Category: Big Thoughts

Lost The Plot: 17 True Things We Forgot

“To tell you the truth, Bilbo has been a bit odd lately.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Would you call someone who microwaved hot dogs Frank Zappa?

Something went off the rails in the twentieth century.  If I were to try to pinpoint it, it would probably be around when Woodrow Wilson was president, as if a large darkness began to descend and ooze through society.  It has been slowly corrosive for decades, but the post-2000 years, and especially the Obama years really saw it make insidious . . . progress.

Why?

At least in part because we forgot many of the really important things that we have always known, for the existence of mankind at least, to be true.

Below is a list of 17 True things that people “forgot” for a few decades that have pushed our civilization to collapse:

  • Men and Women Are Physiologically Different

This has fed the current trans nonsense, and still exists when every single scientific study has shown that the average man over twice as strong as the average woman, and almost always the strongest woman in a study is weaker than the weakest man.

I wrote a book on penguins once.  In hindsight, I should have used paper.

  • Men/Women Cognitively Different

Again, there are basic differences in the way that a woman’s mind and a man’s mind work.  Men are better at spatial thinking, reasoning, and math, whereas women are exceptional at waging personal vendettas for petty reasons.  Oh, and empathy.  Women are good at that, too.

  • Race Is A Real Biological Fact

Race is really more than skin deep.  I once saw a post where the Red Cross™ was looking for more black donors because of the various cofactors that make it a better match for black recipients.  More than that, A.I. can tell the race of a patient by an x-ray.  So, besides being blood, skin, and bone deep, each race was isolated and separated in time, in some cases by more than 70,000 years (Australian Aborigines).  So, yeah, people of different races are different.

  • Intelligence Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Anyone who studies intelligence will tell you that at least 50% of intelligence is inherited, and the number might be 80%.  Does that mean two absolute idiots might not birth a genius?  Sure.  It could happen.  And there might also be desperate single MILFs less than a mile away, like my computer keeps telling me.

Einstein married his cousin, proving that even his marriage was relative.

  • Character Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Growing up in a small town, people would say things like, “That family is no good,” and they were generally right.  Are we slaves to it?  No.  Whereas with intelligence, you can’t hone it, with character you can, which means that maybe not all is lost for Hunter Bi . . . oh, too late.

  • The Family Is Society’s Atom

Feminism requires that the individual be the atom of society so that women can be EmpOwERed grrlbosses, but that is clearly insanity.  No family, no society – it all falls apart.

  • Culture Isn’t Interchangeable

Tacos aren’t Viking.  And culture is far more than a taco.  Why lots of people don’t recognize American culture is the same reason that fish don’t recognize water – they’re surrounded by it all the time and can’t imagine life without it.

  • Borders, Language, Culture, and People Define Nations

Without those, it’s either a country or an empire and not a nation.  And if it’s a country, it will Balkanize or be led by an authoritarian.

  • GDP Growth ≠ Happiness

GDP growth was a focus during the Cold War.  Why?  We needed stuff to beat the horrific ideology of the commies.  We won.  But now we try to make an economy larger at the expense of the people.  How many rich couples were happier when they were young and poor?

I’m joining a Cold War reenactor group – we get together on weekends with a keg and without cell phones and listen to heavy metal.

  • Work Has Intrinsic Value

Sweat builds your soul and gives you freedom—UBI and welfare are cages for the human soul.

  • Competition Drives Progress

And war is the ultimate competition.  What has happened to the vitality of Europe as it has the longest war-free period in its history?

  • Death Is Inevitable

Blue Öyster Cult® said that you shouldn’t fear the reaper, and that’s fairly sound advice.  We’re all going to die.  The parade will end.  To paraphrase Monty Python, we will all become ex-parrots.  Focus on the living bit, and add in a little more cowbell.

I hear that when ducks fly over the pyramids, they flock like an Egyptian.

  • Equality Doesn’t Exist

Equality under the law can exist, equality of rights can exist, but people are unequal in every possible physical, cognitive or moral way.

  • Authority Exists For A Reason

The Founding Fathers thought long and hard about how to set up self-governance in the United States.  They didn’t settle on, “everyone do whatever they want”.  Authority in society is required because:

  • Humans Are Imperfectible

Chasing communist Utopia led to more deaths in the twentieth century than any other man-made condition.  People are flawed, and systems have to take that into account.

Is a classy fish sofishticated?

