Category: BFYTW

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

“There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Think you’ve had a great morning?  Every day Joe wakes up and someone gets to explain to him that he’s the president.

Peter Grant over at Bayou Renaissance Man (LINK – if you’re not going there regularly, you’re missing out!) mentioned a quote from Monday’s post (The Winds Of War?):

The idea is simple – warfare encompasses absolutely every facet of the life of the enemy.  Destabilize the government.  Force their economy into chaos.  Starve them.  Own their communications systems.  In other words, it’s just like a Biden presidency.

When I write these posts, there are generally multiple edits.  First, I do a draft.  Then I go through and edit that.  Then I go through and use hammer, tongs, spackle and a welder to fill the post with jokes.  The last bit I do is to go to work in the meme forge and sweat and pound and make (mostly) new and original memes.

If your only tool is a meme, every problem looks like a grumpy cat.

In this case, I wrote the Biden line in the first edit.  I was trying to be a bit cheeky, but it just fit so well.  When Mr. Grant noticed that line . . . I thought about it even more.

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

  • destabilize our currency (not money, currency) through massively printing it,
  • produce and disseminate propaganda to further polarize the citizens,
  • import millions of people with no ties to the country and no understanding of its governmental systems,
  • work through an admitted conspiracy encompassing virtually all media(traditional and social as well as search engines), corporations, state and to make sure the vote produced the “correct” winner,
  • make yet more Marvel movies,
  • effectively purge from the military all senior officers who don’t follow the correct ideology, and
  • create a culture of dependency on government programs,

we would say that was an act of war, or a copy of the secret Disney® business plan.

Sure, Donald Duck can walk around Disneyland© without pants and he’s beloved.  I do it, and I’m “banned for life.”

From an economic standpoint, one goal appears to be:  destroy the middle class and destroy small independent business owners.

Why?

Large businesses can be easily converged into following the Narrative with little actual damage in most cases.  Need examples?

  • Gillette® attacks traditional masculinity. It’s still in business.  It doesn’t want my business, and doesn’t care.  It’s doing fine financially.
  • Coke™ reportedly provided access to training that told employees to “be less white” and its stock is up about 20% since that came out, despite my personal boycott.

That’s two.  There are countless others.  If you look at the major companies that financially support the radical Marxist organization Black Lives Matter©, they are overflowing with cash.  They are free to take whatever political positions they want, as long as those positions are Leftist.  Just ask Ben & Jerry’s®, which is a Leftist political organization masquerading as an ice cream company.  I guess communists have finally fed someone.

I met a French guy – what a coward.  He kept asking for “mercy” . . .

Big Businesses love Big Government.  They love the huge shield that regulations bring – the more regulations, the fewer competitors they face.  And, if you’re lucky like me, OSHA names a new safety regulation after you.

Big Businesses also don’t care what consumers think, because most consumers are mad for a week or a month and then forget.  Me?  I haven’t bought Levi® jeans since 2002 or so when they went full anti-Second Amendment.  I guess I’m stubborn.  Must be in my jeans.

Big Business also doesn’t really care about inflation.  So what if a dollar is worth less?  Their job isn’t to sit on piles of cash, their job is to create cash flowing through the business, while keeping some of the cash for themselves.  Because the cash is flowing through, it doesn’t matter much if that cash is becoming less valuable every day, they’ll just make more cash and use it immediately to buy more raw materials.

Hunter wanted to be the Secretary of Energy until he found out it wasn’t pipes and lines.

Destabilization of the economy through inflation, though, is good if you want to create more government power.  Another way to create more power is to make sure people are polarized.  That means that they can’t come together to demand freedom.

Increasing poverty is a good one, too.  Having people become poor makes them slaves to the government, and afraid to speak up at injustice.  Microsoft® may choose to support Black Lives Matter™, but individuals can be fired for criticizing it on their own time even when not connecting that criticism to their employer.

Is it government suppression of speech?  No, why would they bother when private businesses will do it for them.  The effect, though, is the same.

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

Is it too far to call it warfare against the Right?  It’s more than that – it’s a war against every aspect of American culture and the basis of what made that great – Western Civilization.  The statues are coming down not because the Left hates slavery or “colonialism”, the statues are coming down because they want to erase the history of America so that they can rewrite it to fit.

Looking into what that means to wealth for individuals, let’s extrapolate what we know:

The United States government for over 100 years had gold and silver as money for a very special reason – gold and silver meant stability for the money of a country.  You either have gold or you don’t.  You can’t print more.  Could you manipulate it?  Sure, but it was certainly harder than running a printing press.

When FDR (press S to spit) took from American citizens the right to own gold, he was effectively robbing them.  He bought gold from them at $20.67.  A year later, he revalued the dollar to $35 dollars to the ounce of gold.  It now took $1.69 to buy what a dollar did before Roosevelt’s heist.

“For example, the free circulation of gold coins is unnecessary, leads to hoarding, and tends to a possible weakening of national financial structures in times of emergency,” was what that philandering monster said to excuse the theft.  Me?  After I read that, I was glad he was in a wheelchair.

Fun fact:  he never ran for office.

But the pattern is there:  if the Left wants something you have, they will take it.  Will they confiscate gold in the future?  I don’t know.  I tend to think not, unless it’s just for spite.  In this case, they’ll inflate the currency, and lend freely to Big Businesses and Big Banks so that they can acquire houses and land and every asset with cheap, borrowed dollars.  Why steal the gold when they can make people so impoverished that they sell it?

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

Inflate again if they missed something.  Will they lose control and end up in hyperinflation?

Probably not, unless they want to.  But realize that almost every person reading this doesn’t have a seat at the table, and the game is certainly rigged.  We knew that.

But what happens when a government declares economic war against its own people?

Happy Thanksgiving 2021, Wilder Style

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

Isn’t it odd the only people who tried to tell you how many people it’s appropriate to have for Thanksgiving dinner are the Centers for Disease Control and Jeffery Dahmer?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

I would say that it has always been my favorite holiday, but that’s not really so.  When I was younger, say between toddler and 12, Christmas was.  The reason that Christmas was so important was, well, the stuff.  The movie A Christmas Story says it all.

