A Modest Proposal Concerning Haiti

“Don’t worry. It’s good luck. In Haiti.” – Caddyshack

Two cannibals were eating Amy Schumer. One asked the other, “Does anything taste funny to you?” The other cannibal answered: “No.”

Haiti is in trouble. Again. This is not a repeat from (spins wheel) . . . nearly every year in Haiti’s history. If you look back, more Haitian leaders have been killed and eaten (hopefully in that order) than there are grains of sand in a beach.

Okay. That may be an exaggeration, since I made up the statistic. But it’s clear that Haiti is awful. The best part of Haiti is not even close to being as good as the worst part of the United States. I believe it was Michael Yon who described Haitians as “Cannibals Without Borders” which is a phrase I really hate for the sole reason that I didn’t come up with that one on my own.

Dangit.

Look how they’ve kept their plate clean.

Haitians have a history that would make Pol Pot jealous. From the beginning, it was born in blood and slavery, and then managed, somehow, to get worse. I want to make a stand, right here and now, and say that the number of Haitians that should be let into the country is zero.

To be clear, I don’t want most anyone allowed in anymore, but I decided to pick on Haiti because it’s the latest foreign hellhole that will soon be sending in droves of awful people trying to escape the very problems that they created by moving to Nebraska or some place so they can bring the wonders of Voodoo (yes, they still do that) and cannibalism (yes, they still do that) and rape (yes, it’s the national sport) to the Cornhusker state.

As I said, this isn’t entirely a Haitian thing, though they’ve managed the impossible: they make communist Cuba communist Venezuela, and all of the Mad Max® movies look like paradise in comparison to Tuesday in Haiti.

This is what roadside assistance looks like in Haiti.

No, the biggest reason I don’t want Haitians to come to the United States is because I really feel empathy for the Haitians and wouldn’t want to expose them to the horrors of our country. First, it’s a philosophical question: The GloboLeftElite tells me that all cultures are equal. So, if all cultures are equal, I think that depriving Haiti of their best and brightest is selfish. They should stay home and keep their totally equal culture going.

I mean, why shouldn’t they give cannibalism a chance?

Point Two: I’ve been reliably informed that the culture of the United States is filled with systemic racism. Why would we want to bring more People of Color into a situation where they would face that? Why would they want to come here? I realize that Point One says that all cultures are equal, but it’s been pointed out that the culture of the United States is bad, so we cannot in good conscience let anyone else in.

Ever. We’re that bad. We need to keep everyone else from living here.

Why does the expression on Jerry Nadler’s face always say, “Oh, my, that wasn’t a fart.”?

Point Three: I’ve been reliably informed that the United States, while having no culture of its own, steals the culture of various people across the world. Imagine the horror! White teenagers are making tacos, TACOS!, at the local Taco Bell® thus stealing the sacred food that only Hispanics can make and despite the GloboLeftElite© being in favor of diversity.

An aside: I came up with a climate-friendly way to stop the illegal alien problem while fighting Climate Change™ by turning all the illegal aliens into food to stop them from entering the most carbon dioxide creating economy on the planet and killing us all. Sadly, this would be (I am reliably informed by the GloboLeftistElite) cultural appropriation from Haitians. Perhaps we should ship all of the illegal aliens to Haiti to allow them to be consumed, thus feeding Haitians and slowing Global Warming®?

Point Four: The Haitians might feel bad because there are still statues left standing of amazing Americans and Europeans that have achieved things that Haitians didn’t, like killing but not eating lots of Japanese or going to the Moon and not killing or eating anyone up there. We really want to spare their feelings.

How dare the Japanese deny Haitian culture!

Point Five: The vast majority of Black Studies programs in the United States wouldn’t be good for Haitians because they do not, in fact, deal much with black people, but rather with how evil white people (and now those sneaky Asians) have been bad to black people. Since the vast majority of Haitian History (since 1800 or so) has been more-or-less white people free, these college courses would just confuse them.

Point Six: Many Haitians actively say that they hate white people. Good Heavens! The United States is literally filled with white people! I think we should take them (and every other illegal alien that hates white people) and help them by sending them to a country without white people, like Wakanda or the upper part of the Amazon drainage basin.

Point Seven: The United States is one of the most slave-free countries in the world today. In all of the countries of North and South America, Haiti is number two in terms of per capita modern slavery. Why would we want to impose our anti-slavery cultural imperialism on the absolutely equal (according to the GloboLeftElite) slavery practices of Haitians?

In summary, we need to keep Haitians out of the United States because we don’t want to expose them to the toxic United States culture (which also does not exist) which would infect their totally-not-awful-and-not-at-all-a-hellhole-culture-which-is-totally-equivalent-to-the-United-States-except-it’s-better-because-the-Haitians-aren’t-imperialist-colonizers.

Could be worse. Could be raining.

In summary, Haiti is only in trouble because we have tried to help it in the past. We could help by keeping the Haitians in there by sinking their boats and not sending them food except for airdropping them the illegal aliens who are currently suffering oppression and racism by being in the United States.

See? Hard problems have simple Wilder solutions.

27 Thoughts for Friday

“I thought so.  You remember our business partner Marsellus Wallace, don’t you Brett?” – Pulp Fiction

I got a CAPTCHA that asked me to select pictures of tractors and farm equipment.  That’s really not my field.