  • Truth, Beauty, And Goodness Exist

Not GloboLeftist “My truth” but Truth, with a capital T.  The same with Beauty and Goodness, both of which the GloboLeft similarly tried to define as nonexistent.

  • A Divine Presence Exists

YMMV, but everything I’ve seen shows that this is both a physical and mathematical certainty.

That’s a start at the list, and I’m sure you have more.  Whenever a society becomes based on ideas that aren’t real, it becomes unstable.  Whenever a Man With A Plan® says that they’re going to rebuild society, run.

And when people spout corrosive philosophies that tear apart families and create societal misery, why do we reward them by sending them to congress and or giving them prestigious professorships?

What other things that everyone knew in 1025 A.D. have we forgotten?

Life Is Not Random. This Isn’t A Mistake.

“I refuse to believe that mankind is a random byproduct of molecular circumstance, no more than the result of mere biological chance.” – Alien: Covenant

A LEGO® store opened in my hometown. People lined up for blocks.

There are times that life seems random, chaotic. In our current time, especially, change is moving faster than a Disney™ transvestite can ruin a childhood.

It seems random.

But it’s not.

As I look deeper and deeper into the world, I see that the world, and in fact the entire Universe, is as it is for a reason. That’s a big claim. So why am I certain that this is the case?

Physics, baby.

The Universe is tuned for life. There’s a quantity called the “fine structure constant” which is roughly 1/137. And, there aren’t any units, so I can’t even poke fun at the communist metric system.

What the fine structure constant represents is the relationship between the elementary charge of an electron, how hard it is to make a spark, pi, the speed of lights, and the relationship between wavelength and energy of a photon. So, it’s a lot of stuff to mix up, and I’m surprised the number of lime-flavored PEZ™ bricks in Guatemala isn’t included as well, but I didn’t get a vote.

When photons pass each other do they just wave?

What’s important, though, is that if it were much different than its current value, life doesn’t exist. If the number is much bigger, electrons are bound too closely to the atom this shrinks the size of the atom, making your mother even shorter and denser. I can hear the kids now: “Your momma’s a neutron star.”

Also, chemistry is built around electrons zooming from one atom to the next, so if the electrons don’t move, poof. No steak.

If the fine structure constant is much smaller, important things like carbon and oxygen couldn’t stick together, and, boom. No beer.

Life existing requires this one number being within a fairly narrow range around that 1/137. 4/137 and, zap, no more Toaster Strudels™. Of any flavor.

I wrote a book about using stairs. It’s a step-by-step guide.

Throw everything up randomly, and nothing useful exists. Our Universe is really like Goldilocks was so picky that she had to have her porridge between 112.312°F and 114.452°F (between 4 and 7 liters). Yes, she would have starved.

That’s not all – change the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant by just a few percent and no useful structures can ever form. Ever.

That’s the big picture. But I’m far from original, and this is far from new knowledge.

The Greeks stole my thunder and had the Fates: Clotho, Larry, and Curly, I think. The Romans had Fortuna: Fortuna was worse than vodka at bringing both prosperity and ruin. The Norns knit the fates of the Vikings while drinking mead and sitting under Yggdrasil. Oh, and Matthew 10:29 would like a word as well:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

Yes, I know that’s not a sparrow.

I generally leave my house within the same thirty second window every day. I know that’s crappy OpSec, but it does soothe my autism. When I’m delayed, I’ve often had the thought that wasn’t without a reason, good or bad. What seems to be random chance is almost certainly not. If I lose a sock, get a flat, or have “stumble” upon an article, it’s just me being a part of the play.

Now it may surprise you, but my life isn’t perfect. There have been goofs I’ve made, and I’ve had both good and bad luck. But I’ll tell you, it often wasn’t something I could perceive right at that moment. The old Chinese parable comes to mind:

A farmer’s horse runs away, prompting neighbors to lament his bad luck. “Maybe,” he replies. Days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “Good luck!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” he says. His son, taming the new horses, falls and breaks his leg— “Bad luck! The neighbors sat. “Maybe,” the farmer shrugs. Soon, war breaks out, and the Emperor’s army comes through town, drafting all the able-bodied young men, but the son’s injury spares him from conscription. “Good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer repeats.

See, what the farmer realized is that his son might end up married to Greta Thunberg.

Life’s no crapshoot, though – the place was designed for us. There are no coincidences—our wins, our flops, even that flat tire last Tuesday are part of the plan, and it’s no accident you’re reading this.

And we don’t talk about time travel.

