Big Thoughts – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Truth, Neutrinos, Taylor Swift, And Otto Von Bismarck.

“I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?” – The Matrix

When I was a kid, I could walk into a 7-Eleven with just a dollar and walk out with a six pack of pop and three candy bars. Now? They have cameras everywhere.

I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general. Why? Because I said so.

The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails. The Truth is, very often a grim thing. I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined. Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth. I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.

That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits. Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth: The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.

Or something like that. Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped. But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.

What was Otto von Bismark’s favorite Queen song? Under Prussia.

The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be. In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are . . . disturbing.

That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew? What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong? What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.

One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college. I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water. Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.

There are several things still functioning on the Titanic, for instance, the sinks still hold water.

And, it’s True. Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people. I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash. I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.

That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional: it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage.

But it comes down to friendships, too. I once had a close friend at work. I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed. Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting. Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.

She said, “Strip down, facing me.” It wasn’t until the McDonald’s® cashier screamed that I figured out she meant my credit card.

Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions. It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending. This is better, even if the Truth is ugly.

Why? Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better. If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle. Again.

That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth: “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident. Those “solutions” may even make things worse. For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?

For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff: housing and food. How many illegals will that policy stop?

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem. In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing.

Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.

The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever. Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong. Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”

It’s a powerful question. If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong? What’s the upside if I’m right? We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear. It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.

So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me. I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional. They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right. By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.

Just kidding.

I’m really hoping this isn’t a spoiler for you Civil War buffs.

The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth. It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome. Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead.

Stupid neutrinos.

The Internet Is Crappier. On Purpose.

“It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Google™, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine.” – The Simpsons

I’ve had millions of hits, but none of them from Best Korea.

Today I had to spend an hour searching for PEZ® dispensers honoring the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. Amazingly, despite the time I spent looking, no one that I could find has made a PEZ™ dispenser to honor this historic moment. To me, it was amazing that Amber’s lawyers worked so long and hard to prove that Depp was utterly innocent.

Google™ used to be better. I remember it wasn’t a little better, it was a lot better than it is today.

To be fair, I’ve mainly stopped using Google© as my search engine of choice. Besides being horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite shills, they also have futzed with their algorithm so much that when I do a search for common phrases that are pretty unique to my site, I don’t show up on the first two pages.

Go figure. I mean, horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite? I might be able to deal with that. But kill my search results?

They’re dead to me.

The FBI recently announced that Hillary Clinton’s laundry did itself.

Search had long been skewed by Google®, but the autistic programmers that originally put it all together really took that “Don’t Be Evil©” original mission statement to heart. They wanted to create great search results. They even went as far as to make sure there was a firewall between their search people and their ad people so that search was preserved.

Oh, sure, they put their thumb down as hard as they could to get Hillary selected in 2016. Heck, one researcher thought that over 3,000,000 votes were impacted by their search results, alone. Hmmm, Donald Trump is put on trial for forking over $130,000 to a tramp via a shady lawyer (yeah, he has horrible taste in people) but Google™ subverts their entire search platform in favor of a candidate?

No crime here. Move along, citizen.

Regardless, the search engine was still pretty good. As the newfound desire of the GloboLeftElite to clamp down on speech, starting about 2017, Google™ seemed to shy away from that. Again, the search results in 2017 were pretty good.

If Elon Musk really does send thousands of people to Mars, he’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

But around 2019, the ad executives at Google™ decided that, perhaps, the search results were too good. You can read an article about that here (LINK).

The problem was that if the search engine were too good, that meant fewer searches. Fewer searches meant fewer ads. Fewer ads meant less money. The paradox was, the better Google™ got at search, the less money they made from ads.

The result was the same as at most businesses when money meets principles: money wins. Google™ searches were “encrapulated” so that they were crappier. More irrelevant sites should show up in a search. Oh, and the ads? They weren’t getting enough clicks. Solution? Make it less visible that they’re ads – make them look like legitimate search results.

But I did not know that the IRS now accepts Apple® gift cards!

Indian scammers *love* this, since now they can buy an ad, redirect people to their scam website, and get the scam going.

In a recent example, I did a search for a fairly unusual phrase, put quotes around it, and hit “go”. My quotation marks around the exact phrase I was looking for were utterly ignored. The results were . . . entirely encrapulated.

I finally remembered where the quote came from, a website that was now dark, but that someone had resurrected it elsewhere. Boom, there it was, the exact phrase (it was an article title) and I was in business. Google™, however, had ignored my “quotation marks” and my

-ignore

-results

-with

-these

-words and instead gave me a mishmash of crap that still included the trash I tried to weed out.