I’ve trotted out lists of thoughts from time to time.  The lists change based on (hopefully) me getting more wisdom over time.  Anyway, here’s this year’s list:

  1. Be on time. Seriously, it’s simple.  People notice, and people care.  It’s a basic principle of respect for someone not to waste their time waiting for me.
  2. Never be a little late to work or a little early to leave. Especially on a regular basis.  Being late an hour once every quarter is much better than being late a minute each day for sixty work days.  An hour looks like something happened.  A minute looks like I don’t care.
  3. Little changes at the start make big difference in the result. I’ve seen many people start their careers and become experts at the subject of their first assignment.  Many of them made a lot of money by knowing a whole lot about a little.

Who knew Cathy was Haitian?

  1. Choosing not to decide is a choice. I love reminding people that “doing nothing” is always an option.  But it is a choice.  And it has just as many consequences as “doing something”.
  2. For me, opportunities always showed up when I needed them, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. Thankfully in my case the opportunities weren’t subtle.
  3. After college, in a high achieving profession, it becomes rarer and rarer to be the smartest guy in the room, and someone in the room is often an expert at something in which I’m a novice. True humility allows a good leader to understand the capabilities they need, and not have to be “right” all the time.
  4. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. It seems that no one ever snaps over the house being on fire on the day the insurance payment was late – it’s that the trash wasn’t taken out on time and we have to hang on to it for another week.

What does Soylent Green® taste like?  It varies from person to person.

  1. People understand $10,000 more than they understand $10,000,000. The difference between $10,000 and $11,000 means more to most people than the difference between $10 million and $10 billion.  Most people can’t understand more than seven magnitudes of anything.
  2. Outcome is less important than process. When working on life, I try to not care about what the outcome will be.  I go in, make the best choices I can, and do the best work that I can.  If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I try to adjust to be better next time.
  3. Outcome is still important. Dead is dead, so sometimes the outcome is final.
  4. The last outcome is always final. How many refunds?
  5. No refunds.

My chute didn’t open once when I was skydiving.  I didn’t panic.  I figured I had the rest of my life to figure it out.

  1. Nothing breeds success like success, and nothing breeds failure like failure. I’ve been on streaks where I literally could not lose.  I’ve been on streaks where I couldn’t win.
  2. Corollary to 13: I’m never as bad or as good as my failures or successes.  The streaks where I couldn’t win set me up with the habits I needed to win.
  3. Beating myself up is a loser’s game.
  4. Most people don’t think about me very much and will have a hard time remembering my name after five years. As much as I like to think I’m the center of my story (and I am) I’m only a minor player in the stories of most other people.
  5. Corollary to 16: Except where I’m their personal villain.  Then I live on forever and will definitely have someone who will want to be at my funeral, if nothing more than to make sure I’m dead.

What was the name of that Mexican villain in the Bible?  Poncho Pilate?

  1. Protect the relationships with the people that genuinely do care about me in a positive way so maybe the sad people at my funeral will outnumber the happy ones.
  2. Listen to people, really listen. They tell me amazing things if I just listen.  One time I was interviewing a guy and he mentioned committing a felony at a previous job.  Yeah, I kept a straight face.  No, he didn’t get the job.
  3. If someone says I’m wrong, I need to have the humility to embrace that and see if they’re right. Especially when my first impulse is to try to defend myself.  Even if I’m not wrong, I at least understand why they thought I was wrong.
  4. When I’m wrong, admit it and apologize. It’s amazing how admitting error makes other think I’m more trustworthy.  And apologies?  Why not apologize, have some sort of problem with that?

Okay, he didn’t say that.  But he’s the first person I thought of.

  1. Being good at several things is enough for success, if they’re the right several things. Being an expert at useless things might be fun, but mostly nothin’ times nothin’ is, hmmm, carry the nothin’ . . . nothin’.
  2. If I spend my life waiting for the next thing, I’ll spend my entire life waiting and not living. The journey is the point, and rushing through it just gets me to my grave faster.
  3. Past behaviors are almost always the key to predicting future behaviors. Leopards, spots, etc.  When I listen to a person’s story, I realize that often they’re also telling me their future.
  4. Success is based on the last thing I did, not the next. People pay to keep me around because they think I might be able to do it again.

Orphans are often very successful at business – someone told them “Go big or go home” so they didn’t have much choice.

  1. Could I have done better?   Could I have done worse?  Yes.  I did how I did.  Success is based on how I change what I’m going to do to be better.
  2. Power and money are not the same thing. Just ask the rich guys after Robespierre or Lenin took over.

Okay, that’s 3³ thoughts for Friday.  See you on Monday!

Gamer Gate 2.0 Update: Disproportionate Response Edition

“Well, that escalated quickly.” – Anchorman

I’ve been stuck in Ancient Rome all this week.  All of the roads seem to have this one weird design flaw.

All visual content today is as-found, except the bits that I might add a comment to.

This will be a post with exceptions:  normally I like to post “second day” type material, where we’ve had a chance to get through the event and reflect back on what really happened.  On Monday, I posted about the history of Gamer Gate 1.0, and what I thought just might be the start of Gamer Gate 2.0.  Here’s a link if these posts ever get separated (LINK).

I have another post, nearly completely done, that I was going to run today.   Completely different subject.