The paradox is, though, you’re not a pawn, you’re also the player. Our actions matter. Life isn’t a cosmic slot machine, but the things we do and experience are lessons and mold us, or mold someone else. And it’s in that narrow window that wonderful things happen.

How do I know that?

We’re here. And so is beer. And so is every other wonderful part of creation.

Except for the metric system. The French can have that one back.

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole.  I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union.  As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination.  In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing?  They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way.  They had the institutions:  colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose.  They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power.  Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor.  How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks.  The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found) 

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves.  This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof?  Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

  • Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
  • Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it.   Yay death!
  • Wanting to have Zero Population Growth©, at least in white populations living in traditionally white countries.
  • Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
  • Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first.  This happens in roughly this order:

  • Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
  • Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
  • Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
  • Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
  • Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
  • Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal?  What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies.  The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see.  Men are women?  Truth is a lie?  Strength is weakness?  Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either.  They’re currently working on “messaging”.  What is messaging?  It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong.  The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them.  The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

  • Men are no different than women,
  • Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
  • Being a woman is something anyone can be,
  • Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
  • The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change.  One of those changes has and will be in economics.  I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight?  Certainly, it will.  But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist?  If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society.  Ha!  Just kidding.  They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested.  DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is.  And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland?  You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated:  the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon.  No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit.  The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything.  Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

  • Ukraine versus Russia.
  • Palestine versus Israel.
  • Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
  • Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant.   I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion:  I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me.  And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it.  News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion.  Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details.  I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy:  what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary:  if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away?  Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really.  And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them.  I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board.  It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe.  People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game.  But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares.  In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased.  Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral.  I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity.  Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders.  Just not our borders.  Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction?   Not a problem.

Oh, Europe.  I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians.  And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go.  If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about.  The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century.  Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin.  Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic.  I guess I can see that.  Ma Wilder cared what I thought.  Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him.  Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador.  Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much.  Why?  The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right.  When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first.  And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

The Funniest Movie Review You’ll Read All Day. Promise: The Andromeda Strain.

“I’ll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.” – The Andromeda Strain

What do you call it when two strains of a disease are identical?  Plague-erism.

Flipping through the television the other night, there were movies the computer network that pervades our lives (paging Uncle Ted) thought I might want to watch.  Now, if you’re a paranoid person, you might think about how by putting a piece of media in front of a particular person at a particular time might be nudging, but hey, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

The one that caught my eye was one I’d seen as a kid – The Andromeda Strain (1971).

I am certain I haven’t seen The Andromeda Strain since I was younger than 10.  I think I saw it on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday night Creepy Creature Feature UHF show.  Regardless, I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it another looks for the sake of nostalgia.

For those, like me, who were a little fuzzy on the plot, I’ll give it a recap.

A satellite re-enters the atmosphere, and because Elon Musk isn’t even born yet, it lands in the middle of a village in northeastern New Mexico.  Because New Mexico hasn’t agreed to join the United States and rename itself Greenland, a virus kills everyone in town.  And there’s not a Tesla® in sight to tow it.

Why does Elon love satellites so much?  He’s transmitten with them.

In the first amazingly improbable event, the government decides not to drive to pick it up, but rather sends a Phantom F-4 to take pictures.  Now, I really think the Phantom F-4 is a really cool plane, but I’d bet that since in 1971 you couldn’t throw a rock and not hit an Air Force plane in New Mexico they could have sent something else, but, hey, Phantom F-4s are big sexy to the under 10 crowd.

Hell, they’re still sexy to me at current age.

Second in are two scientists who have the equivalent of sixteen days of air in their space suits, because everyone knows you send Nobel Prize-winning scientists to do field reconnaissance in an area where everyone is dead from a completely unknown cause.

They find a drunk and a baby.  It would have been more reasonable to find a drunk baby, because, after all, New Mexico, so they lose credibility points on that one, too.

That is the most Zelensky-like baby I’ve ever seen.

By some mysterious field, the drunk and baby are separated from the scientists while simultaneously being isolated from everyone and sent to the most secret laboratory in the universe (more on that later) while the scientists make their way much more slowly there.

It is at the facility where we discover that the three male scientists all suffer from the same birth defect:  they were born without any sort of individual personality.  The lone female scientist is played by an actress who was 39, but looked like she was closer to 59.  I guess life was harder in 1971.  The female scientist does, however have a personality, most charitably described as “being an utter bitch.”  How bad was it?  She could be on The View without an audition.

So, they make it to this super top-secret biological containment lab, and this one isn’t even in Wuhan.  It is, instead, cunningly hidden below an anonymous Department of Agriculture soil testing building.  How do you access this lab?

