Big Thoughts – Page 19 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Sex

“I don’t know much about geopolitics, but that is one cool name for a country: Chad.” – Norm Macdonald Live

Ever notice you never see Chad with Chad in Chad? Hmmm.

Technological change has been very difficult for the kids of today – it has changed entirely the way that they relate to each other, how they spend their time, how they are rewarded, and the very nature of the male-female relationship. Since I’m writing this post, it’s about as positive as Biden’s impact on the economy.

Of course, technology had changed the way that previous generations lived. When I was a kid, our entertainment on a Friday night was cruising main. We’d get in cars, and ride up and down the street, listening to loud music, revving engines.

Why?

To see each other. To find out what was going on. To meet girls. The girls would go to meet guys and chatter and drink some occasional peppermint schnapps snuck into a Big Gulp® cup. Often the girls and boys would do no more than flirt. Sometimes, though, well, more would happen.

This was an in-person interaction that was natural. The technology of the car and cruising Main were just minor adaptations of behavior that was certainly as old as the concept of the very first city – boys wanting to watch girls, and girls wanting to be watched.

Does mentioning cruising Main make you feel old yet?

This in-person interaction gave us the dopamine hits of the day. And, even at the breakneck speed of 25 miles an hour, there was an absolute limit to the number of boys a girl could see in a night of cruising Main of, maybe, a few dozen.

The reality is, of course, that we all have a finite number of choices of people to date (and mate) with. Cruising Main was a dance that was as old as time. In this dance, the woman offered her youth and beauty in return for the commitment of a good man. The man offered his commitment for the youth and beauty of a woman. And, when I was much younger, if I stayed up late enough I could watch it all on Cinemax® after my parents were asleep.

Those trades are, generally, good trades. They create a stable society, and provide a woman the chance to find, marry, have children with a man and raise them. Women tend to try to date and mate upwards in socio-economic status. Men? Well, you know.

Hey, derpy girls need love, too.

Now, for many, the meeting place is Tinder©. In Tinder™, women have infinite choices – they are the commodity to be possessed, and they swipe left or right, alternately accepting or rejecting hundreds of men in a minute. In this new bargain, the woman now trades her youth and beauty for endless one-night stands with Chad Tinderchuck. Example:

Chad always has a date, since girls always swipe to talk to him. In this, Chad ruins women. Chad’s a 10, but when it’s 2am at the bar, Chad’s fine with the average 4 or 5 or 6. In this way, that 4 (Flora Foura) thinks that, for the rest of her life, she deserves a Chad Tinderchuck in the prime of his life. She is a widow, forever pining for that man that she thinks she deserves. Don’t believe me?

Wait, is that a lunch lady from 1983? And she’s calling anyone mediocre???

The actual 5 or 6 guy Flora should be with? Well, after Chads marry and disappear, and younger Chads start ignoring her, she’s ready to “settle” for that 5 or 6 Andy Average. And, she’s angry about it every day that she sees Andy, since, deep down, Flora knows that she’s good enough for Chad.

But we’re seeing now that Andy Average isn’t quite so interested in Flora Foura after she’s spent her twenties on a revolving carousel of men, maybe picking up a child or two.

Let’s be fair – most of the things that most men do (especially young men) is to get quality females. If those aren’t available, Andy Average shuts down. Why work overtime when Xbox® is cheap? Why pump iron when Flora puts him on ignora?

¡Jeb! is always on ignora.

Men then go NEET – Not in Employment Education or Training. Why work hard? Why try to get great education? Why work at all? One segment of men has gone beyond MGTOW – they’ve gone full NPNW. I’ll let you sort out what NPNW means.

And who can blame men? When I was in high school, women liked men taking charge. Men were supposed to try, and women were supposed to put up a struggle so they didn’t feel like tramps. To be clear, I never engaged in any behavior that the young fräulein didn’t enthusiastically support, and when she said “stop” and meant it, I did.

It was well ingrained in women that they didn’t want to look like tramps, so they had to pretend they didn’t like or want to make out. Meat Loaf’s song trilogy Paradise by the Dashboard Light is a perfect description of a healthy sexual dynamic of the type that produced . . . me, and probably you, too.