But as I grew older, Thanksgiving kept growing in importance.  In part, it grew in importance because it didn’t have the gifts.  It had all of the proper things that, in my mind, a good holiday should have:

  • Time away from the cares of the day,
  • Time focused on being grateful,
  • Free from stress, and,
  • Cold.

The stress of Christmas was from the commercial aspects.  Would I get that thing I wanted?  The gifts overshadowed the holiday.  Of course, each year the presents got less and less important, and the time with loved ones became more important.  That’s when Thanksgiving started to win.

This year is the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving.  The first one was held (according to a letter) in 1621.  It wasn’t held at this time of year, rather, sometime near the end of harvest.  The Pilgrims knew that they were going to make it.

April showers, bring . . .

It wasn’t always so clear.  The original deal that they drew up was socialist.  Everybody worked, and everybody shared equally.  That worked as well as it ever has.  Nobody worked, so nobody shared anything, except starvation.  That was 1620.

Starvation is a tough teacher.

The Pilgrims then came to the good and sensible decision that if you grow it, you own it.  The result?

So much food that they wanted to have a party – a party that lasted three days.  And history teaches us that the Pilgrims weren’t teetotalers.  But this harvest festival was sheer joy:  giving thanks for the good sense to give up socialism and allow people individual freedom.  There’s a big lesson here, yet we keep trying to repeat the same evils that impoverish men.

Oh well.

The holiday being a direct repudiation of the philosophy that’s killed more people than any other philosophy, well, that’s not the main reason I love the holiday.  It’s just whipped cream on the pumpkin pie.

It’s so cold this Thanksgiving I saw a socialist with his hands in his own pockets.

The cold plays into why I love the holiday as well.  The work of planting is done.  The work of growing is done.  The work of the harvest is done.  Now is the time to sit, rest, and be thankful.  The harvest was good.  The food will last us through the winter and spring until the next crops can be grown from a renewed Earth.

It’s that stillness, that preparation.  The great woodpile set and prepared against the winter’s cold.  The food stocks set against the winter’s hunger.  Now is a time of peace.

And that resonates through 400 years.

The life of a man, when faced with 400 years, is but an instant.  But the peace of a single Thanksgiving can seem as an eternity.  The moments created when family gathers together to celebrate is nearly magical.  Overcooked turkey or gravy as lumpy as the Hunter Biden’s thighs?  Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

I’m pretty sober, but even prettier when I’m not.

A drunken uncle who wants to need Mom about something that happened when they were six?  Not a problem.  Your team doesn’t win the football game?  Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

Of course, at this point, the question is, to give thanks to who?  Well, in our folks, the dinner will start out with us giving a prayer.  That is, over those 400 years, the most common way the feast was held.

Giving thanks is part of being human, whether you are religious or not.  Being thankful is a way to be healthier.  The mere attitude of being thankful changes the way that people think.  It moves them from a spirit of greed for what they don’t have, to a spirit of gratitude, for what they do have.

French tanks have rearview mirrors, mainly so they can see the battlefield.

Studies have proven that being happy about the things you have is about a zillion percent better for your health than being unhappy about things you don’t have.

Duh.  This is the equivalent of psychology professors stealing money to do a study, because nothing in the history of humanity has been more obvious since, well, ever.  Yet, they studied this.  You could look it up, but, why?

You already know that it’s true.  To quote it again:

We are here to give thanks.  Not complain.  Not be upset about any of the day-to-day things that always go wrong.  Thanks.

I seemed to figure that out a little each year as I grew older. When I was six, it was all about the stuff.  I remember ripping through the wrapping paper like a velociraptor in a room full of Leftists who had been raised on soy since birth.  Some of the bits probably reached orbit.

As I got older, the greed waned, and the importance of Thanksgiving increased.    Last year when I cooked the turkey upside down?  I don’t think anyone but me noticed.  But we were together as a family on the 399th Thanksgiving.  Together, in a house filled with the smells of turkey and pumpkin pie and a family that loves each other.

The most frustrated ghost in the world?  The one that tried to haunt Helen Keller.

The things that I am thankful for are so numerous I couldn’t list them if I kept writing for the next eight hours.  I’d put my list down, but I’m going to (as my textbooks always said) leave this as an exercise for the reader.  It’s not what I’m thankful for, it’s what you are thankful for that will help you.

Even in the deepest depths of difficulties, there is a time and a place to stop.  And give thanks.

Every minute I think about those things I give thanks for, I feel better.  And the crazy thing I’ve learned?  I don’t even need a turkey and mashed potatoes to do it.  But the gravy?  I’m especially thankful for my annual gravy bath.  What would Thanksgiving be without it?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Rittenhouse Has Caused More Tears Than Old Yeller

“Ladies and gentleman, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookie from the planet Kashyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that. That does not make sense.” – South Park

I guess Kyle did have a salt rifle.

The reaction from the Left on the Rittenhouse verdict has been different than I expected – I expected a few riots, sure.  Riots are the standard when dealing with Leftists.  They want the world to burn, so why not start with a Starbucks®?  Or, heck, almost any huge corporate entity.  They seem to love it when Leftists burn down their buildings – they immediately respond by vowing to rebuild and then donating to the very groups that . . .

. . . just burned down their store.

But Kyle Rittenhouse bothered them, deeply.

Don’t recognize his two IMDB® credits.  Probably wouldn’t be a good dinner guest.

I watched, while not the whole trial, a huge chunk of it.  Just after the Prosecution was done, the Defense could have said, “The Defense rests,” and still won.

It was that clear-cut.  I don’t know why it took the jury so long, perhaps they were just waiting around to see if they could get those Panera® sandwiches the judge promised them if they were still deliberating on Friday.

The Left, who has never seen a criminal atrocity so bad that they don’t want the criminal to go free, was fixated on this case.  The media was on board, mainly.  Large numbers of people thought had no real idea of the facts of the case, and some even thought that Rittenhouse had killed multiple black people for no reason other than that they were protesting.

