Bad Smells – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Only Thing You Need To Read Today: Wilder’s End Times Book Review: The Face Of The Crisis And The Aftermath

“If that’s the end of time, I got a front row seat with a big tub of buttered popcorn and a greasy half-live chicken leg.” – Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything. I think it was Farmer Geddon.

I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming. Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at

Every elite scrambling for position,
Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:

There Be Dragons Here.

How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin. “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.” Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter: “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.” He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.

Give Turchin his props: he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics. I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.

This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like. Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.

But back to power structures. Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier. I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy. That’s what it is, really.

Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy. It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power. At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”

Honesty.

I love it.

I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts. It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them. We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least. Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.

I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks. That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today. Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas. But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.

End of digression. Back to the book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road? “Am I being detained?”

The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore. Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.

This doesn’t happen gradually. It happens when the University closes. As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant. The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

Who will lead that war? Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry. Why from the Elite? They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly. Examples from our history?

George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.

Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump. I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990. Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.

Astrophysicists started a radical protest group: Black Matter Lives.

From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”. Turchin notes that: “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”

They want to stop the signal. But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned: you can’t stop the signal.

Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns? It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government. This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle: it makes you a more compliant consoooomer. And if they get the 2^nd Amendment, the 1^st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.

This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one. The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.

Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.” Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago. Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased. Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.

I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better. And recovers from his dementia, too.

Who else have they attacked?

Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media. Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”

Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.

Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.

What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?

In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
“The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”

Grim. Really, really grim.

We are at the brink of a civil war. I’ve been saying that for years now. One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming. They left 25 years too soon.

Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard. I can tell you the future in some instances. If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die. It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now. Just as my family saw the European war that would known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.

It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.

I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it. I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine. I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such. Why? Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men, and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.

Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.

It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.” Turchin brings it home. If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.

The Funniest (And Most Enlightening Book Review You’ll Read This Year) End Times by Peter Turchin, Part 1

“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist

I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures. I mean, why knot?

I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin. I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.

Her book was bad. Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.

Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough. This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.” To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can. A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).

The XXX Files are a completely different subject.

His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse: Elite Overproduction. In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are. Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power. Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.

Turchin breaks down political power into four types:

Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this. Think AntiFa® or the “new” Army.
Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.

Where do psychics shop? The Seers® catalog.

In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power. The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else. In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast). In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race. Why? Bored, I guess. Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine. But I repeat myself.

The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs. That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin. Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.

Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.

I once saw a baguette in a cage. I guess it was bread in captivity.

Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.

There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.

So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown. What else leads to problems? Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person. Another term for this is Bidenomics. Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.

To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump. Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable. In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily. The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats. Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.

The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb! To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.

I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”

Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes. Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.

These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so. This is in line with Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb:

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023. American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion. It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce. We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world. Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia. While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.

Me? I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.

I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire. The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. No bucks? No Buck Rodgers.

Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today: America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people. As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.

Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes. What are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?

Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration? It’s perfect to keep wages down.
What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals? Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh. There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.

This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.

That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given. While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump. Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion. Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?

Thus ends the first part of this review. More to come. I’m not sure if it will be one or two more posts, but we’ll get through it.

I’m a trained professional. Unlike paint-chip-eating Barbara F. Walter.

(FYI, when I get this finished I’m posting a link to it at Turchin’s blog. He’s got a better book contract, but I’ve got more readers.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You dropped this.”

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

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

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

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

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

That’s one type of society.

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

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

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

But San Francisco? Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably the biggest reason is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until they didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IQ, Lies, and National Wealth

“Now there’s a fine choice for intelligent offspring.” – Star Trek, TOS

Is it just me, or does Biden’s only expression convey, “Now why did I walk into this room again?”

I once was in a meeting with one of my son’s clubs. One of the kids came over, “You know, John Wilder, I am very smart.” The kid was a junior in high school. “Really, Zeke? That’s great! Are you planning on going to college?”

“Yes, I think I might want to teach history,” Zeke replied.

“Wonderful! How did you do on the ACT?” I asked. The ACT is a test that measures both a student’s preparedness for college as well as the ability of their parents to pay for the test. I’ve heard a rumor that colleges like money.

Zeke told me his score, and I tossed it into the Internet. The nice thing about the Internet is that it has lots of data related to testing and IQ. Pretty quickly, I correlated Zeke’s ACT score with his IQ. This isn’t a perfect correlation, but it’s close enough.