Now major search engines (Google©, Bing®, DuckDuckGo™) are giving only answers from the mainstream media, especially with certain topics – politics being one of them. The beauty of the Internet, circa 2005, is that the mainstream media hadn’t figured it out, so great content with dissenting voices was given a huge platform.

If NPR™ started a metal band, would it be called, “All Things Dismembered”?

Remember when Google™ used to say, “About 1,242,400 matches”? That’s gone. Google™ has stopped showing the number of pages, no doubt after people figured out that only about 225 results are ever shown.

Of course, NBCNESPNPR© has a lot of money riding on being able to provide curated news to you for fun, profit, and control – so search engines censoring any idea that is contrary to The Message is their goal. The major search engines seem to be on board with this.

This is also a major reason that comments are now dead on many websites, because giving the people who read the encrapified news are often embarrassed by that pesky Truth. Why allow comments at CNN™, when someone can come and make The Message look silly with just a few words?

Pressure has been specifically put on several sites, including Unz™, where unregulated commentors have caused Big Search to blacklist them killing their traffic from search. Oops, BIPOClist them. In the case of Zero Hedge™ (and The Federalist™), Google Ads™ were cancelled until they controlled their comments.

Yandex.com is better in many regards to Google©, even though it is Russian owned. When I did a search on Google™ for “Civil War Weather Report” – I was buried so deep that I missed it as I went by – over thirty items in front of my pages, which have nearly that exact title. On Yandex®? I’m SEVEN of the top ten results, like I used to be back before 2020, when the big political censorship bug hit all of the major search engines.

What’s the difference between bigfoot and Amber Heard? Johnny Depp never found bigfoot’s poop in his bed.

I guess that if I use Yandex© from time to time, well, then the FSB as well as the NSA will know that I’m searching for Amber Heard PEZ© dispensers. I couldn’t find a set with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but I did find one set consisting of Jesus, Amber Heard, and Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, Micheal Cohen? I guess they were in a set because they all got nailed on the cross.

Well, to be fair, two of them were nailed on the cross-examination . . . .

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK). Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet. And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today. That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities. Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left. Why? Because being in a city is dependency. If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally. This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster? A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific. And where would they put all the street-poo? Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them. They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time. People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower. 98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country. Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads? Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors. Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it. They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection? God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols. She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller. It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are. This is not a fluke: John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this: in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities. Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not. There’s one other missing factor: religion.

Cities are more secular. It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day. Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man. Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work. I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff. In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular. However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular. There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population: they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from: it certainly won’t be San Francisco. And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it. We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Economic Doom? You’re Soaking In It.

“Two Purple Hearts – Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the president. You robbed the Federal Reserve Depository. Life sentence, New York Maximum Security Penitentiary. I’m ready to kick your ass out of the world, war hero.” – Escape From New York

Elon bought a coffee company and then made it a cryptocurrency. Yup, StarbuX®.

I’m a bit under the weather (sniffles). The good news is that some of the memetic content/graphs I found on the Internet about the current economy probably speak mostly for themselves. So, comments may be shorter than usual. I guess I’ll offer you this shorter post and an IOU for a longer one sometime in the future when I sober up get better.

First off – the dollar and gold used to have (depending on the era) a very similar volatility – at one point dollars were gold. What if the dollar was more volatile than gold, for the first time in 45 years??

Normally, longer term bond and notes have higher interest rates than shorter ones. The reason is uncertainty – if I was going to borrow money for thirty years, there’s more risk of crazy things happening, like Civil Wars or George Lucas selling Star Wars™ to Disney© in a thirty-year time span than in a three month time span. But when things get uncertain, that ration flips. If you look below, note that even a small inversion is a strong, strong signal of an impending recession. Well.

How bad has Biden been? Median mortgage payments (average selling price and current interest rates) are higher than Hunter Biden at a Burning Man®.

Homeowners aren’t the only ones paying huge interest payments. Here’s what’s happening on the national debt:

But it didn’t have to be that way. If someone remotely intelligent was in charge at Treasury, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Don’t know where this snip came from, but it’s spot on:

Janet should be managing a grade school lunch kitchen. How deep does the rot run in the Banking Industrial Complex? O’Keefe tells us tons with one of his people hacks:

Thankfully the Fed™ has infinite money to lend. Or, at least the balance sheet shows that. In this case, this shows the economy as needing three times as much cash injected into the system as in 2008 to prop it all up and keep everything from draining into the abyss. In this case, the big vertical line represents the Silicon Valley Bank© failure.