So, what did they have to say?  (Some language not safe for all audiences, and all memes today are as-found on the Internet.)

Umair Haque is a grifter, and a fairly successful grifter.  Does he bring up valid issues?  Certainly, from time to time.  And, if his solution is commies leaving the United States?  I will personally help buy tickets if they promise to never come back.

Ayanna apparently has a keyboard that doesn’t allow her to type a capital “W”.  Also?  She takes her love of Jean-Luc Picard a bit too far.

Does “Prince Jellyfish” describe his arm?

Possibly fake.  But funny.

Take a breath and come up for some Umair, Umair. 

If you had any doubts about who we are dealing with . . .

You can find plenty of salt for yourself on Twitter® or Reddit©.  Might as well bid goodbye to the trial with some memes:

That explains everything!  Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: “What does this have to do with this case?” Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me, I’m a lawyer defending a major record company, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation… does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

Okay, the real testimony was even worse than the South Park® quote above.

Why can’t Gaige point to Kyle?

Oh, yeah, that.  The ol’ Spicey Bicep.

A moment of silence, please.

Huh, yeah, I wonder what would happen if they let clinically insane socialists out on the street?

And the only people that Kyle shot ended up being felons?  What are the odds??

The prosecutor will probably never end up living this one down . . .

And, for of course people could see the next round of trouble coming:

The Mrs. really laughed at this one.

And then The Bee® stings.

Who knows what the future will bring?

Reminder that it might be time for Leftists to change their password . . .

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.

The Mechanics of Control

“Under control? It doesn’t look like it’s under control.” – Chernobyl

Personalities?  Looks like this guy has about 20.  Sadly, all of them smell like him.

[J.W. note – this is the post I had ready to go last Monday.  So, I get to go to bed early tonight!]

When I’m on the treadmill, I find that reading a book helps to move things along and make the time go faster, even though I’m stuck in the same place.  I’m currently reading a very long, and (so far) very entertaining book, and one of the passages caught my eye:

“. . . They had to keep working smoothly, and the same way.  Everything interlocked.  If one unit messed – [my edit, JW] up, then every other unit would suffer.  That couldn’t be allowed.  Which was a paradox, because you couldn’t keep the jackboot stamping down forever.  However benign a dictatorship, some generation down the line will rebel. So somebody, centuries ago, had worked out how to keep the lid screwed down tight.  An old enough idea, never quite managed in practice.  Until now.  A government department that quietly and secretly takes control of society’s lowest strata.  Criminals and radical insurgents actually working for the people whose existence they threaten.”

– Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God

This book was written in the 1990s and is the capstone to a trilogy. This is the first trilogy I’ve read since I finished the fifth book of the Learning to Count Trilogy.

In Hamilton’s book, the Earth is ruled by a shadowy cabal who creates a cult for the lowest rungs of society and uses the cult to distract those dregs from ever being a real threat.  Likewise, the cult is used as an excuse to create threats.  Strangely enough, I think we’re living in that society, today.

Punch anyone drinking Sierra Mist™.  That’s the first rule of Sprite© club.

The idea that Trump was anything more than an interloper that was barely tolerated should have been apparent to most people nearly immediately.  As soon as it became apparent that the FBI was intent on getting him about two weeks after the inauguration, the writing was on the wall.  The fact that no real justice will ever be visited on the agents that conspired together to vilify Trump and “subvert democracy” should tell you enough.

The agencies are not on your side.  Like every other institution in Washington, D.C., the agencies are on the side of themselves and the Left.  Even evil Chuckie Schumer inadvertently told the truth when he told Trump that the intelligence agencies have “six ways from Sunday to get back at you.”

Why?

Preservation and increase of power is one – the Left will do anything for power, and the intelligence agencies are now entirely Leftist.  The attack on Waco had nothing to do with public safety or firearms laws – it was a flashy attack in force at the time of Congressional hearings so that the ATF could get a bigger budget.  They didn’t want to help America.  They just wanted to prove they needed more cash.

How better to prove that?  Knock over some cult-y type guys in Waco and show how tough you are.  That will play well.  It worked.  The Branch Davidians are (mostly) gone, yet the ATF is bigger than ever.

And this strategy normally does work.  The FBI comes up with the idea for, sets up, funds, and provides all the equipment for, say, a plot to kidnap a governor.  Then they get the headline of stopping a dangerous group, all while admitting that the dangerous group wouldn’t have existed without them in the first place.

What does the ATF call dozens of lives ruined for no benefit to society?  A good start.

But I really don’t think the .GOV agencies are afraid of the Right.  If so, they’d be busy trying to take control of the movement.  So far, I see little evidence of that, I mean, besides the alien entity that appears to be Sean Hannity’s hair.

I do, however, see evidence that the Left (which, in 2021, is synonymous with .GOV) is very concerned with managing the violence on the streets of BLM® and Antifa™.  Why?

First, they provide convenient groups to stir up trouble and headlines whenever inconvenient things are happening.  The Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014 occurred in August.  These riots were big news for weeks.  What else was in the news then?  The Congressional committee about Benghazi.  Coincidence?

Maybe.

Distracting from shedding light on a governmental embarrassment?

Certainly.

I have definitive proof of Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Bengh

The same pattern was repeated during 2020 with the outbreak of violence across the country.  Was it organic?  Certainly not.  I recall seeing photos of pallets of bricks dropped off at likely riot locations.  Beyond that, at least some of the rioters were highly trained and very tactically aware.  They were also aided and abetted by District Attorneys that would not charge Leftists for criminal behavior.

Those District Attorneys?  They were voted in on huge rafts of Leftist money, including from Senator Palpatine George Soros.

The goal, in this case, was creating division.  Most of the time, when the country is faced with a crisis, it pulls people together.  I’m sure the polls said something like, “Trump is winning.”  The crowds certainly showed that to be the case, since Biden was just as exciting to the crowds as “split pea soup day” was at the cafeteria when I was in elementary school.