By going into the tool room and pressing a secret button near the wheelbarrows.  It’s like James Bond meets Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres.  All we needed, really, was Eb as a lab assistant.

Apparently when you press the secret button it goes Dong.  Ding Dong.

Here is where the plot falls apart for adult John Wilder.  From the dialogue, it becomes clear that this super-secret lab was built in the last year.  And it is secret.  But it also goes for, at a minimum, of 140 feet (7.4 Angstroms) under the ground.  It’s also, again, by observation, at least 150 feet (2 Curies) wide.

This building is not made of straw, sticks, or bricks, rather, it looks like it could be a space station.  Based on my not inconsiderable experience in building large biological containment laboratories underground, I would estimate that the minimum cost for a structure of this type (and I mean minimum) would be three-quarters of a billion dollars, and much more likely to be on the order of two or three billion.

And it was done in a year.  With a computer system that still isn’t available in 2025.

Have you ever met contractors?  I have never met a group of people more like a ladies sewing-circle for gossip.  And can you imagine how much they’d talk at the bars at night?  Sure, everybody with the plans has a Top Secret Compartmented Information clearance, but somebody has to bend the rebar, baby.  And those dudes leave behind empty bottles of Schlitz™ and out-of-wedlock children named Carl.

Three billion dollars, and constructed in a year?  Carl’s dad built it while drunk and smelling like stale Dairy Queen™.

Oh, and did I mention that when the four scientists got to this lab, it was fully staffed by people who were comfortable there and knew how to run everything?  What the hell did those people do all day until the Green Chili Greenlanders were killed by the alien virus?  Minesweeper™ and the World Wide Web© hadn’t been invented yet.  I bet they did shots of Jim Beam© all day or played Pong™ with petri dishes.

Paging D.O.G.E.!

We discover that the facility has a nuclear bomb planted in it, and the only person trusted to let the whole place blow up is the Incel among the group.  Great strategy – put the 50 year old virgin in charge, hell, I think his name is even Dr. Foreveralone.  In an Amazing Plot Twist™ the scientists discover that the thing that killed everyone thrives on power and a nuclear bomb would make it eat Pittsburgh.

In a Predictable Plot Device©, it turns out you can’t disarm the bomb until it decides it wants to blow up.  Great planning, Kevin, father of Carl.

Great Caesar’s ghost, Marty!  Who could have seen this plot device coming?

But wait!  Now the organism has mutated!  It no longer kills people, it just wants to . . . eat synthetic rubber?  Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Deus Ex Machina.  The scientists end up doing nothing, and saving no one while spending billions.  In this they may have inspired Dr. Fauci.

My biggest problem with the movie is that it assumes that government is competent in doing things other than taxing people, printing money, and allowing people to play Minesweeper® while writing grants to perform Gay Sesame Street© in Rhodesia.

I guess I can see that.  1971 America isn’t 2025 America.  We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.

THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE IT BORING.

The other strange thought is that government really wanted to help the people.  I don’t get that in 2025 America.  We have a Department of Education that never educated anyone, and a Department of Energy that doesn’t produce energy.  If we had a Department of Air, we’d probably all suffocate since the department would focus on getting air to Botswana.

Or, maybe, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

Is The A.I. Singularity In The Rear View Mirror?

“Changed? What did you do? Perform and exorcism?” – Ruthless People

I get real estate, but what about virtual estate? (meme as found)

It’s a bit ironic that this is the first post that I’m making using my new computer. My old one developed a severe case of epilepsy, where it would start making flashing lights, vibrating erratically, and then just shut down for a few minutes. The Boy came over and tried a techsorcism, but was unable to bring it back into the land of normally functioning computers.

My new laptop is working great. The Boy spec’d it out for me, based on his noting that I treated my old laptop like a “rented mule”. Fair enough, though I didn’t know that they made computers out of quarter-inch (23.2 kiloPascals) thick plate steel.

And I think someone stole Microsoft™ Office© from my laptop. To whoever did this, I will find you. You have my Word®.

But just while I was sweating blood considering what the hell I was going to write about for my topic, I was doomscrolling on my cell phone. How dare you think it was in the bathroom.

Regardless, what popped up was this article by Mark Jeftovic in my inbox (link below), which was my inspiration for this post. It’s not a long article, but the idea is stunning: the point where AI reaches what we would refer to as singularity isn’t something that happens in the future, rather, it is something that has already happened.