That happened because Silicon Valley Bank™ had a lot of low interest, long term assets. Let’s just say I’m happy with my 4% mortgage right now, since I actually lose money by paying it back, since I can get 5%+ from banks. Silicon Valley Bank© had lots of crappy, long positions, and exploded.

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

When that happened, I wrote (link above) that I really expected that the vibrations would shake the system into a bigger failure by that October – this stuff takes a while to propagate. Instead, the Fed pulled a very cunning move: it printed buttloads of cash, allowed the banks to deposit the crap they had with the Fed™ and then the Fed™ took the losses. Of course, since they haven’t sold the crap the banks gave them, those are “realized” yet, so those losses are like a girlfriend so ugly you make her hide in the closet when your friends come over.

In addition to that, the Fed© has also lost at least $161 billion, according to the Fed©. Total? A trillion? Who knows? It’s not like anyone’s counting.

Back in the Before Time, the Fed™ never bought the debt of the United States. Why would they? They debt of the United States was to Ma and Pa Citizen, central banks all around the world, and, (oddly) to the United States when it spent the Social Security funds on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Yup, the United States would spend the Social Security cash, and then write itself an IOU and put it (seriously!) into a filing cabinet in D.C.

Can you imagine a job that’s more futile? It’s like I wrote myself an IOU for stealing money from my kid’s college fund to buy beer, and then made my kid file the IOU, knowing full well that the file would experience “surprise combustion” in the backyard fire pit when I sobered up.

You really should be concerned. Unless you want to send me your cash so I can send you an IOU.

I promise I won’t blow it on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Thankfully, people are waking up to the scam:

Scott Adams, Charles Murray, And Why The Government Doesn’t Like Families

“Well, I didn’t know you wanted to get involved with the discussion, Mr. Helper.” – Back to School

I thought nice things about Nancy when I heard that she said she helped blind children, but then I figured out she meant verb, not adjective.

A few weeks ago I was driving all over creation, so I had a chance to listen to a few podcasts as the miles of Upper/Lower Midwestia melted by over dashboard. One of the podcasts was from Scott Adams.

One of Scott’s topics was about the concept of identity. In dealing with young kids, say four or five, researchers were trying to figure out how to best motivate these snot-covered disease machines to help tidy up a room. I must take a moment to note that forcing toddlers to replace hotel staff could potentially really help the bottom line of Marriott®, so I’m definitely for it.

Regardless, the researchers tried to ask the young kids to “help tidy up.” This had the effectiveness you might imagine, as my experience has shown that the typical five-year-old has the attention span of Robin Williams on cocaine.

But then the researchers tried another tactic. They asked the kids, “Are you a helper?” That worked, and so did the kids. They stayed on task for longer, and were apparently not as useless as they normally are.

I keep falling off of my bike – it’s a vicious cycle. (meme as found)

Adams finished up the segment. He moved on to another topic, which was some random piece of GloboLeftElite propaganda that was circulating on CNN™ or MSNBCommunist©. He then asked his audience, “Do you believe that?”

None of them did. Scott then made the statement: “You are immune to the propaganda of the Left. Why?”

Various answers came back.

“Oh, let’s see, FakeName52 said, it’s because we’re smarter? True, FakeName52, but that’s not it. VirginiaFats says that it’s because we’re more rational? True, but that’s not it either.”

Adams’ answer?

It’s the same thing as the toddler answer: we’re immune to (lots of) the propaganda of the GloboLeftElite not because we’re smarter (we are) or more rational (we are) but because of who we conceive ourselves to be: the lies of the GloboLeft become apparent when viewed through the filter of being someone who finds family important, for instance.

When deaf people go to court, is it still called a hearing?

That’s a pretty deep thought: Who I am is more important to me than what I’m doing. If I think of myself as more honest and trustworthy I’ll actually be more honest and trustworthy. If I think of myself as a victim and incapable of dealing with the world, that’s also exactly who I’ll be.

Simple as.

And, if that was where my podcasting journey ended, that might have been good enough for a Friday post – it feels like that sort of topic, since it’s essentially a way to change the way I look at and interact with the world. But the next podcast up was John Stossel interviewing Charles Murray.

Just like O.J. was best known for, um, one thing, Charles Murray is best known as the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book about I.Q. that touched a third rail by showing data that I.Q. is at least partially inherited. Scandals!

If a cannibal doesn’t like eating brains, think his friends will give him a hand?