Zeke’s IQ was (within a margin of error) about 85 according to his ACT scores. Is this correlation perfectly accurate? No. But it’s probably close enough and I didn’t think his parents would be happy if I kidnapped him and forced him to take an actual IQ test.

I once got a C on a Roman numeral test.

An IQ of 85 isn’t horrible. It does, however, mean that roughly 275,000,000 people in the United States have a higher IQ than Zeke. It doesn’t make them more moral than Zeke, and it doesn’t make them better people than Zeke, but they do learn more quickly and process information much faster than Zeke. Plenty of people with an IQ of 85 have had happy, productive lives.

But people with higher IQs than Zeke can also learn concepts that Zeke simply cannot. On one website it says that people with an IQ of 85 can . . . “complete any (college) course.”

This is a lie.

No one could honestly tell me that I could sprint as fast as an NFL® receiver. Nor should they, because that would be a lie. No one could honestly tell me that if I worked really hard at it, I could grow two more inches taller.

Do taller people sleep longer in bed?

The fact is that IQ isn’t like knowledge – I can study and learn more, but I can’t increase the overall processing speed I was born with. Just as if I never ran, I’d be slower than if I practiced, I can certainly do plenty of things to degrade that information processing capacity. But just like there’s a physical limit to how fast I can run, there’s a physical limit to how fast I can think and the number of things I can hold in my mind.

That’s the thing that most people miss about IQ – it follows the same bell curve that most human attributes follow – height, speed, strength. If anyone told Zeke he was five inches taller than he was, he would have laughed. But people told him he was smart, and he believed that.

I can understand how that might seem to the compassionate thing to do – to tell someone that they’re smart. The downside of that is simple – if Zeke feels like he’s smart because everyone told him he was just as smart as anyone else, what happens when he doesn’t have the success that other people have?

Will I be successful with my glass coffin business? Remains to be seen.

He becomes resentful. He sees others succeeding because of things he can’t fathom happening around him. What, then, must be the reason that other people are successful? They must have some sort of system that is rigged against Zeke.

If it were just Zeke, it still wouldn’t be okay to have this compassionate “participation-trophy” lie. It has consequences for him.

On a societal level, however, we’re busy sending people off to college that have no real business being there. The result is a large number of people in society today who think that they have all the tools necessary to be exceptionally successful at intellectual pursuits and it’s just not so. This creates a society-wide level of bitterness. It’s especially bad when those college kids with no intellectual prospects get worthless degrees (if it ends in “studies” it’s a worthless degree) and are then saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt.

Why is it hard to fight corruption in the United States? Because he controls the FBI.

And, since intelligence is mostly heritable (as proven again and again), it’s likely that these kids like Zeke have a parent (or, less likely, parents) that are also not as bright. Identical twins have virtually identical IQs, even when growing up separately. Nature matters a lot more than nurture. One statistic I read back in the day was that student performance in verbal IQ was tied to the number of books in the home of the parents. This mattered (again, as I recall) much more than the number of minutes the parents read to their children.

Society has a very, very particular relationship with the concept of the heritability of intelligence so much so that this is a huge hot button issue. Certain incentives in our current system encourage mothers of lesser intelligence to have even more not-so-bright babies. This is, of course, as featured in the documentary movie Idiocracy. Since this idea has such significant implications, not the least of which is the fate of nations: smart nations do better than, um, less bright ones. Here’s the data:

I’ve heard that talking to yourself is a sign of intelligence – at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

The data is from the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, so it dates back to before they year 2000, as far as I can tell. That really shouldn’t matter much, since the relationship is so strong. Smarter countries are richer – a lot richer.

We’re entering a period of time where resources will be far more constrained than at any point in my lifetime. We’re entering a time where we will have no choice but to stop lying to ourselves about IQ and its impact.

And when I die, I do want my ashes put into a participation trophy. I think I’ve urned it.

Bikinis, Garbage Loans, And Fishy Finance

“A 30-year mortgage at Michael’s age essentially means that he’s buying a coffin. Now, if I were buying my coffin, I would get one with thicker walls.” – The Office

Most garbage workers don’t get official training. They pick it up as they go along.

The Big Solution to the Great Recession was printing lots of money. I would have (back then) thought that it would have hit the economy all at once. In reality, what the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury did was send all that money they printed off to the banks.