The Singularity Has Already Happened

Cue raised Wilder eyebrow.

If that occurs (or, as Jeftovic muses, has occurred) this will create a new world. I’m quoting an Xeet™ (LINK) from an X© account that claims that “we’ve crossed the barrier into recursive intelligence territory . . . the real story is the complete collapse of every barrier between conceivable and achievable.”

That’s a big claim, and I don’t know that I believe it. And, to be clear, Jeftovic doesn’t stand by the quoted Xeet™, either. But if it is a LARP on a lark, well, it’s interesting fiction.

I finally crossed “running a marathon” off of my bucket list. I’m relieved. There was no way I was ever gonna do that.

Let’s continue on with that very evocative phrase in mind . . . losing the barrier between “conceivable and achievable”. That rattled around the brainpan so much I felt like a Kennedy on a Dallas vacation.

I’ll start with this: not everything that humans conceive of is possible. There are certain things that we can conceive of that might violate some fundamental principle of the universe in such way as to be really impossible. Perhaps time travel is one of them? Perhaps it’s Disney™ making a good movie in this century?

Who can say.

But women do defy physics – the heavier they get, the easier they are to pick up.

But I assure you, much more is possible. In 1874, the story goes, a twenty-year-old German living in Holstein (it’s odd that so many ranchers raise German provinces) went up to his physics professor and said to his professor, “Hey, I like physics. I think I might want to become a theoretical physicist.”

“Nah, kid, don’t do it. Physics is pretty much like Madonna – everyone has been there, it’s all used up, and you don’t want to look too closely at what’s left.” I believe this is a correct translation, but, to be honest, I was using a Speak’n’Spell™.

We should be glad the student ignored his professor, since that student was Max Planck, who is also the guy who discovered quantum theory. And, remember, without quantum theory, single-serving airplane booze bottle bourbon would never have been developed and Madonna would still be an actual virgin.

I bring up this example for your consideration because I fully believe that much, much more is possible in our universe than we imagine. I mean, AI won’t help women be better airplane pilots.

Too soon?

Let’s get serious. Much more is possible, and the landscape has seriously changed since I first heard “ChatGPT™”.

We really can’t see where all of this is going right now. I recall listening to Scott Adams a year or so ago talking about AI. He noted that when he first got ChatGPT™, he thought that the way to get ahead was for a person to really get good at using it to solve business problems, and that would command a good salary.

Adams later gave up on that idea: ChatGPT© was evolving so quickly that “mastering” it was impossible because it kept changing so quickly. In watching these large language models (LLMs) develop it’s clear – they are becoming smarter, quickly. They are able to comment intelligently on writing, and to improve clarity. They’re able to program. They’re able to determine protein folding structures. They can determine who is going to die by looking at an EKG.

And, they are just starting.

The boundaries of what we can know are bounded by what a single person can do in a single meatspace life. An AI could reach across disciplines, rapidly taking information from one area to another, and synthesizing results and experiences that a single person could never have.

Get ready for research to move at a faster rate than at any point in history, and knowledge to be accumulated at a rate where the last two hundred years’ worth of technological advances might be seen in two. I know some are skeptical, but we’ve seen advances in the performance of LLMs so quickly as to be faster than the Bernie Sanders jumping on a loose dollar bill on the sidewalk while yelling about the evils of capitalist greed.

What do Bernie Sanders supporters call their roommates? Mom and Dad.

I am convinced now that the current research in AI is amazingly rapid, and it will be unrecognizable from our vantage point in just three years.

What we do with it, is up to us.

Will we be like monkeys with an iPhone™, using it to break rocks while we stair at our reflections in the shiny black mirror, or will we use it to remove all the barriers, quickly, between our ideas and reality?

Or what if Jeftovic is right and it’s not cosplay prophecy, and it has happened already, and we’re just in that odd space before the fireworks start?

Perhaps we’ll The Boy to come back and do many more techsorcisms?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Sunny With A Slight Silence Of The Lambs

“Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?” – Silence of the Lambs

If Miley Cyrus starred in a Silence of the Lambs reboot, would she play Hannibal Montannibal?

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

Volume VI, Issue 10

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I moved the Clock O’Doom down a notch, but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up.  If things keep on an even keel I’ll notch it down to 6.  Beware: it can notch up 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 – Silence of the Left – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Changes – 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.

Silence of the Left

Okay, the Left really isn’t silent – they’ve never been silent, since there’s no way to signal virtue when they’re quiet.  It’s like feminists – if they get agitated they either dress up like a character from The Handmaid’s Tale or take off all their clothes and scream.