But before that he wrote a lot about government policy, even being quoted by Ronald Reagan from time to time. Murray wrote about the interplay between government policy and outcomes, and one of the things that he found that bothered him the most is that all of the policies that give money to unmarried women had the consequence (intended?) of kicking the man out of the house.

The woman don’t need no man because .gov steps in and becomes the breadwinner. Heck, the government is even better than an actual husband and father because the government never judges, always pays on time, and let’s the woman sleep with whoever they want whenever they want.

So, no father, no problem. Right?

Well, not exactly. Young boys look to fathers as role models, as someone that they’d like to be like. Since Uncle Sugar is now the de facto father, that means that the only role models available to a young boy in a situation like that is, in the words of Charles Murray, “the worst possible role model: the most aggressive and meanest person in their circle of friends.”

I built a model of Mount Everest and The Boy asked if it was to scale. I said, “No, it’s to look at.”

We see the consequences of that all around us. How many of the “youths” shooting up Chicago or Baltimore have a father at home? Seven out of ten blacks (2018 data) were born out of wedlock. No father, or a revolving door of fathers removes the role model the boy should have had. The numbers for whites aren’t encouraging, either: nearly three out of ten whites is now born out of wedlock.

This should be no surprise if you’re familiar with r/K selection theory. I’ll give a quick explanation. This will be a refresher for some, or you can read one of my previous posts here (link below) for more a more in-depth discussion.

r/K Biology And The Coming Cold Winter

r selection is the selection process followed by rabbits. Rabbits live (generally) in an environment with large numbers of resources, so they have rabbit sex all the time. They produce lots of little rabbits, and, for the most part, the rabbits have little involvement in raising all of their baby rabbits. Rabbits also don’t particularly care who they mate with, there are no pair bonds. Rabbits survive based on a numbers game. In high resource environments, it’s about sex, all the time, with anyone and everyone.

When dentists get awards, they don’t give them trophies, just a little plaque.

K selection is different – it’s the selection process that wolves have. Wolves often live in low-resource environments. They pair-bond for life, and a huge amount of resources is expended in the long process of turning a wolf pup into an adult member of the pack.

Obviously, the environment for women right now favors r selection, and I can’t help but think that this is entirely on purpose. That attack on the family seems to serve the GloboLeftElite’s agenda. Families are the atoms of civilization, and to fundamentally transform civilization, the families have to be controlled first.

As for me? I’m a helper.

Revenge of the NEET

“I wanted to send my kids to college. It’s, like, $200 a year!” – Unfrosted

But I do have degrees in Mike Rowe Economics and Mike Rowe Biology.

NEET is Internet slang for “Not in Employment, Education, or Training” – in other words, “stays a home and smokes weed and plays video games”.

Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, spent time noting last year that even with unemployment below 4%, 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t in the work force at all.

Now, I would hate to bring up the points that if our nation:

sends all the factory jobs overseas,
imports millions of foreigners with H1B visas (95,000 a year, minimum, since 2006, and more going back before that), or
just like Google®, cut hundreds of highly-skilled technical jobs in the United States and offshore them to Mexico and India,

then maybe, just maybe, the job market actually sucks because the wages are depressed to the point where living conditions at those wage levels are literally third world.

They’re not send us their best, or their best navigators, but I wonder if the repairs will be riveting. (meme used with permission)

Why would people put up with that? The market.

An example I read recently was of a person from India claiming that the only way they could find a place to live (this was in Canada) was in a bed in a kitchen in a two-bedroom apartment where six other Indian families were living. Admittedly, this is probably an upgrade from living in a slum in Mumbai, but these six families each pay a sixth of the rent. If a typical Canadian family wanted to rent that apartment and each Indian family was making $300 payments, the Canadians would have to cough up $1800.

That’s why people are tenting it – tents are better (marginally) to the American psyche than living with six other families in a condition where “squalor” would be an upgrade.

Another example?

When I was a kid, delivery work was for kids. Sixteen-year-olds were the ones frying Big Macs® and driving pizza from the Pizza Den to people’s houses.

Now?

Doordash® is now an adult job and everyone I see running the windows of the fast-food places has been voting for a big chunk of this century.

The United States is slipping quickly (and then, I fear, all at once) into a third world economy. To be clear, I’m not blaming those attempting to get to a better place, but it would be magical thinking to believe that once they got here and were a majority that they’d not immediately turn the United States into just another version of their homeland. You know, the one they fled.