We now live in a world of #MeToo. Russell Brand (who I don’t know because he doesn’t return either my emails or my calls) is being accused of, hear me out, having sex with (really!) a girl who wanted to have sex with him, who was (drumroll) of legal age. The cad! If a multimillionaire celebrity can be accused and lose a couple of million dollar a year of income for doing legal things, well, what chance does Andy Average have, especially since the average woman don’t need no man?

This is, perhaps the biggest lie. Women who don’t have children or a husband in their 40s are, perhaps, the unhappiest demographic on the planet. And, as I noted earlier, women want to marry up. The big paradox is women want to get a college degree (skip having children) and earn a lot of cash.

Women won’t marry men who make less than them, so they die childless and alone.

But, hey! At least they got to make cool PowerPoints™ between boxes of chardonnay and the trip to the vet for Sir Buggles Von Fancypants. I’m not exaggerating. Check this out:

When you sold your family, soul, and children for Internet likes.

Did I mention this is ruining the economy, the family structure, and the future?

The good news (for me) is that I wrote my notes on this post, and I’ve only touched a third of them. That means probably the next two Wednesday posts will be around this theme.

The bad news is that there are two more posts. As much as I’d like to say the kids are alright, they’re most definitely not. This has tremendous impacts on the near-term economy, as well as the future of the West.

But, hey, at least Biden’s still Building Back Better!

Oh. That didn’t age as well as a cat lady.

Dunbar At The Fall Of Nations

“Dunbar, not Dumb Bear.” – Dances with Wolves

If beer makes you smarter, that didn’t work out for Budweiser®. (meme not mine)

People are funny. And I’m not talking, “John Wilder after fourteen beers at Chili’s when someone mentions that we’ll have to give up PEZ™ to meet CliMAtE ChAnGE GoALZ” funny. No, I’m talking about the way that we’re wired to react as people, and yet pretend we’re not.

Out of all of the aspirations of the way that we want to think about ourselves, there are some constants. Except for Mark Zuckerberg, we all need air to breathe. We all need food. We all need something to drink. I’ve heard some people drink water, but I keep wonder why they do that when mankind made civilization so we could have a nice beer.

The other thing most of us need is . . . people. Although everyone is slightly different, there seems to be something hardwired into us as to how we deal with people.

I told the doctor I didn’t trust him to stitch me up. He said, “Fine, suture self.”

Robin Dunbar (Grad student for Dr. Batman® Von Unterober) is a British Psychologist. He looked at the various sizes of primate brain, specifically the neo-ocasio-cortex. Er, just the neocortex. Sorry. The neocortex is the most recent delivery to the brain, and allows humans to do complicated things like talking, brewing beer, heating up frozen pizzas in the oven, giving each other chlamydia, and writing columns while drinking beer.

Dunbar sliced up a lot of primate brains, and compared the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate tribe. There was a correlation. Dunbar then said, “Hey, humans are primates, even though we are so very sexy, so what size would a human tribe be?”

His result based on math and brain size, and, I’m guessing a few pints of Guiness®?

Stable human tribe sizes should be about 150 based on Dunbar’s math, and this number is called Dunbar’s Number. I wrote about this before in this post (LINK) where I have the original (as far as I can see) hypothesis that some mental illnesses might have helped small groups survive back when we were killing mammoths to survive, and I write a bit more about Dunbar’s Number in that post.

My friend’s wife is leaving him because of mental illness. Or at least that’s what his cat told him.

This 150 person (let’s be generous and say it’s somewhere between 100 and 250) group size seems to show up wherever I look. Huge corporations may have tens of thousands of employees, but each of the actual operational chunks is small. Most that I’ve seen have been . . . less than 150 people. Even operating locations I’ve been to that have 500 people or more break down into groups. Office staff versus day shift versus night shift, or people who forgot their pants versus people who always remember them, or something similar.

Many folks might say, but Wilder, my country has hundreds of millions of people in it. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t seem to apply. Dunbar himself theorized that this number would only be exceeded when those groups faced extreme survival pressures, like invading Huns or women wanting to vote.