Then fresh info on Gamer Gate 2.0 hit, and I thought it was important to show just how fast this story is moving, and how critical it is.  The older stuff can wait, and I’ll have an easier week next week polishing it and it will probably even be a better post.  I do promise that, pending significant developments, this won’t be a regular feature.

The hallmark of Gamer Gate 1.0 was that gamers just wanted to play games, and after they saw the journalistic community (allegedly) SIMP out (look it up) for a talentless narcissist, they complained.  The response was coordinated and disproportionate – it’s like you say, “I don’t like this package of McDonald’s® Chicken McNuggets™ and they say . . . “You can never come to any McDonald’s© again for the rest of your life.”

It was weird.  So, Gamer Gate 2.0 started with something simple:  “We’re watching woke Marxists injecting The Narrative into our video games and we don’t like it.”  Simple enough, and in 2024 not particularly controversial.  The response?  “Biden Admin Zeroes In On Gamers In Push To Crush ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’”.

Because Gamers are easer to catch than the unending hordes of illegal aliens that were let into the country.

Gamer Gate 1.0 very, very strange way to treat the people that are your core audience.

Gamer Gate 2.0 is using the full power of the FBI, DHS, and probably NSA to crush people who just want to play video games without a bunch of woke crap.

I know many readers aren’t into gaming, computer or otherwise.  This is not at all about video games.  It is about the attempt to use hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to create a fully functional propaganda system to fundamentally alter the values of the nation.

This is a big deal.

In this case, the journalists that hate the majority of people in this country are still awful.

And it’s wonderful that they tell you, right out loud, that they are Satanists.

Doesn’t that make it a Satantree?

But they’re only part of the problem.  Dr. Rachel Kowert, who, on her website indicates that she is:

. . . currently working on a two-year project funded by the Department of Homeland Security (in collaboration with with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and Logically AI) examining the landscape of extremist radicalization and recruitment within digital gaming spaces. This project aims to establish a baseline of understanding for the unique characteristics of extremist activities within video game communities, build capacity within the gaming industry to prevent and counter violent extremism in these spaces, and create collaborative networks across public and private sectors.

I left the “with with” in there.  Yeah, I know I have typos on here, but it’s a bad look Dr. Kowert (and she also talks about her “cahnnell”, which I assume means “channel”.  I guess if you have a Ph.D., you’re not allowed to use spellcheck.

Regardless, this is the point:  the DHS, rather than finding the millions of illegals crossing the border, is instead putting as much money into Rachel’s fat cheeks so she can bury them with her nuts for winter.

Here’s her Tweet on 3/11:

As Anon notes, her response was because ONE GUY made a LIST of games that Sweet Baby®, Inc. might have collaborated on.  ONE GUY.  ONE LIST.

Dr. Kowert apparently locked down her X account.  Huh.

And this is what puts the Kow in Dr. Kowert.

But one thing the GloboLeftElite doesn’t complain about is when they get the game they want.  Since they’re not horribly creative, they end up making games that . . . well, you be the judge:

Gee . . . sounds fun.

And here are the stakes.  Wonder why the full weight of the DHS comes down on ONE GUY making ONE LIST?

It’s because of this.

Gamer Gate 2.0: Woke On Patrol

“Mortal Kombat on Sega Genesis is the best video game ever.” – Billy Madison

Also like a gamer, he spent 73 years living off his mother before he got a job.

I predict this will be the most censored post I ever write, even including the one where I told Joe where he could stick his F-16s.

As I touched on in my last post, there is a process that makes people feel good – have a goal, work, and achieve.  It was important when my great, great, great grandpa Grug was hunting mammoth on the frozen steppes, and is important today.  Since there are few mammoths to hunt, lots of young men get their surrogate achievement from playing video games.

Games are important to them.

That’s why Gamer Gate was a big deal, and Gamer Gate 2.0 might turn out to be bigger.  Many of you might not be familiar with it, so I’ll give a too brief synopsis that skips over a lot of details, because you’re bright and can research more if you want to.

Zoë Quinn.  It starts with Zoë.

Literally who?

I think she was 27 going on 50 in this picture.

Original Picture By Ian Linkletter – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81658314

Zoë was a lame GloboLefty girl with stupid hair color who moved to Canada, built a crappy GloboLeft video game called Depression Quest, her lame GloboLefty ex-boyfriend wrote a long blog post.

Really?  A long blog post about your ex?  Regardless, in the post, people walked away with the idea that Zoë had slept with almost half a dozen journalists to get good reviews for her crappy game.  For this story, it’s not particularly important whether or not she did sleep with them or not.

The important thing to come out of this was that a bunch of gamers got together to complain about the corruption within the gaming journalism community.  It could have ended there because gaming journalists aren’t serious, and were gaming journalists in 2010s because they couldn’t get better jobs.

That would have ended it.  But no, the gaming journalists tried to cover it up and silence the whole thing, calling the gamers (you know, the audience that reads their crap and buys the games) sexist with dozens of articles all at once with the same theme.  The Narrative fought back, and, sadly Anita Sarkeesian got semi-famous.

Maybe someone could pay for a tattoo of fake kids over her barren womb.  Someone get that woman a wine and cat I.V.  Stat!