Biden can’t stop doing connect-the-dot puzzles even though he can’t finish one. I guess Biden just doesn’t know where to draw the line. (meme as found)

But some of them aren’t working at all. And of those men that aren’t working, a huge number of them are white guys. It turns out that all, and I mean all, of the job growth since Corona™ became something other than a beer, went to dudes that weren’t white. In fact, the number of white people in the workforce dropped while Joe Biden “created” all of these jobs.

They were replaced. On any job where there is a remotely credible alternative with some sort of “diversity” score based on: a sexual fetish, being “female”, missing one of their six spleens, race, ethnicity, or religion. Of course, white, Christian and male is the opposite of diverse even though that category is only 6% or less of all of the humans we know of in the Solar System, excluding Phobos.

With things like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) actively putting up barriers to hiring (or keeping) white guys, I’m not surprised that many have just given up. They are pretending right now that that DEI is going away, but in reality, they’re keeping it but just naming it other things. “People and the Planet,” anyone? (Yes, it’s real.) Their goals really haven’t changed.

A lot of companies have women as DEI executives. I guess because it’s cheaper. (meme as found)

The big problem is that Identity is now more important than Competency. Think: Chernobyl 2.0, brought to you by DEI. Why no DEI in the NFL®? People actually care about meritocracy in football players, I guess.

Also, Automation is real. Factories of almost any type, when compared by their counterparts of 1960, are much more highly automated. A guy named Fred walking around to check temperatures on thermometers to make sure the boiler doesn’t suddenly wipe Peoria off the map has been replaced with sensors that feed pressure, temperature, and flowrates back to computers that automate the process. Fred’s out of a job, and, if those boiler automation systems weren’t programmed in India (looking at you, Boeing®) then Peoria is still safe.

Except for Fred, who doesn’t have that job anymore. A.I. is coming for lots and lots of other jobs. Starting now. According to Indeed®:

Software development jobs are down 51.3%,
Information Design down 44.3%
IT Operations and Helpdesk down 33.5%
Industrial Engineering down 30.3%

Are all of these jobs replaceable by A.I.? Of course not. But 35.3% of HR jobs (same study) apparently are.

I’m not a NEET, but I’m sure it’s easier being a NEET without a family. No particular requirement to have shelter other than couch surfing, and some NEETs work for a couple of months during the year and then goof off, smoke weed, and play video games during the rest of the time.

And you can do both of these things in a video game, while stoned. (meme as found)

Families have always been the nucleus that keeps men showered and shaved, but without them, men give up. It’s not like they can afford a family, either. Housing prices and interest rates are now high enough in most metro locations that most young families are effectively locked out of homeownership. The price to income ratio has doubled since 1985 nationally – homes are now twice as expensive as 1985 compared to median family incomes. Add in 7%+ interest rates, and you’ll see why the middle class has caused Red Lobster to go bankrupt.

Who knew we’d live to see so many movies come true? (meme as found)

In reality, there’s not a labor shortage – there’s only a labor shortage at the wages companies are willing to pay, and a ludicrous inflation of the value of women so that what they bring to the table (for kids) doesn’t equal what they have to put. NEETs don’t really care about either. They’ve got their weed, couches, and video games.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Time And Temperature

“Hey, come on. You divorced? You Separated? She beat you up?” – Die Hard

My book on clocks finally arrived. It’s about time.

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

Volume V, Issue 12

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.

In this issue: Front Matter – Clock of Doom Setting– Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Talking About The Inevitable – 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Clock of Doom Setting

Klaus really rocks that Klingon cosplay?

I’m keeping the clock at stage 8 this month. But last month there was the comment from Aesop (LINK) that I promised to address this month, so here we are. The critical comments are in italics.

You’re still vastly over-selling the case. We’re at a 5 to a 6, at worst.

Things are neither wider nor deeper, just more widely and repetitively reported.

That’s a sign of desperation by the minions of Evil, not dominance.

Things are ugly. (Really ugly, if you want to use 1982, or 1962 as benchmarks. Which is why you shouldn’t.) But they’re not out of control, by any stretch. They haven’t turned up the burner, and the water isn’t anywhere near getting to frog-boiling range. Yet. That may (probably will) change. Perhaps quite rapidly (but that’s been true for ages). But until it does change, you really should throttle this back some.

Calling things an 8, at the current time, is gross overstatement.

This is a 100% fair criticism. I am certain we are, at minimum, at a 6 (People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology).

Why?

I know multiple people who have fled states merely for ideological reasons – the Red folks are leaving the Blue states, the GloboLeftists are leaving the Red states and taking their guns with them, to go and live in states that actually value the Second Amendment.