The result?  The powers that be made a video of an overdosed junkie dying while a cop used a restraint technique he was trained to use go viral.

And it did.  It didn’t have to be George Floyd, he was just available and they had good video.  Don’t think that the media doesn’t create stories – it does.  It also suppresses inconvenient ones.

What’s the difference between George Soros and a vampire?  Stumped?  Me, too.  I can’t think of any difference, either.

Second, the groups provide another distraction – a distraction for the group itself.  Let them shut down a chunk of Portland or Seattle.  Let them burn their own neighborhood in Minneapolis.  The idea, I believe, is to keep the group in a state of perpetual rage, most of the time not quite boiling.  Just a simmering rage.

Throw in perpetual articles about “Reparations” and build envy.  Stir with some cilantro and entitlement along with a dash of Social Justice.

This makes the group easy to control.  With Antifa®, their religion is Leftism.   Keeping them under control is easy.  Just give them the candidate they can get behind (Bernie Sanders, for instance), and then don’t let that candidate win.  It keeps them involved, but angry.

True, hardcore, Antifa™ want nothing more or less than the destruction of the United States.  That’s why we get stupid articles about, “When I See the American Flag I Think of Hate.”  It’s food for keeping the hard Left engaged and enraged.

Is it all by design?

It happens too frequently, and too conveniently for anything but coordination.

How better to contain the rebellious than to let them rebel a little, and contain it?

If I had a nickel for every time I got cursed out by a puppet, I’d have two nickels.  Weird that it happened twice, but at least I learned that the best way to fight a puppet is to disarm it.

The alphabet agencies are, in 2021, firmly on the side of the Left.  Likewise, everything points to them being in control of groups that oppose them on the bottom rungs of the social strata, like BLM® and Antifa©.

Me?  I’ll be back on the treadmill.  I have a feeling being in good shape might be important soon.

Manufacturing Consent: Say No

“This is a consent form to stick a wire into your brain. It’s important for hospitals to get these signed for procedures that are completely unnecessary.” – House, M.D.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

The Mrs. and I were both leaders (once upon a time) in that Paramilitary Organization, Boy Scouts of America®.  We were leaders before the lifting on gay membership was removed.

During that time period, we were asked to participate in a (rather) lengthy survey of leaders.  One night over a bottle of wine we started and finished the survey, working together.  There was question after question, and there was scenario after scenario presented, as well as spots for written answers.  In the end, we were firmly against inclusion of LGBTQXYZ children into Scouting™.  We were also against LGBTQXYZ leadership.

And, we really, really thought about it, and tried to see the situation from different perspectives other than our own.  Regardless, in the end, our feeling was shared and simple:  Boy Scouts™ had been doing fine for a hundred years holding the same membership standards, and changing them for 1-2% of the population (that probably wouldn’t join anyway) didn’t make any sense.

One thing that I notice while taking the survey, was that it was quite biased.  In question after question, it presented “edge” cases.  “A boy, having completed everything required for his Eagle® rank, admits he is gay.  Should he become an Eagle™ Scout®?”

Well, how many cases like that would there be?  In reality, nearly zero.  But scenario after scenario was presented, showing gay Scouts in the most flattering light possible in carefully crafted questions that were designed to evoke positive emotions for poor gay kids who just wanted to hike and have fun, darn it.  We didn’t come down against gay Scouts® because we hated gay people.  We came down against gay Scouts™ because it violated a basic principle of the program.

Simple as.

Hmmm, another pattern?

It came out that the national Scouting® decision had already been made before the survey.  The entire survey was just an attempt to change the opinions of leaders and parents.  The purpose of the survey was not to legitimately understand what the adults involved in Scouting® wanted, it was to get them to consent to the preordained change.

The BSA™ was engaged in Manufacturing Consent.  The response from the Left after every retreat from principle by the Boy Scouts©?  “It’s not enough.”  It will never be enough.

Manufacturing Consent is a book by a communist named Edward Herman and the much more famous communist Noam Chomsky.  Their primary idea was that the news media was beholden to special interest groups, and would gang up with capitalists to make sure that True Communism© would never be tried.

Those poor communists couldn’t get an even break!  I mean, Chomsky and Herman had to get by working in coal mines in cushy professorships, while scoring book deal after book deal and getting fawning reviews from an admiring press.  Chomsky and Herman argued that “the man is keeping me down” while, indeed, they were pampered pets continually sucking blood like a parasite from the civilization they were intent on destroying.

That doesn’t mean that they were wrong – the media was quite busy Manufacturing Consent, but the consent they were manufacturing for was Global Leftist State Control, the same people who bribed the Boy Scouts™ into giving up long held positions based on morality in exchange for big bux from corporate sponsors.

We see that today, as well.  News is elevated when it serves the purpose of the Global Leftist State Capitalism.  News is depressed when it doesn’t.  Even news of a sensational nature becomes muted outside of local boundaries when it doesn’t serve the purpose of Global Leftist State Control.

The Mrs. did that.  The Mrs. used to be in radio.  She got to put together the news, sports, and weather for a regional network.  She had fun at the job, but one thing she did that made me laugh was that she wouldn’t cover NBA® scores.  Football?  Sure.  Baseball?  Of course.  But no the NBA™.  When it was winter, she only provided . . . hockey scores.   It wasn’t (particularly) a hockey region, but she didn’t like the NBA™.

So, for her news segments, the NBA© didn’t exist.

The news media does that on a national basis.  Sensational stories are elevated to cover news stories.  There was a missing toddler who apparently lived with wolves during the weekend in Houston and then was found alive and well.  Sure, that’s wonderful, but why on Earth was this a national story on the news?  A local story, sure.

But national?  What story did that take the space of?

It’s not just in news, although certainly you’ve noticed that in “mass shooting” events that the story is very, very quickly covered up if the shooter isn’t a white guy.  It has to be both – the reason is that is the group that the Left wants to disarm.  If there’s a problem with the shooter, the case quickly disappears from the narrative.