It kept growing, and growing, and growing.  Oddly, that was the time The Fappening (leaking of all of the nekkid celebrity women’s iPhone® pictures) happened and lots of nudes of celebrities were leaked, starting at 4Chan to discredit 4Chan.

But what became clear was in 2014, there was a narrative, The Narrative that had to be protected.  And why gaming, and why gamers?

Remember the 1995 movie GoldenEye?  It was an okay Bond™ movie?  It cost $60 million to make, but made $356 million worldwide.  A tidy profit.  The 1997 video game GoldenEye 007 grossed over $250 million.  Not quite as much as the movie, but it also racked up hours and hours and hours of play by, mainly, guys.

In other words, Gamers.

Yup, you have no idea how deep it goes.  Snowden might . . .

What a propaganda tool!  Hours and hours of time and attention of people.  Having it the market dominated by (gasp!) young white men was simply not acceptable.  Why think of all the wrongthink they demanded?  Attractive women!  Strong men!  Violence solving problems!  Bond had to be changed to the less-manly Daniel Craig, and video games had to be changed to serve The Narrative.

But the Gamers still existed.  It was required to change the message, to show via the combined might of the gaming journalist press that Gamers were dead.  Boys need not apply to the future – the future was about putting a chick in it, and making her lame and gay.

Well, Kathleen Kennedy didn’t ruin games, but she ruined Star Wars®.  Lame and gay.

So, places like the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) funded by the GloboLeft and manned by the fire-breathing GloboLeftistElite came for the games.  Their job was to create “scholarly” papers regarding video games.  I’d write more about the connections of DiGRA, including supposed links to DARPA funding, but, oddly, much of that material is now 404’d.  Now, this stuff is nine years old, but I get videos on YouTube™ from fifteen years ago, so the removal had intent.

Remember when the mask started to come off at Hollywood, Twitter®, Wikipedia™, Amazon™ and YouTube©?  When the transnonsense became sacrament?  Why are there raging GloboLeftElite censors trying to shut down people merely questioning The Narrative?

It was GamerGate, the leaderless resistance to the GloboLeft that started it all.  One summary I read said, “A girl slept (allegedly) with some journalists for good reviews, a lot of stuff happened, and then Donald Trump was elected president.”  As I’ve said, there’s a LOT more there if you want to dig into this subject.  I won’t even mention PizzaGate.  Oh, too late:

But that was then.  Now, in 2024, GamerGate2.0 has started.

What this time?

Sweet Baby© Inc. is a “narrative development and consultation studio . . . .”  The idea is that they go into a company that actually makes games and tell them what story they should tell, and how they should stick a chick in it, and make her lame and gay.  In one of their triumphs, they kill off male characters (think Batman™ in the most cringe way possible just so strong, triumphant women can have the story.

Yeah.  That didn’t go over well with the core audience that buys the games.  Think about Left Behind 2 – where the popular male hero of the first Left Behind was reframed to be an evil white man, and the new hero was a trans sack of potatoes.

That’s what Sweet Baby® Inc. does, but I don’t think they were behind Left Behind 2, which shows you how deep the crapfest is.  Well, why would anyone hire a corrosive crapfest of woke to make their games more awful?  Here’s the idea in the CEO’s (Kim Belair) own words:

If you’re a creative working in AAA, which I did for many, many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups. And if they don’t see the value in what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want.

And, just in time for journalists to show their true spots haven’t changed since 2014 . . .

These are the journalists we’re dealing with.  Nice that they at least tell you to your face how they hate you.

The best news though is that someone is pushing back.  On Steam®, a service where you can buy and talk about games, a gamer has put together a simple list:  Sweet Baby Detected, which showcases games Sweet Baby has helped ruin.  That’s okay with Kim, she’s gotten rich making the people who buy her games angry while helping companies lose money.  As /pol/ notes, she’s probably a Marxist, so for her, it’s a two-fer.

I’m skipping out on fuzzing the f-bomb.  I agree with Anon on Marxists.

Sweet Baby isn’t alone.  There are hordes of these cancerous “companies” out there, with their sole intent to make stuff worse.

Is there any surprise that the Zoomer males think Pinochet did nothing wrong?

 

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?  Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy.  It was a disaster.  No one would accept the program.  Entire crops were lost.  Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.  But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.  The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.  Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off.  I walked through the room naked.  (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart.  He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects.  One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical.  I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements.  The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal.  (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.)  The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand.  You can read it in Ted’s work.  Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski:  it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy.  People like the struggle.  I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe.  Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days.  Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder:  “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe:  “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge.  Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame.  But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks?  A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key.  And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy.  Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him.  Imagine fighting a kitten.  I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems.  At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized.  Eventually he may become clinically depressed.  History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.  This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power.  But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power.  This shows that power is not enough.  One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals:  they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there.  All the time.  They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them.  Maybe winning an Oscar™.  If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders:  they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this:  the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier.  Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival.  Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again:  the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers.  They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God.  They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me.  Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo.  Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good.  I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone.  We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears.  That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live.  So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not).  One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out.  But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself.  You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House.  The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so.  Men need quests.  Society needs quests.  We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning.  And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry:  it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock.  Grug grab other rock, smash rock.  Rock eventually breaks.  Grug happy.