The banks didn’t lend it. They kept it on the books, and in fact many of them redeposited their free money with the Fed™. In reality, the Fed© was scared about was the entire system locking up. It was pretty bad in 2009 – basic chemicals that were necessary (say, sulfuric acid) for a basic, functioning economy just stopped production.

No one knew who had money, or who would have money. As one friend of mine noted at the time, “When the tide goes out, you finally see who isn’t wearing swimming trunks.”

My office above a bank, my assets over tens of millions of dollars.

The inflation stayed “within target” for the Fed™, flipping up and down around 2% during the decade following. Again, with all of the money printed, I expected it to be more, and I still don’t trust the official government figures on inflation since that would be like trusting a used-car salesman on that gently used 1995 Ford Taurus© with only 350,000 miles on it.

COVID was the final straw, though. People produced less stuff, so there was a lower supply. The government printed a lot more money and then gave it to everyone, who most definitely didn’t save it, and in fact bid prices up on everything. Making nothing and buying everything?

Inflation. Or my ex-wife.

Inflation finally triggered interest rates to go up. That posed a problem for the banks. Let’s take me: I have a small mortgage left on Stately Wilder Manor. I’m in no hurry to pay it off because I can get a CD for 5.5%, but my mortgage is only 4%.

How did Metallica stop people from pirating their music? They started releasing garbage.

My mortgage is worth less to the banks now than I owe on it – if I were another bank, they’d sell it to me for less than I owe. That’s a problem for banks that have exposure to mortgages and didn’t sell them off or hedge them.

It’s not just mortgages – Silicon Valley Bank® decided to invest in lots of long-term bonds and such because inflation had been so low. Buy a corporate bond yielding 4%, pay depositors 1%, and profit!

But when interest rates started heading upward, the same sort of math as with the bank that owns my mortgage applies – what used to be worth $100 is now only worth, say, $80. Oops. When the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the bank, money that wasn’t insured, find out?

Bank funs. Er, bank runs.

And it’s gone . . .

How bad was it? Of the $172 billion deposited at the bank, only 11% was covered by deposit insurance. I imagine that there were quite a few tense billionaires like Oprah worried that she’d have to get a job at the McDonald’s® drive through, and how could she resist those perfectly salty fries?

Since billionaires were in danger, the FDIC immediately said, “Rules? Who needs those. All money is safe in Bartertown!”

My initial expectation is that we’d see more bank failures right around now as interest rates increased and the piles of garbage on the balance sheets of the banks started to rot. Instead? Banks are still (I believe) happily lending money borrowed by the Fed™.

How do they do it? They manage to do it by having the Fed© allow them to mark their assets to what they paid for them, not what they’re worth. So, they’re lying. I’m fairly certain the Fed™ is buying this stuff to get it off the balance sheets of the banks and lending them more money whenever they don’t have enough caviar.

Does the Sturgeon General recommend caviar?

The rot, though, is still there – it’s only a matter of who pays for the rot. Debt always gets paid, the old saying goes, either by the borrower or by the lender. I do know of two local businesses that are going bankrupt. Their debt is what drove the bankruptcy. My guess is that, combined, they have a debt of a million and a half dollars (or so). Who will pay it? In the end, the lender will.

I think that might be at least part of the big jump in debt that the United States owes. As interest rates go up, Uncle Sam is acting like a raccoon and jumping straight into the trash can to eat the garbage loans and bonds that the banks had to throw out because they were stinking up the fridge. Here’s proof:

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Eventually, printing lots and lots of money is like a magic trick the magician does one too many times and everyone sees how it works. Will it work this time?

Unrelated, frequent commenter Ray notes this Give Send Go. I’ll let him explain more. GiveSendGo – Loco Needs Divorce from Prostate: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

Mechanisms of Control: Information

“He who controls information controls the world.” – Babylon 5

I was trying to finish a puzzle. I asked The Mrs., “Can you help me finish this one? It’s supposed to be a bird.” The Mrs.: “Put the Froot Loops back in the box, John.”

Last Wednesday I wanted to write about the mechanisms of financial control. Of course, there’s always more to write – that post was less than 2,000 words, but if I took the time I could probably write another 20,000 or 80,000 words.

It’s the same with this post. Even beyond propaganda, a big part of the game is information control. What information do we get, and where does it come from?

For quite a long time (I haven’t put any effort into going back in time, but it’s been here a while) the control of information has been used to actually create the news that Mainstream Media® uses. Sure, an earthquake is true and fair news. But 90% of the news that we are presented with in any given day isn’t news. Just like “processed cheese spread” or “buttery sauce” don’t contain anything resembling actual cheese or butter, most of the news we have is “manufactured news product” and doesn’t contain much news at all.