I’ll toss in a different theory here: larger groups than Dunbar’s number can exist when there’s a great degree of wealth that requires cooperation to maintain. My theory was (and is) that civilization was formed so we could make beer (LINK).

So why is it so big now?

How is Alexa® like my ex-wife? She tried to listen to everything and pretended to know it all.

Wealth, technology, and order allow Dunbar’s Number to get immense. If every small town in the United States has a McDonald’s®, then life gets simpler. We have built around an economic “sameness”. Similarly, people watch the same NFL™ teams or NCAA© college teams based on regions. This economic homogeneity is based on wealth and technology.

If you’re a fan of {INSERT SPORTS TEAM HERE} then if I’m a fan of the {SAME EXACT TEAM} we’re not so different, we’ve created a commonality. Dunbar’s Number is short-circuited, and a shallow trust is created.

But what happens when wealth (and the hope of having it) goes down?

I think we’re seeing it. Trust shrinks. People we once put inside our group are now put outside our group because the competition for resources increases. An example is probably in order: if everyone has a job and all of the PEZ™ and Hot Pockets© they want and big houses with swimming pools, having the odd illegal immigrant doesn’t bother them much. But when times get tight and jobs are scarce and Hot Pockets® cost $10 each, the “in-group” shrinks.

The Mrs. cringes every time I call them “Squat Pockets®”.

The greater the stress on the people, the smaller the group gets. Who do I trust? In my circles, it’s my family first. That number is small. Then my close friends – those that I know, based on experience, that I can trust. That number is bigger, but still pretty small. Then there are those who I have strong reason to trust. Then those in the neighborhood. Then . . .

Well, you can see, the tougher the situation, the smaller the circle. If we go back to our history, this is what we find – somewhere between 100 to 250 of us in a group trust each other, and can work as a group. When times are good, technology is in place, and the NFL® is playing that number can certainly be bigger.

I tend to think we’re past the point of Peak Dunbar. As things get tougher, you can see the friction already started as violence has escalated. As jobs disappear, and as hope disappears, this will increase.

But at least right now, I can still have fourteen beers at Chili’s™.

Wilder’s Cures for Male Loneliness

“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.” – Jaws

If you’re lonely you could buy some stocks. Then you’d have some company.

In July, the New York Times® ran a story titled, Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court? It wasn’t particularly political, and I think I can summarize it in just a few words: “If you’re a dude, have a few friends. The best friends are those that share some sort of common interest with you. Friends make you happy.” Writer Michelle Cottle strung those three sentences out into several hundred words of mainly forgettable fluff that would be obvious to anyone with an I.Q. higher than a Phoenix, Arizona winter temperature. In centigrade.

The real joy of this particular story, however, was the unleashing of memes. The picture that accompanied the article, however was, shall we say, regrettable. It’s above, showing a man (I think, it’s 2023, so who can even define a man in 2023) with massive, fat tears containing enough water to keep California going through a megadrought. I think he might be crying because he hates pickleball, or maybe because he can’t afford a shirt with sleeves.

I have so many orb memes.

Regardless, the /Internet/ reacted predictably to the picture, and created a list of memes that would make all those sages pondering orbs proud. I saved a few of them, just for you in the hopes that you, dear reader, might find your key to cure your loneliness. If you’re like me, you don’t have feelings other than cold, salty, and drunk, so I haven’t figured out what the whole “lonely” thing is.

Anyway, here are the memes, as found, with some annotation.

I think that drinking with Quint and killing sharks is definitely going to solve any issues with loneliness.

Curling? Not so much.

Now being in a Roman Legion? That’s the stuff! Hiking every day! Just avoid Germany.

It’s weird that the Turks mispronounce “Constantinople” as “Istanbul”.

I, for one am always happy when I’m at Chili’s. It is the booze.

I’ve never tried it, but, what could it hurt?

Now this looks inviting. I think termites like saloons, because they like the bar tender.

I wonder if he’ll be a crying-on-the-inside NPC?

Can confirm, this is fun until the cops show up.

Is the Wendigo related to the Whodigo, or the Wheredigo, or the Whatdigo?

Who can be lonely interacting with 400’ tall anime girls?