Another example:  Grug want break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine.  Grug create coal mine.  Grug find tree.  Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer.  Grug smash rock.  Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example:  Grug want to break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur.  Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite.  Grug break rock real fast.  Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot.  The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient.  It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time.  And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well?  A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method.  And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet.  Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine.  Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once.  It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman?  More like Grugman.

Yes.  Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas.  What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea.  Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck.  And they were always digging.  I think they might be part mole.  Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly:  couldn’t buy gas.  At all.  Even with cash.  Credit card usage?  Nope.  And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber.  But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet.  In Alaska.  In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely.  Information used to be hard to move.  Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places.  It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear.  Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China.  Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain.  But books burn.  The ephemeral website?  It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon.  Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today.  I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice.  Why would they?  Their methods, their lives are the most direct.  They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus.  It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike.  The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it.  Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon.  He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why?  There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done.  He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz.  Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct.  How fragile?  Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom.  I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: It’s All Planned

“Did everything go as planned?” – Pulp Fiction

I had some chips at midnight on Saturday.  It was a snackrifice.

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

Volume V, Issue 10

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

I’m keeping the clock at two minutes to midnight, probably will roll back next month.

In this issue:  Front Matter – All Of This Is Planned – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Border In Five Memes – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 810 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

All Of This Is Planned

When I look at the road we’re on to Civil War 2.0, it has not gone unnoticed that the enemy creating this isn’t outside the United States.  As much as the GloboLeft likes to call out Russia, others see things perhaps a little more clearly.

Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador.  What has he done for them?  He’s broken the back of organized crime, by this one crazy tactic:  arresting criminals and putting them in jail and getting gender ideology “contrary to nature, contrary to God” out of El Salvador’s schools.  He has a 90% approval rating from El Salvadorans, so of course the GloboLeft hates him.

What is the response of the GloboLeft?  Isn’t it obvious?  First is the rotting the minds of youth.  The map above should be clear enough – it’s a symptom of a plan coming together.

Although this is from Canada, it’s very, very clear that the agenda is simple:  they want the kids.  It has long been the GloboLeft’s desire to use propaganda to get children at their most vulnerable and split them from their parents.

Things like this idea are created to humiliate people.  None of that can make a “more green” planet since the energy used in the process more than offsets any “benefits”.  No, this is humiliation and dehumanization.

Canada, again, has show the goal.  They want to stop making any new roads outside of cities.  Live in a rural area?  No roads for you.  And, last I checked, Canada has a lot more rural availability than most nations outside of Russia.

Now they’re even giving TED® talks about how literally any sort of degeneracy is a sacrament.

And the lawfare is continual.  The New York  Soros GloboLeft Attorney General, Letitia James, is on a a tear.  Donald Trump is just the most prominent of her use of the law to destroy people.  Another target besides the new one listed above?  VDARE.  VDARE is a fairly prominent anti-immigration website that Ms. James has hit with amazingly broad subpoenas and is costing them tens of thousands of dollars – even though they aren’t in New York.  You can read more about that here (LINK).

She’s also gone against the NRA, suing them.  The important question:  why would anyone want to do business in New York?

So, Nayib Bukele is right.  It’s all being taken apart from the inside.

Violence and Censorship Update

Several readers have reported to me (via email) that they were unsubscribed or that their subscriptions are filtered out as spam.  FYI.  Might it be random?  Sure.  It might.

I’ll (mostly) let the memes speak for themselves.  Foreign stories are included as they often foreshadow attempts in the United States.

I guess this one involves both censorship and violence?

This one is especially fun:  Canada has a bill that punishes hate crimes, which can be reported anonymously, and that do not require evidence with huge fines and up to life imprisonment.

Crabs reading?  Forbidden knowledge.

People reading?  That’s racist!

Looks like the plan is working.

I thought they loved science?

If only they could be sent home to Make Eritrea Great Again.

Yeah, that’s the history of the top Google® executive in charge of A.I.

Looks like the New York Times censors . . . food.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  Why?  The GloboLeft are economic geniuses, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is flat.  Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down.

Economic:

Economic numbers did a slight dive.  I wonder if this is the new American Dream?

Illegal Aliens:

Highest January.  Ever.

Also, other people are noticing:

The Border, In Five Memes

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762833481682264080

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762297111381455043

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762568451581681721

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762225168645059071

https://twitter.com/i/status/1610431809334149120

https://twitter.com/i/status/1763481437372567971

https://twitter.com/i/status/1761129463218139238

https://twitter.com/i/status/17636130393229273

https://twitter.com/i/status/1760862306005590149

Good Guys

https://youtube.com/shorts/tQGuha2gpQw?si=kjoLNVF2y0qd7wdE

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1759109053630800211

https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-worker-fired-shoplifters-retail-theft-fight-problems-2024-2

https://www.wtoc.com/2023/07/24/woman-gets-job-back-lowes-after-being-attacked-while-trying-stop-shoplifting/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article285835356.html

One Guy

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2024/02/28/louisiana-expands-gun-rights-for-self-defense-against-criminals-with-concealed-carry-bill/72765215007/

https://www.wowt.com/2024/02/09/nebraska-legislators-consider-bill-alter-self-defense-laws/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2894180/arizonas-commonsense-self-defense-bill/

https://www.oxygen.com/kill-or-be-killed/crime-news/how-to-watch-kill-or-be-killed-an-oxygen-true-crime-series