Have you heard of Karl’s sister, Onya? She invented the starter pistol.

A perfect example is George Floyd. He was a felon and junkie who died of an overdose. He wasn’t choked. George Floyd died because he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill Ecuador. The “news” created by his death was used and amplified for a purpose. In a normal world, Floyd’s death would have been ignored because “junkie dies of overdose” is another name for “Tuesday”.

Likewise, any sort of violence perpetrated by a white guy against (generally) black people is amplified, often to a national level. But the reverse? It’s suppressed and ignored to the point where black people think (really!) that they are the ones who are the victims, despite the fact that in 2021, 87% of violent crimes between black and whites were committed by blacks on whites.

But if black people watch TV or read the media, they’d be shocked and think that white people were the ones hurting blacks, and not the other way around. Why? The story that they’re selling is that white people are awful, and they’re willing to bend the language on a whim to make it so.

I bet they ADL® really hates pandas. They’re black, white, and Asian.

Racism used to mean that someone felt a race was superior. Now? According to the (rapidly disintegrating) ADL® it’s an explanation of why white people are bad and can never be not-bad no matter what they do.

My thought is that the Floyd death was amplified to put out a trap for Trump. Trump’s media coverage was uniquely and pervasively negative for a president. Remember when it was national news that Trump got an extra scoop of ice cream? Pepperidge Farms® remembers. And I do, too. Anything, and I mean anything Trump did became the big complaint of the media.

The Mainstream Media® always has an agenda. But who feeds them news? The Left. The organizations on the Left are the primary news sources. Like scriptwriters on Disney® movies, they create news stories that meet what they need for their organization’s goals regardless of reality. Also, like scriptwriters, people doing the news don’t really have any need for the Truth if it gets in the way of what they want you to think.

Other things are not very truthful, either. Global Warming® is one of the stories I just can’t escape when I watch the news. But how have they twisted the truth in . . . the weather? Here’s an example:

I enjoyed all four seasons of that weather show on Netflix®.

I’ve seen others. In the span of only ten years, those that want to sell fear to bring viewers have taken the same temperatures and cloaked them in a dangerous red color. Is it hot in summer? Yes! And that’s why the stories about Global Warming Climate Change™ all show up then. And they will every summer, even if it gets colder.

So, news is created by Leftist organizations, which include:

The Media (including entertainment),
Most of the Fortune® 500,
Most Schools,
The ADL®,
The SPLC,
Most Colleges,
Military General Officer Corps,
Most Religions, and
Almost Every Government Agency.

These organizations pump out press releases daily which feed the news cycle. Who fact checks them? Why, a compliant media! Snopes® is run by Leftists, and expecting the Washington Post® to correctly fact check Joe Biden? You’d have better luck pulling out your teeth and leaving them under your pillow for the ADL® to bring you a shiny new quarter.

I’m a racist. I just hate the 440-yard dash. Too long for a sprint, too short for distance. And turning it into the 400 meters didn’t help.

This news is then pumped into the heads of Leftists, nonstop. Places like Google® and Facebook™ and YouTube© where alternative viewpoints aren’t allowed. Think that the Vaxx® was a big mistake? YouTube™ is still censoring that one.

Leftists, for the most part, I’m not concerned with. If they ever stumble upon these posts, they won’t be able to read them. They may be smelly virgins without a hope of ever having babies, but they’re not illiterate. If I say the sky is blue, they’ll immediately ask for a source because the Right to them is worse than Satan.

When no one laughed at Neil Armstrong’s Moon landing jokes, he’d just say, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

They don’t want to think, in fact can’t think, about some of the concepts that I write about here because their amygdala will stop them from listening. Literally, a Leftist can’t read one of my typical posts without getting so angry that they can’t read it.

No, I write for the Right, and I write for the middle. The Right is self-explanatory, since I’m on the Right. The Middle have been the people the Left is targeting. I’m sure that they believe that they can convince the Middle if they deprive them of any other viewpoint.

The Left is excellent at that. They want to tighten down Twitter, er, X®, Facebook™, Instasnap©, MySpace©, and any other place that the Right can disagree with the Leftist narrative. Wonder why the newspapers eliminated the comments sections? The Right was (and is!) amazing at getting points out that countered the information goals of the Left.