Beyond the news, it’s also on social media.  Twitter® and Facebook™ are used on a regular basis to amplify Leftist views.  The recent “whistleblower” to Facebook’s© free speech “problem”?  She was apparently involved in the decision to censor information from Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election.  Her complaint is that Facebook™ doesn’t censor enough viewpoints of the Right.

Bots and/or paid users are used to put up comments that are supportive of whatever narrative is being sold.  Of course, the jab is the big one, and the first one to attract those sorts of shills to this blog.  Again, the concept is to create a situation where any idea opposed to the narrative is ridiculed.

Where do you think the phrase “conspiracy theorist” came from?  It was created in the 1960s to discredit anyone who had a narrative that was counter to the mainstream narrative.  It has become especially apparent in the COVID era, since any opinion counter to the narrative as it is known on that day is ridiculed by politicians on the Left and the full might of the news media.

Likewise, Google™ actively suppresses opinions it doesn’t agree with.  Google™ used to give this blog about ten times the traffic of DuckDuckGo®.  Now?  They’re about the same.  That was about 10% of my traffic, and when it dropped, I noticed it, since it all happened at once.  I’ve since recovered (and then some!) from that suppression.

Additional narrative suppression comes from, surprise, academia.  MIT just canceled a speech by a pro-climate change geophysicist because (drumroll) he was against race-based affirmative action.  Now, he wasn’t going to talk about affirmative action, he was going to talk about climate change, and follow the Leftist line there.  But to allow people who challenged another part of the narrative to talk?

Nope.  To be on the Left, understand you’re all in, or you’re out.  Will that shut up the next academic with politically unpopular views?

This brings us back to the Scouts®.  They had made a choice, and agree or disagree, that was where they were going.  The collapse in membership from around 2.9 million when the decision was made to 760,000 or so today (despite adding kindergarteners and girls) is nothing short of catastrophic.

That, in the end, is the problem with manufacturing consent.  It isn’t real consent, and it ends up destroying the thing it was trying to influence.  The parents and kids voted with their absence – regardless of the attempt to influence them.

The first step in not being manipulated by Manufactured Consent?

Be aware.

Biden’s Big Bluff

“You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em . . . .” – The Gambler

I bought dice, but they didn’t have the 2, 4, or 6 one either one. They are very odd.

This was originally going to be a post on another topic, but events have overtaken it. Again. Instead of getting a sidesplitting romp about a lighthearted subject, you’ll get sidesplitting romp about Biden’s (latest) Big Blunder.

I’ve never been that dedicated of a poker player, though my friends and I played quite a bit when I was in high school. I do recall one game way back then where I won a bayonet (an M8A1 with matching scabbard for you knife nerds) but lost a hand where I wagered a girlfriend.

Oh, and I also won $6.48, mainly in pennies.

I still have the bayonet.

One thing I did notice was that when I was winning, it became easier to bluff. I could bet on junk, but only if I’d won most of my hands up to the point I started bluffing with strong cards.

None of us were experienced poker players, so it was trial and error. I found that the bigger, more confident bet that I had made (after I was winning) the faster my friends would fold their hands, and the fewer bayonets and girlfriends I could win (or lose). But if I wanted to end a hand quickly, a big bet was what I would try to bluff my opponents into folding so I could win the pot.

Never trust a cheetah. They always try to pull a fast one.

Even with that small amount of experience, I can tell you that former vice-president Joseph Robinette (I guess his parents couldn’t afford a real Robin) Biden is bluffing.

And Biden is scared.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was so poorly managed that it would be enough to charge Captain America® with treason. And that’s probably the best thing that happened to Biden in the last month, even though his recollection of the evacuation of Kabul might be dim and confused until they bring the flashcards out.

As bad as it was, Biden managed to make that national shame even worse. How much respect does he get from the American people when he checks his watch every time the coffin of a soldier goes by? Maybe he thinks there’s something on it, since he obviously doesn’t know what “not on my watch” means.

No, things have not been going well for the kid-toucher in chief.

This string of decisions so bad it makes Johnny Depp on a three-day drunk look as lucky as a chipmunk at a peanut convention. It’s bad enough that I imagine most of the senior White House staff are looking for jobs, or in some cases, countries that don’t extradite back to the United States.

I guess El Chapo would be used to high officials.

Through the art of remote viewing and making things up, I have an exact transcript from discussions among some of the members of Biden’s political strategy team last week:

Soulless Political Drone 1 (SPD1): “Okay, we’re down in the polls. What do we do?”

Soulless Political Drone 2 (SPD2): “It’s not so bad.”

SPD1: “No, it really is. Biden is now less popular than,” checks list, “having leprosy . . . on your genitals.”

SPD2: “Well, people kind of like leprosy nowadays. It grows on you. Besides, we know that there’s a floor to the number of people that will support him, though. The voters . . . .”

SPD1: “Voters? You do realize that most of those voters are copier machines we rented at Kinkos®, right? No. He’s lost the suburban soccer moms.”

SPD2: (shocked) “You mean he’s lost the support of the SSM? That’s a disaster! Our focus groups say they used to think of him,” checks focus data, “as category 74-b: ‘befuddled elderly relative that mostly means well but you wouldn’t leave alone with girls between the ages of six and twelve.’ What do the focus groups of Suburban Soccer Moms say now?”

SPD1: “Now they have him as a 93-w: ‘Creepy old man with degenerative brain disease who probably smells like week-old urine.’ Also, that he doesn’t care about Americans stuck in foreign countries and is . . . weak.”

SPD2: “Ouch. SSMs don’t like weak. Remember when all of them were having romantic dreams about Trump and Trump supporters?”

SPD1: “So, what do we do?”

SPD2: “Let’s do what we always do: trot out the kids. Let’s make a big fuss about COVID-19 not being safe for children, blame the unvaccinated.”

SPD1: “We’ve done that already. It’s getting a big yawn. We have to spice it up.”

SPD2: “We could have him do push-ups, maybe beat someone up? Think we could dig up Corn Pop?”

SPD1: “Do you even hear what you’re saying? You sound like Kamala when she’s off the sauce for a day. This is serious.”