Body Count

https://twitter.com/MakisMD/status/1754830517986566210

https://thehighwire.com/editorial/why-are-young-adults-having-more-heart-attacks-the-level-of-denial-is-stunning/

https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boys-who-were-killed-by-police/item/5

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-02-13_11-38-28.png

https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PRRI-Jan-2024-Gen-Z-Draft.pdf

https://twitter.com/noble_x_x_/status/1758149565251784710

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-81749d7c-d0a0-48d0-bb11-eaab6f1e6556

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1757461240421449806

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759305508584882680

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/nevada-identifies-voter-history-errors-on-website-fixes-underway-3003358/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/11/data-specialist-presses-georgia-look-voters-cast-ballots-wrong-jurisdictions/

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/exclusive-see-the-grave-markers-of-long-dead-residents-listed-on-michigans-voter-rolls/

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/elon-musk-is-right-and-the-ny-times-is-wrong-about-illegal-voting-by-non-citizens

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2023-review

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-24-2020-Election-Analysis-vWeb_Final.pdf

Civil War

https://uproxx.com/movies/civil-war-alex-garland-details-february-2024-update/

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/cpac-donald-trump-voters-warn-355149

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-is-spoiling-for-a-civil-war/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kristi-noem-war-texas-border-standoff-1234960568/

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-disinformation-campaign-civil-war-texas-border/

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/comes-thermidor/

Kardashians And The Cult Of Growth

“A future of economic growth, freedom, and happiness.” – Robocop

I had a hen who wanted to study economics.  She was something of a mathemachicken.

“The economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023.”

And my response:  so what?

There is a Cult of Growth in the world.  In the United States, at least, that growth was literally in the DNA of the young country – there was lots of space and it was only filled with some pesky Indians who didn’t have a lot of resistance to smallpox or lead, some buffalo, no zoning, and lots of empty land to build Blockbuster Video® stores.

So, off my ancestors went.  The idea was simple – fill the country from sea to sea with farms and businesses, eventually mines and mills and railroads and factories and highways.  No one really planned it, and there weren’t economists reporting on unemployment figures to Rutherford B. Hayes.

What does the “B” stand for?  Babebandit.

The growth that the United States experienced was amazing, and it was real.  People built those farms and businesses and mines and railroads and factories and highways.  That sort of growth allowed the creation of amazing wealth and prosperity because it was enduring and built upon itself.  In those decades of growth, the United States experienced not diminishing returns but increasing returns as the steel mills fed the oil boom which fed the creation of the automotive industry and interstates.

Add in a few thousand nuclear weapons, and this growth of actual productivity and wealth production allowed the country to achieve tremendous national prosperity during a time of relative safety.  Some would maintain that this prosperity peaked in 1973, but when you look at the relative availability of exceedingly cheap “stuff” – it was probably later than that.  Perhaps a good case could be made for the 1980s when Blockbuster Videos™ roamed the land like a great majestic beast, spewing properly rewound videotapes and Raisinets® to all.

Regardless of when that exact date is, it is likely past.

Your momma is so old she rewinds Netflix® videos before logging off.

What was once achievable on a single income now requires (in many cases) two incomes.  People of the past always thought that new labor-saving devices would accrue benefits to the worker, and we’d see a two- or three-day work week.  Instead, we see people working more hours for less (relative) pay.

Why is that?  I mean, the economy grew, right?

Yes, it did.  But the way the economy grew, fueled by illegal aliens contributed to lower wages.  The argument could be made that that the economic activity, the growth from these added workers helped everyone.  Well, no.  Illegals are certainly a net negative when everything is accounted for – welfare, roads, schools, medical care, voting GloboLeft, and Kardashian body hair.

I think she’s got so much plastic in her that if she swims it’s technically littering.

And the “growth” that we saw in many cases was the productive bit of the economy being hollowed out and shipped off overseas.  Why?  Because regulation increased in the United States (it never goes down) and it was easier to start and run a factory in Malasia than it is in Maine.  And if iMegaCorp® can ship the factory over and increase corporate profits by 2%, they’ll do it.

Why?  They’re owned by the people who make bad growth.

What’s bad growth?  Well, the financial sector.  It should be set up not as a casino or a place where the businesses make money selling money.

Growth is not always good.  And it’s not always desirable.  Let’s take an example:  if I decided I wanted to gain a pound of weight next week, the healthy way to do it would be to put on a pound of muscle through exercise.  But the easy way to put on a pound would be to pound some beers and milk shakes.

I believe her pronouns are HerShey.

The United States could do the same – we could increase the size of the economy by producing more and better cars or computers or flat panel displays, or bulldozers.  Or, we could increase the size of the economy by ChaseCitiFargo™ charging extra fees on overdrafts and GoldmanBlackRock© buying a company, loading it up with debt that it can’t pay, and then selling it piecemeal for a 15% profit.

One of these makes a more productive society.  The other is the equivalent of two people selling a house back and forth for 10% more each time and talking about all the wealth that they created.

So, not all growth is good, and not all increased profit is increased wealth.  One economy can make stuff, the other just makes magical made-up profits.  I’ve made the argument for some time that China’s economy is fine.  It is.  They know how to make stuff, so they are fundamentally more stable than the United States because the growth in China wasn’t in financial shenanigans, it was in productive stuff.

Did you know it’s illegal to water your plants in China?  It causes the microphones to rust.