So, they’re not really silent.  But they are confused.  Here, mainly in snips from the last month, are pictures of what’s going on with the GloboLeft.

First, they realize that being insane isn’t working at all for them, and are attempting to look a little more sane.  The person they chose to give the response to Trump after his address to Congress in March was an example:  someone trying to not look like a rabid socialist.

But they simply can’t help themselves.  At their DNC they did all the proper pronoun thing, and then elected far left attention hogg the aptly named David Hogg as their vice chair.

But in D.C., there’s panic.  How bad?

I wonder if the thought of treason is the cause of some of these searches?

As well as corruption at the highest level to the tune of billions of dollars.  I find it hard to believe that this is legal.

If they can’t get fat Stacy Abrams to hire them, looks like it’s too late to take up coding:

And if you start to feel sympathy, remember they hate you and want you dead.

As for me?

Violence and Censorship Update

It’s becoming clear that defunding US A.I.D. did a lot of good that we didn’t expect.  How much propaganda were they pouring down our throats?

Maybe we’ll never know, as the coverup is ongoing:

But it appears that having opinions the GloboLeft doesn’t like are no longer career-ending for some:

But, since Trump is in office, they’ll tell some truth.  When it suits them.

That’s a bit much to give a nation for information warfare.  How much went to Swiss bank accounts, and how much was disinformation aimed at you?

Is this something people can talk about now and not be banished?

By these people?

Oh, and the GloboLeft are getting ideas:

But nature is healing.

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new administration.  Early results are better than Biden’s numbers, but I’ll wait a month or two before I post them.  I anticipate a recession, however – writing about that last week.

Here are parts of the report card on Biden’s America:

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 indicators in are down slightly, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it is unchanged this month.

Economic:

The economy is stable this month.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since COVID.

Change

One of the things that Trump did in selecting leadership for this second term was (in many cases) avoid D.C. insiders.  In fact, he chose people who had been attacked by the establishment to be leaders in many cases.  If they weren’t loyal to Trump, they certainly weren’t loyal to the establishment like John Bolton or Jeff Sessions.  Since choosing people has always been his weakness, perhaps this method of selection will be better.

There is danger in change, obviously.  Ripping apart structures that have been built over decades will have consequences – intended and unintended.  Removing the funding for US A.I.D. has removed at least some funding for the GloboLeft, and apparently they’re missing it.  As the funding dries up, pretty soon income for many of the GloboLeftElite chattering classes will dry up as well.  I’d expect that those who were deepest in the trough will scream the loudest.

This level of change does carry the possibility of bringing Civil War 2.0 to reality sooner, but if Trump is successful, it might be avoided entirely.

Only time will tell.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/smith_seattle1/status/1890205737676337268
https://x.com/smith_seattle1/status/1889116579582853301
https://x.com/tecas2000/status/1896506323472445798
https://x.com/i/status/1892598585965088809
https://x.com/smith_seattle1/status/1896730930787889459
https://x.com/tecas2000/status/1896312656514150854
https://x.com/tecas2000/status/1898047766535762151

GOOD GUY

https://x.com/i/status/1892083497373712489

ONE GUY

https://www.kentuckystatepolice.ky.gov/news/p11-2-16-2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kentucky-child-shoots-kills-2-home-invaders-rcna192833
https://patch.com/california/across-ca/ca-bill-would-limit-lethal-force-rights-self-home-defense
https://www.nssf.org/articles/u-s-house-subcommittee-holds-hearing-on-the-right-to-self-defense/

BODY COUNT

https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx
https://archive.is/28w8H#selection-655.123-655.223
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14410295/liberals-gun-ownership-america-reasons.html
https://religionunplugged.com/news/christianity-maintains-dominance-in-us-as-religiously-unaffiliated-levels-off-pew-study-shows
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-us-states-where-christianity-surging-falling-2038851

VOTE COUNT

https://www.rodmartin.org/p/the-florida-voter-fraud-case-that
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/elon-musk-voter-fraud-group
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/trump-postal-service-executive-order-mail-voting-threat/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-save-act-overview-and-facts/
https://www.newsweek.com/married-women-stopped-voting-save-act-2029325