I just flew into Australia, and boy are my arms confiscated.

The GloboLeftists leaving Red states isn’t as big, because (at least now) the GloboLeftists are tolerated in Red states. You can have a “Biden” sign in your front yard and no one will vandalize the place. This is mostly true.

There is a paradox of these places: If you live in the parts of America where it’s likely that you’ll need to use force for self-defense, you also live in a part of America where the District Attorney will charge you, and the jury will convict you for using self-defense. If you live in the parts of America where it’s unlikely you’ll need to use force for self-defense, you also live in the parts of America where the odds are they’ll give you a medal instead of indicting you. If indicted, the odds are nearly zero that any jury would convict you,

People on the TradRight see that, and they’re moving.

So, 6 is the floor. Is it also the ceiling? My logic says no, and here’s why:

Most Civil War violence is homicide.

A large portion is because the state allows or encourages it to happen. It’s not tanks, it’s not fighter jets, it’s people killing people – US Civil War 1.0 was an anomaly, mostly. Out in Missouri, though, there were many blood feuds that only glancingly involved politics. Ditto the Balkans, where neighbors just started killing neighbors due to ethnicity or due to them being middle class. Ditto the Indonesian civil war, where it was mainly just homicides based on opportunity, not based on political reasons.

Dali’s brother was a really good boxer. His name was Muhamma.

Regardless, there is currently an increasing amount of violence that is well tolerated, as long as it is perpetrated on people who probably vote on the Right. The January 6 protesters were charged in ways that strain any sort of claim of fair justice. The actually violent and felonious Black Lives Matter™ protests and Antifa® protests had nary an arrest, and of those arrested, the punishments for things like assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and actual murder were not handed down. Most protesters (of the GloboLeft variety) were just ignored.

They got the message. Even now, violence is 100% tolerated by the GloboLeftElite Soros District Attorneys and their “catch and release” program for violent felons. In 2011, Syria released all of the violent prisoners to act as a counterbalance to peaceful protestors. This is a known strategy. Civil War 2.0 won’t look like Civil War 1.0, and it will be a far, far dirtier thing, and we may never see a single uniformed conflict.

Where do football players get fresh uniforms from? New Jersey.

In my mind, that brings us to an 8. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

I see Aesop’s point, and, though we may differ, I’ve got to make my call, and I’m sticking with an 8. If we see any meaningful attempt to back down the violence in GloboLeftist areas, I’ll rachet it down accordingly.

Violence and Censorship Update

Let’s start with Elon Musk. A judge in some place called Australia seemed to think that Australia controls the media in the United States, and, heck, maybe interstellar space for all I know. She ordered Elon Musk’s company, X™ to stop showing a video of an adherent of the Religion of Peace stabbing a Christian priest during a sermon. Elon (predictably) told her to shove it.

Microsoft® has likewise decided that games should only have women in them that look like sacks of potatoes. The good news is that Amy Schumer isn’t doing much, so she should be okay to step in as a model.

And, if you thought that you could own and operate a business and not hire criminals? I guess you didn’t figure on 2024. A convenience store is being sued by the Justice Department for not hiring criminals. I didn’t know Hunter needed a job that badly.

And, if you thought that having a bridge named after the guy who wrote the National Anthem was not unreasonable, well, they’re trying to disappear him from history.

Finally, the FISA program was not only extended, but expanded. Now the NSA has the power to look into, essentially, the whole Internet. Go figure.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. And it’s gonna get worse.

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 down, expected with cooler weather. Probably quiet until June or July.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly up. I expect this fall to be a bit more crazy.

Economic:

Economic numbers are down a bit. But prices are up.

Illegal Aliens:

Second Highest April. Ever. But the normies are waking up.

Talking About The Inevitable

One of the clues that people are going to have a divorce is that they start talking about it. A recent Rasmussen Reports® poll shows that:

41 percent of voters are thinking that there is a new civil war due sometime in the future,
16 percent felt it would occur in the next five years,
37 percent of voters felt civil war is more likely if Biden remains in the White House after the election,
36 percent of Alaskans want to leave the Union,
31 percent of Texans want to leave the Union,
29 percent of Californians want to leave the Union, and
28 percent of New Yorkers want out.

When I started writing the Weather Report in 2019 (this is the 60^th monthly issue!) I stated that I felt that the very first possible time that a civil war would occur would be 2025. I felt the halfway point and most likely time would be 2032, and the latest date would be (I think this is right) 2037. There are reasons for those years, tying to several large trends in economics, world power dynamics, hordes of illegal aliens, and other demographics.