Does China have all sorts of debt?  Yes, yes they do.  Have they produced a lot of suspect crap in the past, especially for internal consumption?  Yes, yes they have, and probably still do.  Doesn’t matter.

Their economy isn’t based on “growth” that occurs only on paper, and only due to paper even though people smoke in China to get fresh air.

They don’t worship the Cult of Growth.

Do I want to live there?  Nope.

Again, there’s good news – this system can’t last, so it won’t.

The ride, however may be bumpy . . . as we get to rebuild it – on healthy growth this time.

Feminism: The God That Destroys

“Bullhorns are a core principle of eco-feminism.” – Futurama

Why are the books on Dwarf Rights on the top shelf?

The GloboLeftist use of power can be objectively observed to be feminine.  To put it bluntly, GloboLeftism is feminism.  One way this is especially apparent is the tactics that the GloboLeft uses – it uses the tactics of gossip, the swarm, and ostracization of those that it deems unworthy.

If you look carefully at how the GloboLeft attacks, it follows that pattern.  Gossip against an enemy, a swarm against that enemy, and finally the ostracization of that enemy.  With men, the way to solve a problem is simple – get up, get a hammer (or other appropriate tool, like a much bigger hammer) and solve the problem.  Or fail.

If necessary, and the problem is big enough, get a friend.  If that’s not enough, go build better tools and recruit more friends.  Or a brigade.  Or tanks.  Or an army.  Or take this newfangled flight and build jet engines to fight at the speed of sound and play with the fundamental forces of nature to create a miniature star to cause your problems to evaporate.

Simple.  Okay, not simple sometimes.  But it is direct.  This is how men historically kept other men (and other tribes) in line, just various sizes of hammers.

I hope that joke didn’t catch anyone by surprise – I don’t want to be convicted of involuntary man’s laughter.

Women, however, use the gossip/swarm/ostracize technique naturally to keep the group members of other women in line.  I’ve seen it.  When women are together in a group and they split away from the main group, they begin the gossip to keep other members in line or to pull them down.

When a big enough transgression occurs, they swarm against the offender.  Then they kick them out of the group.  In smaller tribal groups this behavior was probably entirely necessary to keep the peace.  Many of the historical tribal punishments were directed not at adulterous men, but adulterous women.

Why?  Men have the key, and women have to have the lock otherwise the fighting and killing start.  Also of note, is that in every point in history up until the modern society, women depended on men for their power – so women had to rule over women to keep the worst female impulses down.

What do you call a letter from a feminist?  Hate male.

Back in the day, the worst case for a woman was to be shunned and shamed and denied resources.  Being denied resources meant (in many cases) death for the woman, and her children if she had them.  This is the core feminine fear, and is the basis for society today.

This was why, of all the crazy things developed by the commies, that feminism was the worst, because it preys upon a core fear.  The result is that feminists have done everything that they can possibly figure out to remove any consequences for their action as feminism took hold.  Examples?

  • Abortion made the defining hallmark of real femininity, having kids, an option.
  • No-fault divorce was next – having an affair no longer meant that a woman was liable in court for her actions – now divorce could happen just because she was tired. But that wasn’t enough – women needed cash and prizes for leaving the marriage:
  • Community property and child support followed. That was fine for high-status females.  But what about poor females?
  • Well, for them we need welfare and Aid For Dependent Children so they can have as much irresponsible and unprotected sex as they like.
  • I’m generally not in favor of slugging women, but domestic violence laws have made men guilty until proven innocent, with many jurisdictions requiring an arrest if the police are called out for domestic violence. But even that isn’t enough:
  • Making fun of Lizzo because she’s the size of a school bus is now “fat-shaming”. And making fun of a woman who had sex with all of Wyoming is now wrong and called “slut-shaming”.

All of these are intended to insulate a woman from the consequences of her actions and choices.  No society on Earth can afford this for long, because the consequences of insulation of consequences are what we see around us.

  • Rampant criminality because removing consequences should apply to everyone, up until they commit murder.
  • Declining birthrate as women avoid having children and having families until they’re at the point that having more than one or two for them is impossible.
  • Lower than optimal family formation is happening because women are skipping the family to become the drunk wine aunt that makes PowerPoints® for a living but can’t get a “good” man to commit.
  • Lower than optimal family stability, since there are no consequences, women can monkey branch from one man to another and this be accepted.
  • Sentimentality as a basis for public policy rather than rationality – i.e., illegals are viewed as individuals in pain rather than a contagion that will turn the Untied (it was a typo that I thought I’d leave) States into the average of Venezuela, Eritrea, Cambodia, and the Congo.
  • Degeneration as all consequences for anything sexual are removed as sex becomes the new sacrament for the feminist religion – note that in any argument with a member of the GloboLeft® they’ll soon drop a sexual insult.

Name something that goes better together than “Wilder” and “procrastination”.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Oddly, feminism does the opposite of what it says on the label – it either turns women into cut-rate men, making them unhappy tramps who “settled” but still thinks she deserves a Chad because she slept with fifty Chads.  Conversely, it deprives them of family, making them unhappy drunk wine aunts by having them chase a career so they could be complete women that don’t need no man.  In fact, keeping women unhappy is better for the GloboLeftElite because it keeps women dependent on feminist ideology and makes them defend it all the more.

Go figure.