CIVIL WAR

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/illinois-counties-secession-vote-indiana-j-b-pritzker-todd-huston-5a93d624
https://www.newsweek.com/illinois-secession-indiana-bill-todd-huston-2036023
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-05-state-of-donald-trump-union-permanent-culture-war-address-congress/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/left-wants-us-dead-larry-klayman-warns-violent-revolution-short-order
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/arming-america-couple-charged-fraud-scheme-ready-kill-democrats-potential-civil-war-fbi-says
https://baptistnews.com/article/a-second-civil-war/
https://in.benzinga.com/personal-finance/25/03/44183616/probably-past-the-point-of-compromise-and-empathy-billionaire-investor-ray-dalio-tells-tucker-carlson-were-already-in-a-civil-war
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/04/the-democrats-coming-civil-war/
https://zeteo.com/p/trump-maga-civil-war-violence-congress
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/braid-invading-canada-would-spark-guerrilla-fight-lasting-decades-expert-says
https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/alien-invasion-to-civil-war-self-proclaimed-time-traveller-sparks-frenzy-with-2025-doomsday-predictions-7812591

What Does Winning Look Like?

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?

I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.”  His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention.  His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.”  The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:

  • GDP Growth
  • Price of Eggs
  • Stock Market Level

These are mainly material things.  The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.

Fun fact:  if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.

Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?

I’ll answer that question with another question:  Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?

I think that question is easy to answer:  we were happier then.

Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then.  Did we have a society based on greater trust?  Yes, yes we did.  Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).

Doors were unlocked.  Cars were unlocked.  The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.

There was also a greater presence.  People were where they were, mostly.  Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed.  People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.

If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme.  It’ll be lit.

And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input.  A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment.  A Xeet™?  It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.

We also thought differently.  When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away.  Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem.  It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.

There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.

There was also a greater patience.  The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”.  Yes.  That’s right.  A month and a half.  There was no next-day Prime™ delivery.  I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner.  The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.

Oh, sure, there were negatives, too.  I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone.  I’m pretty sure that polio sucked.  Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes).  And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden.  MKUltra, anyone?

And air conditioning.  I really like that.

But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.

Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze.  He called it air conditioning.

It hasn’t brought us together.  Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa.  The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.

It hasn’t made us stronger.  As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been.  Part of that is the wealth.  If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy.  A person who lives in a box?  They shrug at a thunderstorm.

Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?

Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle.  I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff.  I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.

So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.

My advice?  Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become.  You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.

What Will Come From The Current Recession?

“No tomorrow?  That means there’d be no consequences.  No hangovers.  We could do whatever we wanted!” – Groundhog Day

An economist falls off a cliff.  During the fall, he notes, “So far, so good.  It’s different this time.  Soft landing ahead!”

Note:  no podcast this week.  Hoping to have a new computer that can hear things as soon as my staff gets the specifications together.

Last week I let on that I thought a recession was coming.  I mean, I always think a recession is coming, so that was no big surprise, but it looks like from preliminary data that the economy is actually contracting this quarter, so, if we match it with one more quarter of contraction that’s the textbook definition of a recession.  Or maybe the economy is having a baby.  I slept through that part of health class.

It is a long-used trick of sitting presidents to treat the economy like a 1980s high school kegger in order to get re-elected.  The plan is generally simple:  lower interest rates, make great big troughs of money available, and, bada-bing, the economy is bada-booming on election day and the cheerleaders are doing keg stands.

Nixon mastered this with his re-election bid in 1972.

Well, add the hangover from Nixon’s economic Everclear™ to the crude oil embargo (thanks, Israel) and the result was the miasma of suck that was the 1970s economy – stagflation.  Every president has done some variation of this act since then, with varying degrees of success, but since 2000 or so, each president has tried to avoid all of the consequences of the Boozing.  How?  Boozing some more.

And I heard they were banning cheese in Great Britain.  Or at least extra sharp cheddar.

I’m guessing that one can avoid a hangover by staying drunk all the time, though I don’t have personal experience in attempting that strategy.  Although it is probably more enjoyable than a hangover, there are always consequences to replacing all of your blood with ethanol.

There is a difference with this current economic hangover that we’re working on because, first, we’ve been drinking soooooo long.  Like I said, this has been going on since at least 2000.

So, there’s that.  But that’s not the only thing impacting the economy right now.

Another major factor is Trump.  I think, like many people, Trump sees the size of the national debt and knows that this can’t go on.  He’s also a guy who has nothing at all to lose.  He can shoot the Moon and try to go for all of it.

He’s doing exactly that.  Tariffs?  As I’ve written before, when the United States had tariffs, we were a strong economy with manufacturing.  Post WW2, when we went away from tariffs to help the rest of the world rebuild out of the rubble?  Not so much.

