecy – that a hurricane-sized burrito will hit Tampa?

That’s (the hurricane, not the burrito) the story in the news, however, I think the much bigger story is buried.  Or it was buried.

Russia makes most of its money by shipping natural gas, oil, fertilizer, and wheat out to the world.  It imports tracksuits, cell phones, and gold chains.  As I’ve covered before, what Russia imports is silly, but what it exports is crucial.  The cheapest way, by far, to export oil is in the hair of a Russian or Italian.  But they don’t do so well at moving natural gas, so people build big holes called pipelines.

Really, that’s all a pipeline is.  It’s a hole.  As tempting as it is, I’m not going to make a Kamala Harris joke.  And you can bury it like they do most places, you can put it on stilts like they did in Alaska, or you can even have it under the sea.

I hear that part of the ocean is haunted, so Germany might be getting super-natural gas.

As the Europeans have come under more political pressure to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, they’ve moved away from coal.  They’d like to move to entirely renewable energy sources, but last I heard those only exist in sufficient supply to power a technological civilization in the dreams that Greta Thunberg had in the womb as her mother engaged in one too many vodkas while riding rollercoasters on sleeping pills.

No, in 2022 Europe is powered by fossil fuels.  Sure, there are some renewables, and the French built a lot of nuclear power plants.  But the desire for power has increased exponentially to keep up with civilizational growth.  Concentrated energy is also a multiplier, it allows a person or a company or a nation to do far more.  With natural gas, a German factory can build all the Volkswagens® and bratwurst and lederhosen that the world needs.  Without it?  The production is (if they’re lucky) one percent of the powered production.

Time zones are confusing.  It’s September 28 in Europe, September 29 in Australia, and 1953 in Moscow.

Russia was the biggest single supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing 45% of the needs.  Nord Stream© was one such pipeline, and it took the route of going on the seabed from Russia to Germany.  Why?  One reason was that it avoided having to pay Poland, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries that never visit this blog for “transit rights” through those countries.  For example, if Russia wanted to send gas through Ukraine (natural gas, not sarin) then Russia would have to pay Ukraine for the right to do so.

They say they saw Bubbles in the water after the explosion . . .

As such, the Poles and the Ukrainians hated Nord Stream®.  But, it was successful.  And the Germans loved it.  Besides Austrians in the 1930s, what can all Germans agree on?  That they like the Nord Stream© and Nord Stream II ™ projects.  It lowers the price of energy for them, and makes it less likely that they’ll be held hostage by the Poles (hint, the Poles are still a bit miffed at the Germans and the Russians).  The Ukrainians hated it most of all, since it looked like those projects alone would end up costing them over $4 billion dollars a year in transit fees, and it also lowers their political power to hold Russia hostage at the expense of European countries.

And some people have paid dearly for that . . . .

That brings us close to today.  The United States has always opposed any of the Nord Stream projects.  Why?  First, if Europe is divided, the United States has one less group to be concerned with on the world stage.  Almost as bad as a united Europe is Germany and Russia on good terms.  Combine Germany’s economic powerhouse with Russia’s raw materials?  That’s a threat that gives the State Department bad dreams.

Wasn’t she in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?

This probably explains 90% of what went on in Ukraine, and the other 10% involves Hunter.  Could Biden have de-escalated the conflict?  With one phone call, yes.  But it’s going now, and there reaches a point where even I’m concerned – and that’s the crippling (it can be fixed, but how bad is the damage?) of Nord Stream™ I and Nord Stream® II.

My dad can fix it.  He’s got the ultimate set of repair tools.

Why would the United States do that?  Well, the biggest reason (that I can think of) is that it makes it so that Germany can’t back out of the sanctions when winter gets cold and prices start to be amazingly high and there just happens to be this nice, big straw filled with natural gas that they could suck on all day to be warm.

Note:  this is supposed to be a satire account.

How do we know that people knew this was going to happen?  Well, there are reports the CIA told Germany an attack was imminent.  And there’s this little matter of the British pound collapsing right before the incident.  And, there’s the little matter that an explosive was found next to the original Nord Stream© not too long after Russia took Crimea back in 2014.  The detonation wire was cut, so whoever was getting ready to blow up the pipe had changed their mind (cough) Obama (cough).  The fact that this happened even before we know the results of the Russian referendum?

Do you think the Ukrainians would meet this result with Jeb!ulation?

Do I think that Germans will freeze to death?  Probably not many.  They may clear-cut forests, they may shut down industry for February and March, and they might make it against the law to heat your house in any way other than having a chubby girl in corduroy pants rub her thighs together as a space heater.  On an economic scale, Frequent Commenter Ricky noted, it might devastate Germany’s economy even more than 9/11 did ours.

But now they can’t pick up the phone and call Putin and say, “We miss heat.  Er, you.  Please turn it back on.  Here are rubles.”  That option is gone, and that’s why I’m certain that it wasn’t the Russians who did this:  why destroy your best bargaining chip?  And, no, it’s not shoddy Russian construction – the companies that made the pipe and built the line are the best in the world, not Yuri’s Pipeline By Mail Company.

Even the Polish know the score . . .

And I thought it was Joe Biden, not For Bidden.

So the United States did it.  Biden even told us that he was going to do it.  I’m not sure he remembers he did it, but he did.  It’s even on video, and he looks rather lucid (for Biden) during the speech.

The thing that scares me is this:  if I were Russia, I’d take this as a rules expansion pack:  undersea pipelines are now fair game.  And the ones that feed Europe from Norway are mighty vulnerable.  This, more than anything, just ups the level of tension and ensures that what started as a property dispute keeps escalating.  And escalating.  And escalating.

In Minecraft, of course.

And one thing I learned from Tom Clancy movies?

Hmm.  Good advice.  I’ll even add this bit:

Frequent Commenter Ricky also noted that I get to be the first person to make fun of the next stage in escalation toward a nuclear war.  So, I’ve got that going for me.