What African country do neckbeards hate the most?  Chad.

The reason this all was available was because we have amazingly abundant resources and could pay for it out of the spare change that we had from printing money.

The good news is that this can’t last.

To be clear:  I really like women.  And I know that women are different than men.  I know that this might be heresy at places like Harvard™, but it’s true.  Women add to society, but when they’re in unmitigated charge of society, it just creates a big mess like the one we’re seeing now.  The future needs women, acting like women, in families, making children that are worthy of being called men and women, which can only be made by the atom of society – the family.

The future won’t be the feminism of the GloboLeft – it’s a cancer.  And the methods that it uses gossip/swarm/ostracize aren’t ways of solving the problems that we have right now as the resources of the eternal summer end – that’s when the only real solution is the solution of men – get a tool and fix it.  The only real question is what form that solution will take.

Will it take a miniature star to fix it?

What did fatman say to little boy?  “Nuke, I am your father.”

Be Bold. Life Is Too Short For Anything Else.

“That’s a bold statement.” – Pulp Fiction

A lion would never drive drunk.  But a tiger would.

One of the problems with life in Modern Mayberry is that it often moves at a fairly slow pace.  Especially in the time when an adult is focused on raising kids, the days tend to blur one into the next.

If your life is good, this isn’t really a problem.  When I was younger, my life was spent going to weddings.  Now that I’m older, more time is spent going to funerals.  It is important to not get mixed up as to which you’re at, although sometimes “My condolences,” is appropriate at a wedding and I’d almost be willing to bet $20 that at least one person will say “Congratulations!” after my funeral.

However, in the event that I’m wrong, collecting on that bet might be a problem.

Maybe I’ll add bikini girls.  Will that put the “fun” in funeral?

One thing that facilitates this blur is reading stuff on the Internet.  One blogger I read (LINK) is giving up doomscrolling (or reading the unending list of negative stories that are available in the news) for Lent.  I suppose you could leave him a comment, but you’d have to wait a few weeks to get a response.

But when it comes to doomscrolling, there are huge numbers of these stories available.  The business model is simple:  scary stuff attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs means revenue.  As I look at my own past posts, I’m thinking that, even though I talk about a lot of scary stuff, that I’m mostly relentlessly positive.  I can even recall a comment section or two where I’m called a Pollyanna because I’m so positive.

What do we want?  Hearing aids.  When do we want them?  Hearing aids.

I can live with that.  Being positive, being for things and knowing that, in the end it’s all going to work out keeps me positive.  In most cases (most, not all!) the things I write about don’t make me angry, either.

Again, stress on the “mostly”.  And I try not to get worked up about events occurring half-a-world away that I can’t control or even much influence.  Things are what they are.

And, for most of us, things are generally pretty good on a day-to-day basis, even when things aren’t perfect.  Even on a bad day, most parts of the day are good.  The thing that gets us is built into the doomscrolling:  spending time worrying about things that simply have not happened.

My friend wrote me a text that said, “What do you get when you mix a gullible person with an optimistic person?”  I replied, “I don’t know!”  He texted back, “Read it again.”

I write about the coming Civil War 2.0 not in hopes that it comes, rather to make people aware that it’s coming.  Do I sit and worry about it daily?

No!

That would take away from the time I spend thinking about the Roman Empire.

In this moment, there are things that I could let bother me.  However, I realize that letting them bother me gives them power over me when that’s the last thing I want.  “Take not counsel of your fears,” is attributed to George S. Patton, Jr.  I’m sure other people said the same thing in similar ways in the thousands of years that people have been saying things, but when Patton says it, well, it’s been said.

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.” – GSP

If I let my fears fill me up, I live a life of fear regardless of if it’s a perfect 63°F, and I have a wonderful cigar, and a great book beside me while sitting in a comfortable chair.

I think fear comes to people as they age.  I certainly saw Pa Wilder get more and more cautious as he aged.  I could give a few examples, but it doesn’t much matter.  I did notice.  And when I saw the tendency to do it start to crop up in myself, at least I understood what was going on and I could choose to be cautious or choose to be bold.

I think, however, that as I get older it is precisely the time to be bolder.  Life moves in a blur, and days stack up faster, so they should mean something.  If I knew I had only a year?  What would I do?

Something to make that year worthwhile.  If a month?  A day?

The shorter the time left, the more that boldness matters and the less caution should.  If I only had an hour of my life left, you can damn sure bet I’d do something with it, as much as I could.

Oh, that’s Samuel L. Jackson, not the famous English dude Samuel Johnson.  I guess that’s the Netflix® version of the quote.

But life is built on compound interest.  The more I try to write, the better I get.  The more I lift, the stronger I get.  The time to start is now.

The actions should be bold.  While my days may pass fast, the more I can do with them, the more I will do.

When I pass, what will be left are the lives I’ve touched, the children that I’ve raised, the ways I’ve made the world better, and the words that I have written.  Since the restraining order dictates who I can touch, and the lessons to the children are mainly done, that leaves making the world better and writing.

Even a full human lifetime isn’t enough, because they are so very short.  But I’ll make do.  With the remaining decades (hopefully) of my life, how big a dent can I kick in the Universe?

I guess I’ll see.  And I’ll smile some, every day.  And enjoy that cigar, and book, and chair when I’m not being bold.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”