SPD2: “Ok, serious face on. Ohhh, we could have a vaccine mandate. We could threaten the jobs of 100,000,000 or so people if they didn’t comply.”

SPD1: “What? How is that remotely Constitutional?”

(Both laugh. And laugh. And laugh.)

SPD1: “Whew. Constitutional. Still funny. But 100,000,000 people? How many of them are Biden voters?”

SPD2: (checks website) “2,113,210.”

SPD1: “Only 2,113,210? Out of 100,000,000?”

SPD2: “Well, after we were done with the counting.”

(Both laugh.)

Okay, that might not have been exactly the conversation, but it was close. Biden’s political advisors see that he’s as weak as vegan housecat. They have to think of something to distract the voting public and bring his poll numbers up.

  • His economic policies appear to consist of burning money to keep his supporters warm while importing future voters as fast as he can. Can’t use those.
  • It’s pretty certain that there are approximately seven people left that want to go bomb foreign countries for a distraction. Sending cruise missiles to blow up people in (spins board) Denmark is out.
  • Can’t get tough on trade with China – they have too much information on where Joe’s bank balance came from.

That leaves . . . the ‘Rona.

Thanks to Biden, a lot of people are going to be back on their feet again, since they can’t afford cars anymore.

I think the idea was to craft policies that appeal to the Suburban Soccer Mom while not impacting the SJW base. So, go after people with jobs and force them to take “the jab.” Suburban Soccer Moms will love it because it will leave little Cody or Colby or Colbee or Codi “safer” because the TV and Facebook® said so. SJWs are all about injectibles, and this has the added bonus of forcing people to do their will, which makes it just that easier to order them onto the trains.

A hospital in Houston fired 150 for not taking “the jab” – and every private business with over 100 employees will be forced to do the same. Yet Biden is exempting 600,000 Post Office employees. Why?

To lose the mail system would hurt his poll numbers.

Looks like everyone knew this was going to be a popular speech.

This is his big bluff. He’s nearly out of chips. All he has is one chance to try to redeem himself.

I guess it makes sense. I mean, nobody is going to accept Jill as collateral.

What to do?

Huh. I’ll see your bluff, and raise you “the loss of consent of the governed.”

Is that sweat?

The Fall Of Freedom In Australia In 16 Memes

“Your planet doesn’t deserve freedom until it learns what it is not to have freedom. It’s a lesson, I say!” – Futurama

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Ben Franklin

Note:  Memes tonight aren’t original.  Normally, Friday is less political.  Tonight?  Not so much.  Events in Australia are moving quickly, so, here it is.

The reaction to COVID-19 by the Australian government has been about as rational and lucid as Joe Biden is in the morning.  Or the afternoon.  Or, well, anytime.

It’s that bad, it’s all of the logic of a sugar-addled toddler with a machete and a police force in a tank running over a disarmed people.

Australia has been the test case for total social control.  You’d think that the independent Aussie spirit would make them resist.

No, not really.  They gave the government ludicrous control.  So, what did the government do?  Jumped the shark.  Or crocodile.  Or whatever other poisonous or deadly animal that Australian Fonzie jumped over.

Yup, that’s right.  The good ol’ government wants to have full access to everything Aussies say and do online.  For safety, of course.  There’s no way that they could abuse that, right?

Oh, wait, once you give them that control, it never stops.  Here’s the next bit:

What does that mean?

This is a scene directly out of Orwell’s guidebook novel 1984.  Forced to have an app.  Forced to prove where you are so the government can track you.  Only 15 minutes to comply, or the police will show up.

I can see the Democrats taking notes in the back . . .

It’s not all bad.  If you spend enough time in your cell, you get privileges:

An hour!!!  So generous.  Perhaps they’ll let them make pruno and give them commissary privileges so they can buy some smokes.  Until they ban smokes.  I’m sure they have a plan if people rebel:

No, a real plan:

Yup, that’s closer.

But you might think that’s bad enough.  It’s not even close.

Yup, things can get worse.  Truckers wanted to protest the outrageous bans, rules, and mask mandate.

What did they do?

The truckers did it.  But if you were an Australian, they tried to make it so you’d never know.  The government shut down the traffic cams so you couldn’t see it.  They shut down the truckers’ phones.  They shut down their social media.  They censored, in real-time, a revolt against the rules.

Well, if you want to know what I really think, I think [THIS CONTENT IS CENSORED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF AUSTRALIA].

Thankfully they haven’t designed concentration camps . . . oh.

My apologies.  These aren’t concentration camps at all.  They’re quarantine camps.  (PM me if you want a larger copy, I have a 1.6MB version.)

As usual, /pol/ has a take on it:

When even a magazine as far Left as The Atlantic says you’ve gone too far, well, you may have gone too far:

Well, that’s bad.  It gets worse.  Even the Canadians are piling on:

Strangely, it’s almost like the world has been here before.  When might that have been?  Hmmm.

But Australians are still free, right?

Efficiency: Not Always Our Friend

“Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.” – Star Trek (TOS)

I’d tell you a German knock-knock joke but they already have AI-enabled sensing that lets them know who it is.

Let’s pretend that you had to break a big rock.  A really big one, say the size of your mother-in-law’s butt.

Okay, that’s a big ask.  The last time I had to break a big rock that big was . . . never.  That’s a big rock.

Big rocks, mothers-in-law?  You’re thinking, have you had too much ale, John Wilder?  Bear with me, this will make as much sense as Joe Biden’s economic policies.

So, we’re back to breaking a stupid rock in our mind because John Wilder asked us to.  What’s the most direct way to do it?

What does a member of the Southern Buddhist Church say when they die?  “What in the reintarnation is going on here?”

You might think you could use a sledgehammer, but not so fast, Thor.  That’s not the most direct way, and Disney® will probably sue me for mentioning Thor because they now have the intellectual property rights on all things Norse.   Ignore Disney®, since they don’t have (yet) a copyright on hammers.  But I don’t want to give them ideas, because soon enough they’ll have a copyright on interstellar space.