Quite simply, from their standpoint, that had to be stopped.

AOC had to write an essay in college about genocides. Took her a long time to decide if she was for or against them.

Again, remember that the “news” you get from the Mainstream Media™ is simply not news, but a product, like “buttery spread”. It isn’t news. Have some fun with it – count the number of stories in a day that you come across, and see how the Left is trying to manipulate you.

When you see it, you’re free to make your own opinions. And free to wake others up.

Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet

If someone commits first degree murder in Canada, is that 34 degrees in non-metric murder?

The posts have been pretty heavy recently, so I thought I’d do a changeup before we dig back into the heavy stuff next week. I’ll start with a bit about John McAfee:

John McAfee was being interviewed by Wired magazine back in 2013 (LINK). In the middle of the interview, McAfee pulls out a revolver and dumps the ammo. “This is a bullet, see?”

The interviewer responded: “Let’s put the gun back.”

McAfee puts a single bullet back in the revolver and spins the cylinder, which holds only five bullets. From the article:

Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession.

There are only five chambers. “Reholster the gun,” I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”

To be fair, a good stage magician could do this, so I have to doubt it since I wasn’t there. And McAfee? While he was a “presidential candidate” he Tweeted® out about the really important issues of the day:

Really.

This is probably number one in my category of “answers to questions no one really ever asked” file. But, yeah, John McAfee actually Tweeted© that.

The closest argument is that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, John McAfee really does die a lot in alternate realities, like all those Mario® corpses I accidently killed by walking into turtles in Super Mario Brothers™.

What’s the Many Worlds interpretation? Simply this, that whenever a clerk asks “paper or plastic” the answer is “yes”. When there’s a decision or a probability that something happens, all the things happen. The catch, though, is that the Universe branches at this point, and those decisions and probabilities themselves bring new universes into being.

I won’t go into the details, since you can read if you’re interested and you’d be bored if you’re not, and I’ll bet the incredibly intelligent Frequent Commentors will engage in a lively debate as to the relative crackpot level of Many Worlds. For this post, let’s just call it a convenient way to create a nearly infinite number of parallel universes right next door, but (probably) disconnected from our reality.

I put in the probably because for a long time I’ve thought that the Many Worlds interpretation might explain the Mandela Effect pretty well.

I actually ran into the Mandela Effect before it existed during a conversation with The Mrs. one evening. We were watching a TV’s Funniest Game Shows on Fox® when we were newly married. Richard Dawson was narrating. I have written about this once before, but this is a (slightly) different take.

Me: “What? Richard Dawson is dead. He died in 1989 of lung cancer. I remember reading it in the paper one morning.” In fact, I remember it specifically as in January or February of that year.

The Mrs.: “Yup, I remember the same thing.”

I used the pull-start on my Briggs & Stratton two-stroke Pentium® computer and dialed into the Internet and, after the modem made those squeaky-fuzzy sounds found . . . Dawson was alive. This was despite The Mrs. and I having had exactly, down to the month, the same memory of his death, from the same time and cause.

I wonder if parking would be difficult in a parallel universe?

It’s not called the Richard Dawson effect, it’s called the Mandela effect because a group of people were convinced that South African leader communist Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, versus his actual death in 2013, and this surfaced around 2010.

One of the biggest examples of this that people share is something simple – the Fruit of the Loom® label. I had a memory of this logo looking as a variety of fruit sitting in front of a fruit cornucopia. I even asked (while The Mrs. was cooking dinner a few years ago) for The Mrs. to describe the logo.

The Mrs.: “An apple, and some grapes, maybe another fruit, all sitting in front of a cornucopia.”

Me: “Which side is the cornucopia on?”

The Mrs.: “The right side.”

I showed her the picture below of the logo with the cornucopia.

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

Except the Fruit of the Loom™ people say they’ve never had a logo with a cornucopia. They say they’ve never had a cornucopia in their logo, though they been asked about it plenty. But it’s not just me. The painter of the album cover for the 1973 album Flute of the Loom had some thoughts about the logo:

And the way I remembered it on my t-shirts and underwear? This logo looks exactly like it, though I’m nearly certain it’s a fake:

The only other really big one for me is the character of Jaws from the James Bond movie Moonraker. I’m not old enough to have seen it in theaters, so, like every male since forever, I was watching it on TV the night it premiered for the first time on network TV.