Back in 2020, Scott Adams predicted we wouldn’t have a civil war in the near term. His reason? “We don’t want one.” I think, four years later, we’re getting closer to wanting one. Remember: it doesn’t require everyone to agree to a civil war, what it requires is a committed minority. John Adams, who knows more about this than I do, noted that he thought about a third of Americans were in favor of the Revolution, which was just a civil war that we happened to win. Adams felt another third didn’t want war, and another third were loyal to the king.

The numbers above are showing that we’re at danger levels of support for a major change, and I think next year takes us into the period where civil war becomes possible – with the peak probability still sitting at 2032. Here in 2024, though, it’s a nice, cool night and tomorrow’s weather will be perfect. A storm may be coming, but tonight I’ll prepare. And enjoy.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/TTEcclesBrown/status/1779532832056180756

https://twitter.com/TTEcclesBrown/status/1776630901277126892

https://twitter.com/i/status/1779690452398330155

https://twitter.com/i/status/1782456547525685499

https://twitter.com/GangHits/status/1784616636735004918

https://twitter.com/i/status/1783536135085388174

Good Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13371699/UNC-protest-Israel-frat-American-flag-protected.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0gKDgYHvRA

https://nypost.com/2024/05/02/us-news/bill-ackman-donates-10k-to-unc-frat-bros-who-shielded-us-flag-from-anti-israel-mob/

https://www.newsweek.com/unc-frat-brothers-flag-donations-update-1897055

One Gal

https://twitter.com/Red_Pill_US/status/1779348493490131392

Body Count

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLGuBnfbMAA2xEN?format=jpg&name=large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLGFWhwXsAAinOO?format=jpg&name=900×900

https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-21st-century-red-state-murder-crisis

https://www.shewon.org/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/04/09/transgender-surgery-in-military-paid-by-taxpayers

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-births-alarmingly-slide-lowest-level-1979-failing-exceed-replacement-rate-gfc

https://www.lifenews.com/2024/04/25/americas-fertility-rate-hits-record-low-as-planned-parenthood-abortions-hit-record-high/

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1775928212805103945

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ar-BB1llO5L

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/Rogue_Outlaw17/status/1775851708436078957

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/04/24/poorly-managed-toddlers-are-running-elections

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1778840719387488583

https://twitter.com/amrenewcitizen/status/1774806979367641474

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-dealt-blow-new-testimony-1886322

https://twitter.com/CannConActual/status/1773089354635698446

https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1774799076707422307

https://twitter.com/TrueTheVote/status/1775625397431877718

Civil War

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/alex-garland-civil-war-explosive-083228878.html

https://americanmind.org/salvo/extremism-on-the-ballot/

https://alt-market.us/the-political-left-has-proven-beyond-a-doubt-that-they-are-authoritarians/

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/09/america-politics-divided-polarization-data

https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-democracy-rights-freedoms-election-b1047da72551e13554a3959487e5181

https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/18/second-civil-war-becoming-increasingly-plausible-insurrections-likely-20671654/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/1-in-5-americans-think-violence-may-solve-u-s-divisions-poll-finds

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/41–of-americans-say-second-civil-war-likely-in-next-5-years

https://www.nysun.com/article/100-million-americans-say-civil-war-could-rip-country-apart-within-5-years-survey-suggests

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/04/06/america-is-hurling-toward-a-full-blown-hot-civil-war/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/26/what-a-real-civil-war-would-do-to-the-us-economy/

The Post On Nihilism I’ve Been Working On (Here And There) For Weeks

“Think his nihilism got the best of him and he tried to kill himself?” – House, M.D.

Nietzsche couldn’t use pencils. He thought they were all pointless.

A big danger is Nihilism.

It’s certainly one of the biggest dangers that society faces today. As our society has become less religious, more urban, and has a greater and greater embracing of technology, people begin to ask:

Does any of this matter? Do our values have any real meaning?

My answer to both of those questions is, of course, yes. Values and virtues don’t become outdated.

But what is Nihilism? Nietzsche defined Nihilism fairly simply:

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no thing in itself. This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

To a Nihilist, nothing matters and everything that anyone can think of is true. Read that sentence again, and tell me what I’ve missed in what’s ailing society at its foundation, right now, today. To quote Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, if Nihilism is the “extinction of the individual, then this world and everything in it – love, goodness, sanctity, everything – are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any ultimate consequence, and the full horror of life is hidden from man only by the strength of their will do deceive themselves; and ‘all things are lawful,’ no otherworldly hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and suicidal dreams.” I’m guessing he knew my ex-wife.