To have a steel hammer, you’d have to make one.  That would involve having a mine for iron ore.  Then the ore would have to be processed into steel.  After you figured out how to do that, you’d have to forge the head of the hammer (it has to be strong, right?).

Even then you’re not done.  You have to find a tree, get some wood suitable for a handle, invent an entire industry to just get the knife to carve the handle, and finally mate the handle to the hammer head.

Nope.  A hammer isn’t that direct. To have a hammer, you have to have a functioning civilization.

Thor’s enemies never get drunk:  they just get hammered.

For the most direct way, you’d have to grab a stone or something hard nearby and just start thwacking the rock.

That’s not very efficient.

A hammer is more efficient.  But how about you build a piece of high-strength steel to use as a drill?  That’s faster.  But the drill requires advances in metallurgy even greater than the hammer head.

Okay, what’s the most efficient way to break rock?

How about you blow it up?

Note to the ATF, this is economics, not a suggestion.

That’s a really good way to make a big rock a bunch of tiny rocks, quickly.  But in addition to making your hammer and drill, you have to also create an entire industry dedicated to making explosives.

This points out a lesson from the (dead) Austrian economics dude, Ludwig Von Mises:  the most efficient way to do something is the most indirect.

To break a rock more efficiently, you have to look for increasingly more indirect methods.  That requires time.  It requires effort.  And, it requires resources that might be hundreds of miles (around 7 kilometers) away.

We have a really efficient society.  We can have fresh strawberries delivered to us (cheaply) in January because they grow them in Peru or some other country that rarely visits here.  We can have fresh roses for Valentine’s Day® because we have airplanes that deliver them directly from the cocaine fields.  Or something like that.  I’m not a botanist.

Efficient is better, right?

Well, no.  I’d like to put forward as Wilder’s Exhibit A the human body.  Nobody needs two kidneys, at least that’s what the girl in the motel in Vegas told me before I woke up in the bathtub.  Yet we have (on average) two.  We have two lungs.  Everywhere that having a spare part might make it easier for you to pass along your genetic information, the parts are paired.  I’ll leave the other locations of other paired organs as an exercise for the reader.  I mean, everyone has six toes on their left foot, right?

Wow.  Looks like Chee-toes® instead of actual toes.

Not everything is paired.  We each have (on average) one brain, though I think my ex-wife had six or so brains, one for each personality and species of venomous snake that she would normally impersonate.

But that single brain is armored as well as it could be.  Likewise, physics says that having two hearts works as well as having a man living with two women living under the same roof.  Thankfully, we have a solution that’s the next best thing – death.

Two eyes.  Two ears.  I could go on and on.  It appears that humans are designed based on the philosophy that “two is one, and one is none.”  Huh.

Efficient designs are vulnerable.

From experience, I can say that any business that has any spare capacity will do anything to use that capacity.  Wall Street doesn’t want 90% utilization – Wall Street wants 99%.  They want . . . efficiency.  They don’t want profits for the next decade, they want profits this year.

Just like I have two lungs, I’ll say this again:  Efficient designs are vulnerable.

How many of the semiconductor chips in your life came from Taiwan?

A lot.  Here’s what the Financial Times noted:

“Yes, the industry is incredibly dependent on TSMC, especially as you get to the bleeding edge, and it is quite risky,” says Peter Hanbury, a partner at Bain & Company in San Francisco. “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.”

So, most of the best information and knowledge in making computer chips that define the very essence of your life are built at one factory in a country that the Chinese now know that Joe Biden will defend with all of the force of . . . a strongly worded speech.

The Chinese word for Asia is the same as their word for Taiwan:  China.

It’s efficient.

I can’t help wondering how many of the current shortages of “stuff” that we’re seeing is just China messing with us.  “Hey, if we turn this lever, what happens to the United States?  Oh, man, that was funny.  Did you expect to see used car prices go up?  And those pickles and baking soda?  That was a hoot.”

Outsourcing and internationalizing is efficient.  Having no surplus production stored in warehouses is efficient.  Having no redundant capacity is efficient.

When efficiency works, it means everyone has more stuff.  The factories are working at 100%.  The people are consoooming apps and video games and pantyhose and PEZ®.

Did I mention that efficiency is vulnerable?

What happens when an efficient process gets disrupted?

Shortages.  Price increases.  Business failures.  Revolutions.

Maybe the question that we should ask is what can we do to make life less efficient?

I guess I have stock-home syndrome.

More efficiency means empty warehouses.  Do you have food storage?  Do you have ammo storage?  What happens if you lose the grid for an hour?  A week?  A month?

What happens if you lose the efficiency of modern life for a day?  For a week?  For a month?

What happens if you lose it for the rest of your life?

What happens if you have to live a life that’s less efficient?

I guess there are always more rocks, right?

Remember: Your Mission Isn’t Done

“Santa Maria! Captain, you cannot punish the crew like this. They will mutiny!” – Sealab 2021

The big problem with the French Revolution is that lots of folks lost their heads.

One winter, while hunting elk up on Wilder Mountain, we had, well, an issue.  We were about fifteen or twenty miles in from the nearest pavement, and headed home.

It was overcast.  It was lazily spitting snow, with a breeze that was slowly picking up.  Looking to the west, where there should be a resplendent sunset, the sky was dark, heavy, and pendulous with brooding storm clouds that blotted out even a hint of the winter Sun.

That was when the problem hit.  Pa Wilder, while driving over a “road” that was little more than a common path cut by four-wheel-drive vehicles over the course of decades of hunting and firewood gathering, drove over a small branch that had fallen in the road.  Not a problem, right?

Well, it was a problem.  In this case, the branch had the stem of a broken off limb, sticking straight up.  Pa drove the GMC Jimmy® right over that sharp shard of limb.

In the span of a dozen or so feet, we had lost not one, but two tires.  It penetrated the center of each tire, poking a hole the size of a half-dollar coin in each.

Amazingly, we had lost another tire already that day, already.

Ahhh, I remember this trip.  Those were the Goodyears®.