Travolta and Cage walk into a bar. Bartender says, “Why the wrong face?”

Lovecraft walked into a bar, and the rest is too humorous to even describe.

Ever notice that you never see Walken and Buscemi in the same place? Discuss.

Hell yeah, brother!

Well, even Hunter gets lonely.

I guess it didn’t work for Kaepernick.

But it might have worked out for Kaepernick’s dad.

Sometimes, it’s the simple things.

Or many simple things.

What’s a little psychosis between friends?

If I tried that, I’d be grounded.

Well, back to giant women . . .

And who doesn’t need another synthesizer?

Is there more to life?

Yes, yes there is.

Thankfully, my job will let me work as many hours as I want to.

There might be one other option?

The Invisible Recession

“1000 points of light . . . recession bad, recovery good . . . I think I’ve got that.” – The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear

If Dodge® makes an electric car, will they sell Dodge© Chargers™?

Inflation has really started to bite here in Modern Mayberry. I’m not sure about the Big Cities, but I’ve begun to notice it around here. Today at lunch I made a trip to McDonald’s®. It’s rare, most of the time (if I eat lunch at all) I eat at home. It’s more convenient, and I really, really hate lines, but this was a late lunch and I could drive straight to the window. But hey, for me, it’s the McChicken®.

The prices at McDonald’s® have gotten silly. Whereas there used to be enough value in a Big Mac™ to make one of them (occasionally) worth it, it’s just not the case nowadays. I didn’t spend too much time pondering the price on any of the burgers, since I could get nearly a pound of steak for the price of the average burger-fries-drink combos. But again, for me, it’s the McChicken™.

What a fun, cool, happening place, if you can get 3-for-free!

Why are people not going out?

The prices are silly.

I think (and I might be wrong) that our local McDonald’s™ just has to match the prices that are (more or less) nationally set by some sweaty accountant in Chicago wearing a Grimace™ costume and questioning the life choices that led him to have to report every day to Stacy, who is forced to wear a Hamburgler© costume. I can’t see the labor around Modern Mayberry costing nearly as much as in a bigger city. The food, I would imagine, costs exactly the same as in the bigger cities.

The result? I’ve noticed that the lines are much shorter at the local fast-food restaurants, even at peak hours. One of the regional chains hasn’t raised their prices, since all of their restaurants are just scattered around Upper Lower Midwestia and they don’t have to worry about the price of a Quarter Pounder™ in Manhattan. Their lines are the longest in town, so I follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded.”

Since COVID, my favorite local restaurant has closed. It was a bona fide restaurant, great service, great food. Supply chain issues coupled with labor oddities and lower business slowly torpedoed them. They liquidated before they lost a lot of money – they saw what was coming and wanted to go out on their terms.

I’ve been told that McDonald’s™ was sued once for bugs in their food. They won the case – no one on the jury believed they used any natural ingredients.

And our world got a little bit smaller, so we now have dinner somewhere else. It’s cheaper, but I notice that both of the places that we normally go aren’t very busy anymore. And the waitresses that work there aren’t changing jobs anymore – the good ones are keeping their jobs now. Something tells me they’re a little harder to get now.

So, if you’re counting restaurants and the people who work there (and those that used to own them) Modern Mayberry definitely has fewer restaurants. The revenue in the town might be the same, but there are (my guess) 20% fewer customers.

This is the invisible recession.

I always carry some McDonald’s® fries when I walk the dogs in winter. Fries go great with chilly dogs.

It’s invisible because I’d imagine that, even though McDonald’s® is (visually) selling less McFood©, they’re charging more. So, higher prices times lower volume is probably about even. But the value created to the consumer is far, far less even though revenues might be neutral. Unless you count eating healthier food than McDonald’s™ makes as value. Heck, Ronald has killed more people than Pennywise.

I suspect this is going on everywhere. Wages are certainly not keeping up with daily expenses, and those who are less fortunate haven’t had raises that have kept up with inflation. And why should employers pay more? In a recent month, a net 1.2 million jobs were “created” but 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. They were replaced by immigrants (illegal or legal).

Thankfully, corporate profits were saved!