If Trump puts tariffs on Canadian goods, no one can say he has ties to Poutine.

Trump’s America also (so far) is an America that wants peace.  For decades we’ve been shadowboxing against Russia, which is like Hulk Hogan™ attempting to defeat a room full of kittens.  I mean, jeez, Hulk®, their eyes aren’t even open yet.  Russia is not a threat to the United States.  Except for the nukes.

Others want war, though.  The neocons and people like Victoria Zoolander want war the in the Ukraine, probably because Russia gave them a wedgie in the 1980s or because they have Raytheon© stock.  I saw one Canadian tweet, “Well played, Americans, look at all of the billions of dollars in weapons you won’t get to sell.”

To be clear, I’m all in favor of weapons, just ask The Mrs. when I make goo-goo eyes at a .50 cal.  I think every father should be given their choice of an M2 or an M60.  But to try to mock the United States for not getting profits on weapons that are killing people, right now?

That’s . . . disturbing.

Also as a factor, in Trump’s America government is likely to be D.O.G.E.’d into shrinking for the first time since we demobilized from World War II.  When that happened, we transitioned more-or-less seamlessly into the economic boom of the 1950s, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the world was like Sergeant Hulka:  “All blown up, sir!”

This shrinking government sector will take the heat off of inflation in many things, but tariffs will raise prices.  Where it ends up is uncertainty.

Who doesn’t like uncertainty?  Wall Street®.

Physicists should never look down at their speedometers.  If they do, they’ll have no idea where they are.

The final big factor in this recession is that the insiders who have been putting the Bacardi 151™ into the punch bowl for all these decades don’t want to help Trump.  That’s probably a good thing.  The more government meddling into the economy, the longer it normally takes to shake itself back into order.

I want the recession to be:

Short.

Sharp.

Cleansing.

Like hangovers, recessions are painful.  They can wreck lives.  But they are required to clean out the economy from time to time.

And the economy hasn’t been cleaned out in forever.  Some areas where it really does need a bit of sprucing up:

  • Government.
  • Banks.
  • Real Estate.
  • Manufacturing.
  • Education,

These spring cleanings will be painful.  A lot of people in these industries are out there doing the important work of going to Zoom™ meetings and making PowerPoints©, rather than engaging in useless tasks like growing and making food, or fixing potholes, or picking up the trash.

So, yes, this is probably a recession coming.  The Government-Media-Education complex will certainly try to blame Trump, just as they tried to blame him on day two that he hadn’t yet fixed all of Biden’s booby traps.

Is the most popular red wine in prison Penal Noir?

To be clear, Trump will be partially at fault, but if the result is a true cleansing of the economy?  It will be worth it.  Now, where’s that black coffee?

Trump’s Axe

“By this axe, I rule!” – Kull the Conqueror

My email password has been hacked.  This is the third time I had to rename my cat.

Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026.  Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment.  Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic.

But it might be necessary.

There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot.  Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there.

The impact of his efforts was minimal.  Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts.  He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.

If a Gnome is a pimp, does he manage the garden hoes?

Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out.  Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.

Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him.

That changes a guy.

Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe.  During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders.  The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.

The rot is deep:  it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left.

The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax.  The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.

Allergies around here are so bad in springtime that the tweakers turn their meth back into Sudafed™.

The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war.  Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began.  Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure.

And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently.  Before they fried differently.

But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War.  The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.

By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”.  Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost.  MKUltra?  It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program.  Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later?

Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?

Is a line of people waiting to buy that doll for girls a Barbiqueue ?

Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets.  But we should have about 12 of them.  Which 12?  I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function:  an enemy.  The rest of the secrets?  We put them where no one would look:  in the middle of a Disney® movie.

I can’t see that we have one.  Russia?  Putin asked to join NATO in 2000.  Are the Russians a bit skeevy?  Sure they are.  Are they a threat to us?  Only in a nuclear fashion.  After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations.  We didn’t.

Why?

The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.

The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state.  Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink.  Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.

“Let me tell you:  you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer.  Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?

Guess that makes me the pot.

The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks.  Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs.  When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively.

Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution?  Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit.  Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.

Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price.  The people who have all of the climate “solutions”?  They are the GloboLeftElite.

The axe is required.

Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift.  What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows.  GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.

Yet there’s a goal in here:  a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader.

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away.  There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole.

It’s ugly.  It’s necessary.  And it might just be enough.

All without building a single GULAG.  Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists.  They need REEEEEEEEE-education.