We now had a four-wheel drive with five tires and three flats.  In winter.  As a blizzard approached and night was setting in.  And all of this was in country where it could easily hit -40°F as night descended.

I bring this up to say that we had a mission.  Our mission at that point in time was to get home.  There were several challenges, and I’m pretty sure if most people were in the backcountry as a blizzard was descending that the last person they would choose would be a 12-year-old boy to be a guy on the team.

Which is sad.

Children can have missions.  Children can face danger.  Children can do important things.  We forget that because we’re in a society that doesn’t give children important things to do, mostly.  Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were as young as 14.

I hear the Russians just canceled their Penguin Army program.  Now all they have left is Navy Seals.

To be clear:  Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were 14.  A midshipman is an officer.  If you were unaware, the Royal Navy wasn’t a social club, and often those boys fought in wars.  As officers.

So we forgot that boys can be given real, substantial responsibility.  But there’s also the chance that we forget something else:  that each of us is on a mission.  And each of us has a role to play.

We currently are in a place where freedom is an increasingly precious and rare commodity.  It’s not just in the United States – Trump may have said, “Make America Great Again” but down under they seem to be following the “Make Australia A Prison Again” plan.  And Canada?

I love our Canadabros that come by regularly (Canada is the second-largest readership here), but Canada seems to be determined to become the Soviet Above the 49th Parallel, led by that Tundra Trotsky, Trudeau.

Pictured in background:  the only two Canadians Justin’s mother didn’t have sex with.

It seems like in this day and age we all have a mission.  Just like 12 isn’t too young, 80 isn’t too old.

Frankly, we need all hands on deck.  The size of the mission is the largest on the North American continent since 1774.  I almost wrote that the idea was to preserve the Constitution and the Republic.  Seriously, I’d love nothing more than to write that.

I’d love for that to happen.  I’d love for us to come together.  I’d settle for the laws to look like they did 90 years ago.  Heck, even 70 years ago.  That would be preferable to today.

A reversion, sadly, is impossible.

Whatever will come from tomorrow will not look like the past.  It may be a shadow.  The Holy Roman Emperors weren’t Roman.  And the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Empire.

And I hear that soon enough he’ll be sending ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire, too.  Can’t you just sniff the leadership?

Or it may be something entirely different.

I think it will be entirely different.

And that’s where you come in.  Yes, you.

You have a mission to create a new nation here.  It won’t look like what we have today – it simply cannot, since we have created a situation that is at the far end of stability, but more on that Wednesday.

I assure you, you play a part.    The initial conditions of what happens are crucial to the final outcome.  If George Washington had wanted to be King?  If Thomas Jefferson had been a Martian Terminator Robot like the one that keeps triggering my motion detector lights at night even though the sheriff won’t believe me?

Things would be entirely different.

And you are important.  Your actions in the next decade are critical to the creation of what will come after.  Do we want a nation that will be based on slavery, control, and that eternal boot stamping on a human face?

I’d vote no.  If you’re a regular here, I’m betting that’s your vote, too.

I think everything he wrote was Orwellian.

If so, let me shout as loudly as I can:  You Are Not Done.  This is Not Over.  What is it that you can do to create a world where freedom beats slavery?  What can you do to create a world where children can run free from the indoctrination of an all-powerful, all-regulating state?

There’s a lot.

Our nation was, thankfully, built on the consent of the governed.  Most things that local government provides, we want.  To quote Python, Monty:

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

To be clear:  the Federal government does very little to make anything in the list above better, and often does a lot to make them worse.  Except for the interstate highways.  Those are actually pretty cool.

But I will tell you – you are the seed of the future of this country.  You are the seed of the future of this continent.

Never cross a Scrabble® player.  They’ll send you threatening letters.

You are the seed of the future of this world.  It doesn’t matter how old you are.  The time is coming, and coming quickly where great injustices will be attempted.  And you are the seed to make what comes after better for humanity.  Would the world rather live in 1950’s America or 1930’s U.S.S.R.?

The choice is stark.

Your mission is clear.  How will you act to make your county, your state, your country one where free men can walk?

It’s up to you.

Back to the mountain.

For me, it was a game.  That’s the advantage of being 12.  Pa Wilder and my older brother (also named John due to a typographical error) and I wheeled the tires so we had two good ones in front.  We locked in the hubs on the four-wheel drive.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive up a mountain path in a car with only two tires in a snowstorm as it got darker every minute.  It doesn’t work very well.  The flat back wheels couldn’t push the Jimmy® up the hill.

That’s where I came in.  It was my job to take the winch cable, run up the hill, and loop the cable up the base of a tree.  Pa would then use the combination of the winch and the two front tires to pull the Jimmy© up.

Tree by tree, cable length by cable length, we worked pretty flawlessly as a team to get the Jimmy™ to the top of the hill.  Thankfully, for the most part it was downhill from there.  Although Pa was driving on the rims, we got it home.

Don’t let the jack slip on your foot when you’re changing a tire.  You might need a toe.

Was there danger?  Certainly, there always is.  We had snow, so we had water.  Ma would have called the Sheriff not too long after dusk, and even though the mountains were a labyrinth of roads, people had seen us.  We also had matches, hatchets, wool blankets, gasoline, and a mountain’s worth of firewood to keep us warm.

But we also had a mission.  Each of us served our purpose, and we got home.

Pa was a bit raw about having to buy two new rims and three new tires for a day’s worth of not seeing any elk, though.  For the record, I never saw a single elk when hunting with Pa.  I’m telling you, that man knew how to hunt.  Finding?  Sometimes I think he just wanted a good drive in the woods and hike with his boys, teaching them about living.  Teaching them about missions, and the part that they play, whether they know it or not.

In this life, we all have a mission, and we all play a part in it.  I can assure you that your part is not done, because you’re above ground, breathing, and reading this.

I hate to repeat something so trite, but in this case, it’s true:  you are not done.  This is not over.  And the whole world depends . . . on you.

It’s up to you.  You will create the future.

So, go do it.