It’s better than when he ran the farm using Artificial Intelligence and had to reboot it all before the power outage – AI, AI, Oh.

Interest rates are up, and I expect they will continue to go up because there is no semblance of any fiscal adulthood in Washington, D.C. on either side of the ball. The Democrat mantra of “spend more” is always followed by the Republican response of, “Well, okay, but not quite that much” as the dance of the destruction of the currency continues.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is based on the bet that politicians will continue to be weak and craven, and that 2024 is an election year. What do politicians like during an election year? A good economy with low inflation. Failing that, politicians like distractions and spreading money out like AOC on a Saturday night. If you can’t make a good economy, fake one.

More money floating around means . . . more inflation. But if wages aren’t going up because there’s a massive influx of illegals?

Just more misery, especially for those at the lower end of the pay scale. All of the typical Leftist voting blocks will be rewarded, of course. The standard Leftie professor at the average Leftie college (but I mostly repeat myself) will get raises because the Left takes care of itself and funds itself. The Left believes in the state and uses it as a propaganda and funding arm. Why do drama programs get special federal funds?

Because they vote Left.

I guess the finale was shot before a live audience.

But real Americans that aren’t tied into the ecosystem of government gimmes are seeing their difficulties multiply. Me? I’ll still mainly skip McDonald’s© and save a few bucks and have more steaks and fewer fries. But the invisible recession is already here, at least in Modern Mayberry.

But, hey, for me? It’s the McChicken™.

Mechanisms of Control: Information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: “Which side is the cornucopia on?”

The Mrs.: “The right side.”

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

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I explain Richard Dawson, Fruit of the Loom©, and Dolly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mechanisms Of Control: Financial

“You must not take the Controller away. We will all die! The Controller is young and powerful. Perfect!” – Star Trek, TOS

Song lyric idea: “The Beautiful Sheeple, The Beautiful Sheeple . . .”

Currency started out innocently enough. If I wanted to sell my wheat and then buy some beer, well, I could trade my wheat to the brewer. But what if the brewer had all the wheat he needed, but needed, oh, hops? My wheat would do him no good. There is evidence of a guy making beer in the Bible, after all there’s a book in the New Testament named Hebrews.

I could try to trade my wheat to the guy who grew hops, but if he didn’t need any wheat, what was I to do?

The problem that currency solved was a simple one – how do I trade with someone who doesn’t need what I have? How can accountants get into amusement parks? How can ATF® agents do, well, anything since absolutely no one has any use for them?

The solution was some sort of medium of exchange. In one sense, it’s magic. As long as everyone believes, it works. When used judiciously (i.e., backed by gold on demand) it transforms into something that is hard to manipulate – what we’d call money.

How do you greet a German wheat farmer? “Gluten tag.”

When backed by nothing, (like now) it’s simply cash or currency.

The history of the last fifty years (and the last twenty, especially) has been the history of printing currency out of nothing and then giving it to a few small groups, and then they use the cash to buy up everything.

Once a group owns everything, there’s no reason for them to worry about profit: they already own all the things worth owning. That’s BlackRock©. The Aptly Named® Larry Fink runs it, and it’s no longer about profits, it’s about control based on his ideology.

What does Fink expect you to do when it’s cold? Huddle around a candle. What about when it’s freezing? Maybe then Larry will let you light the candle.

People (last I checked) still drive cars driven by sweet, sweet internal combustion engines. Those internal combustion engines (for the most part) require sweet, sweet crude oil to be turned into gasoline and diesel. Yeah, ethanol exists and so does biodiesel, but those can’t pull the load, and ethanol actively takes food out of the supply chain.

What if, however, the United Nations leaned on banks to get them to stop the supply of oil by choking off the supply of cash to oil producing nations?

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: it’s not about humanity or human rights – it’s about control.

Is the reason Saudi Arabia has so much money all the oil cash, or that they won’t let their women spend it?

Please don’t believe me, believe them when they say it. Here is the head of the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) saying that “central banks will have absolute control over all money (sic)”. This is in how each dollar (or whatever unit) is used, what people are allowed to buy, and what people are prohibited to buy.

Why do Central Bankers drive Ferraris®? Because you’re okay with a Fiat©.