Back then, every guy at school had seen Moonraker the night before. And the one scene that made us all laugh? When the great, hulking character Jaws had been rescued by a tiny little blonde girl named Dolly. Jaws smiles at Dolly, exposing his metal-filled mouth. And the funny, payoff scene is when Dolly smiles back, and exposes a mouth filled with braces. Love at first sight, and hilarious. You can see it in the clip below:

This is exactly how I remember it. Exactly. And exactly what the guys were talking about at school. And, like the t-shirt above, it’s almost certainly a fake, too.

When I discussed the scene with The Mrs., despite never watching Moonraker together, she remembered the braces as well. In her words, “Without the braces, the scene just doesn’t make sense.”

But when I checked the streaming version of the movie, well, no braces on Dolly.

No, I can’t. And the memories are interesting because they’re so very specific. It’s almost like there’s something else at play. Back to the Wired article on John McAfee:

To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. ” Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head.

Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have proven faulty. I’m missing something.

. . . I’m not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside and pulls the trigger. A gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”

He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It’s still warm.

If John McAfee really is dead, you damn well better believe it’s consensual.

Après Trump, qui? (Plus? A Picture of a Stripper)

“Hey, is that Donald Trump’s car?” – American Psycho

Biden likes all-mail voting, Trump prefers all-male voting.

The battle of the Left against Trump continues, as it will for every day of his life. There isn’t really an end to how much he’s rustled the collective jimmies of the Left. It’s especially fun to watch it play out in the Twitter™ X® feeds of Leftist celebrities like John Cusack, Ron Perlman, Steven King or Rob Reiner.

It’s actually amazing to watch the chemicals soak their brain as their amygdala gets hijacked by someone not even in the room (great example here: LINK). And I’m glad that I’ve never been in a small room on a hot day with Cusack, Perlman, King and Reiner – imagine the smell.

Why is that? Trump is a focus. If you go back in time, the Left was similarly fixated on Bush I, Bush II, and Reek, er Mittens Romney. As noted by the commentor El B on last Wednesday’s post Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com),

I imagine the next article will be titled, “There’s no good reason you should have to be alive to vote” so at last Pa Wilder can vote Democrat.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a promiscuous habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, where the quote above originates. It was written as if from a demon to his nephew, showing how Evil might best subvert society. In 2023, I think it could simply be a text from Soros to his kid. Lewis absolutely nails this concept, and does it in a simple, cogent, readable paragraph. Sadly for humanity, Leftists live this way, and thrive on it.

All of the hate of the Left has a concrete and local focus, and all of their compassion is spread in such a diffuse manner that it becomes meaningless. This is why these monsters pretend that handouts from the government (from money coerced from actually productive people) to those who meet some nearly arbitrary criteria is the same as actual charity.

I just donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see the money.

But back to Trump. After he first said “Build the Wall®” the Left went into overdrive with hate towards Trump, pulling out all of the stops. “Europeans won’t think nice things about us!” they said. My response to that one is actually very, very simple, “So what? My ancestors left there for a reason and we have better steak here and don’t have to share a continent with the French.”

Trump’s presidency wasn’t a failure, but it was close, and it showed off his biggest weaknesses: the chose people based on how much the complimented him, and not based on either actual competence or actual loyalty. His personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was a prime example. He hired a corrupt caricature of a sleezy lawyer to do business for him, and was shocked when the guy actually turned out to be sleezy.

Who knew???

Trump didn’t build the wall, didn’t stand up to Congress, and blinked when he had the chance to cross the Rubicon and stand for actual election integrity since, yeah, we know that the Left stole the election, and the receipts to back that statement up are starting to pile up. He did add some okay Supreme Court justices, but I think he should have added the Zodiac Killer, Ted Cruz.

I’m telling you, it would have sucked to have been killed just because I’m a Sagittarius.

Had Trump said, “I’m staying here, not because I demand the power, but I will stay here until a President can be rightfully elected to replace me. I declare that elections will take place in November 2021. I will not be a candidate, and will in no way serve past January 20, 2022 regardless of the circumstances. This is necessary to ensure that the legitimacy of the Presidency of the United States remains unsullied.” Oh, sure, he’d have said, “I, your greatest President, will stay in office because you deserve a system that is excellent in a way only I can give you.”

Then, he could have done that, and retired a hero to the middle and the Right and it would have been talked about for 500 years. The Left would have grumbled, and might have lost their demon and the coming inevitable crisis might (stress, might) have been pushed down the road a decade or more.