Observance to a religion gives a society many things: purpose, values, unity, and stability, among others. But a Nihilist would say that all religions have the same validity, just like all cultures have the same validity.

But that is observably false.

Say what you will, but the Aztec people had a great motto: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

I’ll cherry pick an example: Aztecs. The Aztecs were a bloodthirsty, cannibal, slaving religion. When their ancestors escaped up north, they became known (later) as the Anasazi, and were so hated that they managed to get a huge coalition of all the other tribes together to unite to kill them, probably because having cannibals as neighbors is horrible for property values.

We live in a nation where academics and the news media are trying to normalize everything from cannibalism to “minor-attracted persons” to men pretending to be women. The only, and I mean only, way that this sort of normalization attempt occurs is because the GloboLeft are a group of nihilists that don’t have any fixed beliefs, at all. They were HATING former FBI Director James Comey before Trump fired him. Then, in the span of a single day, they were converted to loving him.

“Comey was always the good guy.”

We were always at war with Eastasia.

When Amy was a child, she said she wanted to go into comedy. Well, no one is laughing now.

If horrible religions like the Aztec religion can result in murder, wholesale slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, imagine how much worse it is to have no religion at all? Now, it becomes open season on anything. The Mrs. likes to talk about an article she read once (maybe it was back when we subscribed to Reason?) about the author attending a Washington, D.C. dinner party.

The conversation went something like this . . . .

“Well, of course Africa is a problem, and probably has 200,000,000 too many people. I think that it can be solved, though, by withholding food supply.” This wasn’t a politician, but probably a GloboLeft academic or regulator.

The author confronted the GloboLefty: “You’re casually talking about starving 200,000,000 people to death?”

Apparently, the GloboLefty didn’t really like it when it was phrased that way, but when he could hide behind pretty words that disguised the real meaning of what he was saying, well, he was good with it.

I was going to donate my clothes to starving people in Africa, but I decided not to. If my clothes fit them, they’re definitely not starving.

The French Revolution was, perhaps, the very first example of this sort of extreme Nihilism, where the idea was not a war on man, but an organized war on God, Himself. Mankind has certainly had its share of civil wars and genocides throughout history, but the French Revolution was something entirely new – the desire of an idea, Nihilism, to remake an entire nation and discard every idea from the past.

To a Nihilist or a GloboLeftist (but I repeat myself) I am nothing. You are nothing. We are not even worthy of consideration as humans. We are beneath contempt. To quote Rose again, “The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.” In the words of V.I. Lenin: “. . . there will be no way of getting away from it, there will be nowhere to go.”

Really.

Should the Russian Revolution be renamed the Tsar Wars?

The greatest horrors (that’s “horror” – I’m not talking about Madonna) in the history of humanity have been brought about by GloboLeft governments while being run not by atheists, but by antitheists. Period, and that’s verifiable by actual numbers. The end stage of this is the Nihilism we see around us now: The Nihilism bent only on destruction. The French Revolution started it, but you can see it daily at work

As I’ve said again and again, I believe we will win, because we stand for something and to win they have to kill us all. Every single one of us.

They can’t. After 74 years of trying, the Soviets couldn’t erase Religion and the values it provides. Today, only 13% of Russians are atheists. Infecting everyone with Nihilism is really, really hard.

My doctor said I should drink more wine. He actually said, “less beer”, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines.

Why am I so certain we’ll win? Because we’ve been winning for at least 2000 years, and that won’t stop now. I do believe in Truth. And I know others to, too.

That’s all it takes to win.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them! They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street? It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool. There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least. I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet. Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together. By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel? That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination. But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment). I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail. Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970. Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club. We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon. Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end. The Wright Flyer? It sucked. But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it. Radio? It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows. Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome. A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA. Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress. Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes? Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways. Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope. It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents. The time was ready for that particular innovation: if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media. Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes. 28 lines. It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right? That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was. Now? I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history. That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig? A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years. Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein. You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations. It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were? In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this? The book in question is A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results. (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me) After a bit, I finally found it.
On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor. Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all? Guess you’d better start picking favorites. In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why? The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever. Houses (if they even had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.” The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler: “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor. Great Britain was no exception. There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor. The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids. But the poor kids also die more often. This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy: the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up. Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close. It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows. Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life. And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless: marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft. Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft. And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors. It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down. It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK). To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy. So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.