One thing I know that they’d love to do is to make money evaporate to force people to spend rather than save. This can be done with electronic currency, and I expect they will do it to make sure that people can’t save and are forced to work every day of their lives.

Even more than now.

35% of Americans think they’ll max out at least one credit card this year.
38% are using their cards for expenses that they never used a card for.
62% are considering a “side-gig”, even if they already have a job.

-Fintech Times, July 25, 2023 (LINK)

Things are looking down for many Americans. When it comes to the point of using credit cards for financing life, it’s getting rough – I know, I was in that trap when I was in my 20s. I’ve seen it here in Modern Mayberry where the labor market is now getting tighter, and more people are looking for work. Employers can now be a bit choosier, which will put downward pressure on wages. The reason for this is simple: people aren’t going to McDonald’s®, they’re eating at home for half (or less) the price.

Another sign of control: in a recent month, 1.2 million “native or heritage”, (i.e., Americans actually born as Americans from American parents in America) lost their jobs. They were replaced by 600,000 immigrants. Low-cost labor is still being imported, and putting even more wage pressure on the middle and lower classes. The Biden administration even ordered that some of the gates in “The Wall” be welded open, which defeats the whole “wall” idea.

Looks like that Bill Gates was in charge of the wall, too. Look at all the Windows®.

To paraphrase William Jennings Bryant (among others), it is difficult to get a person to voice dissent when their next meal requires them to agree. That, then, is the nature of control of economic systems as demonstrated by BlackRock®, the BIS©, and the World Economic Forum™ – the desire is to make it so that the average person cannot resist without being kicked outside of the system that provides food, shelter, and the occasional luxury.

I’m sure it would be easy to start your own Central Bank . . . oh, maybe not.

Even that deal is in danger: the desire to dramatically change the way that people work and live is on the table for these groups. Who, exactly, do you think wants you to live in a pod and eat the bugs, and not own anything? Owning everything that matters isn’t enough – they want to own everything, and make your ability to have anything depending on you giving them all of yourself.

Even your thoughts.

And to think, all we really wanted was a beer. I guess it was pretty expensive.

We Already Know The Solutions

“Watch your top knot.” – Jeremiah Johnson

Bill Clinton thought Hillary would be a good president: “There’s no chance she’ll blow it.”

Alexander the Great is said to have solved the riddle of the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C. Whoever solved the Knot, the legend said, would rule all of Asia. Alexander took one look at the large and complex knot, pulled out his sword and cut right through it. I think Alexander was certain that he’d be successful and that no one would challenge his solution since he had, you know, an army with him. I guess you could say he was so confident that he was knot sure.

One of the things that I’ve seen fairly consistently in my life is that, like Alexander, I generally know the answer right when I see the problem. Some of them, like calculus problems, it took a lot of work to get the answer, admittedly, but there was no place when I said, “Well, if only the Federal government had a Federal Bureau of Solving Calculus problems, I’d be set.” No. I knew the only answer was for me to sit down and hack through that calculus problem until I had it solved.

Most problems in life are just that simple. Too hot in the living room? Get a fan. Turn the air conditioning down. Experiment to see how many cold beers it takes to make me feel cold. But I never think to act on that until I’m uncomfortable. When I’m slightly warm, I don’t go running for the fan, I just deal with it. But when I start to sweat?

Time to take action.

What does a hipster say to create peer pressure? “C’mon, man, no one is doing it!”

I think most people are like this, not just me. Sure, there are things I do when I anticipate a problem coming down the road to save myself the trouble. But like that room temperature slowly rising, at some point I look at the situation and note, “This must be dealt with.” But I always knew the solution.

The solution itself isn’t the issue. Most solutions are mind-numbingly clear. The level of frustration or fear or whatever motivating me just has to be high enough that I’m willing to take the action necessary to solve the problem. To be clear, I also have to believe that my action might work – if I think the air conditioner is broken, for instance, I won’t bother to go over to turn it on and will stick with the whole “drink a lot of really cold beer” idea.