After Caesar crossed the Rubicon, I believe his first words were, “Can someone get me some dry socks?”

One thing Trump did was completely transform the face of politics. Just as the Left didn’t vote for Biden, instead voting against Trump, Trump unmasked the utter weakness and complicity of the Republican politicians (not the Right) in creating the landscape we have today. It was especially instructive watching Trump eviscerate ¡JEB! ¡JEB! had been the consensus candidate for the establishment, but Trump sucked all the air (and ¡JEB!’s soul, it looked like) out the room.

This was also inevitable. The system has stopped serving the interests of the heritage American middle class for decades. Vox Day put it very well the other day when he noted that the Republican debate featured two Indians arguing about who could give more money to Israel.

I think there are a lot of people who would vote GOP for $20. Heck, vote twice and you can afford a Big Mac®

Will Trump survive the trials? I think not. The original charges are (mainly, as far as I can tell – IANAL) to be farcical. Trump’s later attempts at covering crap up? Not so much. There are legitimate charges that could bring him down if Trump did really try to have records or videos erased.

Regardless, the RINOs are doing everything they can to hide the only candidate that they have that has national impact, the only candidate who is leading in the battleground states, the only candidate who stands a chance against the corrupt vote harvesting system set up by the Left.

Then what? Après moi, le deluge (After me, the flood) is attributed to Louis XV, and is said to foreshadow the French Revolution. Since we need more rain here, I’ll adapt the phrase for our current problem:

Après Trump, qui? (After Trump, who?)

The only person on the Right who can even come close to Trump in charisma and poise is Tucker Carlson. Tucker seems to have as much charisma, but can also add in an intelligence and poise lacking in Trump. Could he manage being President? I have no idea, but when compared with the rest of the candidates on the Right, he leaves them all in the dust.

Longer term who will emerge as a leader? Some corporal that fought in Afghanistan and is fed up?

We’ll see. The current crop of mainstream politicians on the Right and Left make ¡JEB!’s charisma vacuum look like Robert Downy, Jr. Most of their policies are, at best, simple replays of politics that are 20 years into the past, with less of a likelihood of solving our problems than using a 4-year-olds fingerpainting to design a passenger jet, though that might be exactly what Boeing® does nowadays.

I’ll vote for Trump in November 2024 if he’s not in the slammer, obviously. It amuses me to watch the Leftists get in a froth-ridden frenzy against Trump. It’s almost like Leftists don’t believe Biden won the election.

Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All

“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz

Whoops, sorry! Just a regular old death cult after all.

This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week. This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.

What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post. I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me. I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left. It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.

The graph is shown as a bullseye. Why? I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway. They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.

I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim. They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it. Who put the electrodes up the fish butts? Grad students.

The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:

All of your immediate family.
All of your extended family.
All of your closest friends.
All of your friends (including distant).
All of your acquaintances.
All people you have ever met.
All people in your country.
All people on your continent.
All people on all continents (apparently, screw those guys on islands, they suck anyway).
All mammals (finally got the people on the islands and astronauts covered).
All amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds.
All animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae.
All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.
All things in existence.

So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you? For me, this is an easy answer. I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.

Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?

In general, I like the people that are close to me more. Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people. I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®. Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:

Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.

Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics. What about the Left?

Why did they pick 45°?

Whoa, that’s amazingly different! Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them. The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated. They like these things best:

All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.

Rocks are more important to them than their parents. And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why. They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them. You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death. “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!” Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status. “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”

I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?

To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning. But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.

I’m not kidding. I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans. Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.

To be clear, I love the environment. I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees. The reason I love them is simple: they exist to by enjoyed by Man. If Man doesn’t exist? None of these mean anything to me. There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now. Because we want to make cows happy? No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust. To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man. But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.

The Moon? Just rock without people. And Soviet Russian ships that landed. A crash is a landing, right?

Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country. Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits? Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends. Why? We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.

When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?

Thought so.

People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government. I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest. For today, let’s focus on government.

The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.

Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?

The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control. And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people). And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy. They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin. Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains: they hate humanity.

Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer. None of these policies have humans in mind.

Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck. I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do. That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy. I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.

Hmmm.

Mussolini was lucky. On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.

Other examples of this are things like nuclear power. The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner. How can we drag them back down? Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.

The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy. Is an energy crisis coming? It certainly is. Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people? Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.

To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.

Is Leftism a death cult?

Not if you’re a rock. Otherwise, yeah.