The above paragraph contains all three of dead economist Ludwig Von Mises’ causes of Human Action. Von Mises said for anyone to take conscious action, for any action three things needed to be present:

A Vision of a Better State
A Path to That Better State
Belief That Following the Path Will Take Us to That Better State.

While I’m focusing on today is when we already know what we want, I’ll just noted that it doesn’t have to come in that order.

It turns out my chemistry teacher was right – alcohol is a solution.

On a personal level, I have to be uncomfortable enough from where I am and where I could be to initiate action. The Vision has to be sufficiently far from where I am for me to care. But, again, I generally know the solution, it just requires enough discomfort to create action. If my air conditioner isn’t working in December, that’s not a big deal. If it has failed in July, that’s where I’m willing to pay extra to see the repair folks show up on a Sunday afternoon because the liquor stores are closed then.

Other examples – I don’t paint my house when it’s a little faded, I might need to see some bare spots. I wait until the trashcan is maybe slightly more than full to take it out. But in each case the action isn’t in question. I always know the solution. It’s not a mystery.

It’s similar as a society. In a society, we all have the ability to act as individuals, but there is some minimum number of people that are required to take action. One group, the 3%ers, took their name from the idea that only 3% of the American Colonial population fought and won against the British. I’m not sure that 3% is correct; that’s irrelevant to the post.

Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.

Certainly, that’s a minimization, because if there hadn’t been broad support for the American Revolution anyway, it wouldn’t have happened. Rather, I am certain that group of fighters represented the symptom of a greater dissatisfaction.

Everyone on the side of the Revolution knew what had to be done. If you take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it certainly spells out the vision, and also spells out the reasons why it was important to take the action.

Of the signers, at least John Hancock had belief that the actions would work, since he signed his name so boldly and largely. And John Hancock never told a knock-knock joke. Why? Freedom rings, baby.

For each of the societal ills we see, the solution isn’t complex, it’s simple. We just haven’t had the guts to implement it. If mobs are ruling the streets of San Francisco or Chicago or Malmo, the solution isn’t to study the problem with a commission. The solution is to make crime much more uncomfortable than the reward for committing the crime.

I’m glad Godzilla® wasn’t Korean. That would have been Seoul destroying.

That solution to stopping crime will involve dead criminals. Oddly, it takes less to keep criminals in line than to stop criminality, but the solution almost always involves Rooftop Koreans and bar owners with very short shotguns and prosecutors that don’t prosecute good and honest people stopping crime.

If the problem is illegals flooding the southern border, the only actual solution is to make living in the United States a living hell for illegals. I assure you, if sufficient pressure was applied, the illegals would deport themselves in weeks.

Have an anchor baby? Fine. It goes into an orphanage or with foster parents. Illegals have to leave. Something tells me the parents will pack up the kids as they head out.

Brought here as a young child and the United States is the only country they’ve ever known? Not my problem. They have to go back.

Drugs? Simple solution. I’ll leave that one to you.

Illegitimate kids? Remove spousal support and child support and welfare. Illegitimate kids will cease in a year and the baby-daddy with 20 different baby-mommas will disappear while those baby-mommas cease to have sex randomly. Or, if they do? They have to suffer the consequences.

What about the kids? Yeah, heard it. Don’t care. It’s that sort of forced compassion that destroys nations, turns them into countries, and eventually leads to Balkanization.

I fell into the reupholstery machine at the furniture factory. I’m completely recovered now.

I’m right and every person reading this knows it.

The wonderful part is that these solutions will take place. Sadly, because the room is getting warmer, these solutions will take place only when the discomfort is so high that it will be unpleasant for all concerned.

And then, once again, the Gordian Knot will be solved.

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity. Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros. Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”. Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once. It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream. Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source. The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it. So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane. I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol. These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote. Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could make furniture out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could heat houses with it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles. The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario. 45%! The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years. I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years. That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles. I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist. Die. Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon. Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered. Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier. It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car. The question is, where do those materials come from? If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn. Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today. Cobalt increases would be 2,000%. The increase in availability alone is questionable. Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is. And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious. China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO₂, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO₂. Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second? The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever. The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity. That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy. Me? I have my own plans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who knew???

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Après Trump, qui? (After Trump, who?)

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

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

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

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