Big Thoughts – Page 33 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Memes And Your Mind

“No, for God’s sake! You’ve got it all backwards! AIDS, the Ebola virus? On an evolutionary scale they are newborns. This virus walked the planet long before the dinosaurs.” – The X Files Movie (‘98)

Greta has made a real difference in electrical usage – every time she’s on the TV, I turn it off.

One of the more interesting ideas that I ran across was when I was first exposed to the idea of a meme. It’s really short for mimeme, which means “imitated thing”. Richard Dawkins described it as the idea that ideas would be faced with the same sort of pressures that biological entities face in the world – they either reproduce, or they die.

Regardless of how I feel about Dawkins’ other ideas, this one has always intrigued me, because it’s about the fundamental relationship between people and information and ideas. It’s the place where ideas propagate and are passed on.

Or not. An idea that’s passed on, lives. One that isn’t passed on, dies.

The doctor said I had Peekaboo virus. He said that sends most people to ICU.

Now, that really may not have any relationship with the truth of an idea. Let’s take a meme that has been artificially boosted to the point where it’s known by virtually everyone:

“Diversity is our strength.”

Well, not so much. It turns out that diversity is our diversity, but probably not our strength in that when you have a bunch of people living together that don’t share a common ethnicity, “social trust” drops. It turns out that if you want to live in a society with high trust, it’s probably more reasonable to say, “Diversity is our weakness”.

What about another great meme, this one from our Founding Fathers, “All men are created equal”.

My hairline would beg to differ.

Now if the meme had been, “All men have the same rights” I would have been right on board, and I think that was the original intent. But people are decidedly unequal. Some are short, some are tall. Some are smart, and some are Leftists. All men may have the same rights, but all men aren’t the same.

Why are all the corporations hiring female Equality Officers? They’re cheaper.

How about this one: “majority rules”?

That’s one I remember having been well drilled into the brains of fourth grade kids when I was one, typically when I lost the vote on the movie to watch in class. Why wouldn’t a bunch of fourth grade kids not want to watch Tommy?

But “majority rules” is a horrible way to run a society. Doubt me? Look around. The idea that has been the most stable (outside of Kim’s Best Korea Solution) has been a constitutional republic, not a democracy. But, hey, who needs a constitution when people might have bad thoughts? Majority rules is mob rule, and that defines the worst of us, a place where the passion of the moment takes over from the rights of all of us.

The ideas here are simple, and the phrases have an amazing lifespan even when they are observably false. There is a place for Truth, and it isn’t in a meme. Just as a virus doesn’t have to be virtuous, neither are ideas that are spread by memes. What they are though, is excellent persuasion material.

Oh, Garfield! And here I thought you just wanted to be Nermal.

But just like all people aren’t created equal, all memes aren’t created equal, either. One could make the argument that Trump’s victorious election in 2016 was partially due to fun memes. I’m sure that you saw some of them. Remember The Deplorables meme?

I’m sure Hillary would like to forget it.

Memes are often effective persuasion material, and effective propaganda, true or not. Advertising, for instance, is entirely made to try to create memes and pump them directly into the heads of consumers. How many ad jingles can you think of in the next sixty seconds? I’m lovin’ it®, and I’d be happy to give you Helping Hands™ to Bring Good Things To Life©.

It’s not a mistake that these are memorable.

The Internet has not made this better. In many ways, the websites (especially social media) are created to be addiction pumps by manipulating your emotions – and brain chemicals.

The good news is that we aren’t simply blank slates for corporations, government, and universities to imprint on, we have free will, and most importantly we get to choose what goes into our heads, what information we watch, and what thoughts we consume.

As Garfield® taught us, we aren’t immune to propaganda.

But realizing it’s there is the first step to understanding it, to taking a step back, and to evaluate what I think.

I asked my librarian if they had a book by Shakespeare. “Yes,” she replied. “Which one?” I asked. “William.”

Is that my thought? Did I put it there? Is it consistent with what I know? Is it consistent with the truth?

Is it consistent with the Truth?

When I think about just what a meme might be imitating, I keep coming around to the same idea: the Truth. And what is propaganda, but an idea imitating the Truth?

Inversion of Values, Part 2: The Roman Empire

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

What’s black and white and red all over? A victim of an industrial accident at a newspaper printing press. (All memes today are as-found)

The inversion of virtues: I’ve written on this topic recently, but decided I needed to have another go at it. Part of the blogging theme is that my posts are limited in space. No one wants to read a 10,000-word post on PEZ™ on Friday morning as they drink their coffee.

Virtues make a civilization worth living in. I’d rather live in a poor civilization with great values than a rich one with poor values, and both of those sound better than what we’ve got going on now. And I’d suggest that our current free-fall is due to that loss of virtue.

What were Epstein’s last words before he committed suicide? “You don’t have to do this! I promise I won’t talk!”

Let’s compare values at the peak of Roman Civilization, the peak of Western Civilization, and what the Left is shoving down our throats right now. For instance:

Rome: Worshiped gods.
The West: Worshiped God.
The Left: Worship man (atheism) or the State.

See? Inversion. Who did the cultures idolize?

Rome: Worshiped heroes.
The West: Worshiped heroes and Saints.
The Left: Worship victims.

See, that’s not hard, and yet more inversion. What about sin?

Rome: Sin of hubris.
The West: Sin of pride.
The Left: Sin of privilege.

I’ll just quit making inversion comments, because this is a slam dunk. Who are the spiritual leaders?

Rome:
The West:
The Left: Professors, Leftie politicians.

Ideals?

Rome: Ideal was glory, excellence (Areté).
The West: Ideal was holiness, modesty, courage.
The Left: Social Justice, victimhood.

Ideal social class?

Rome: Warriors and those who served their fellow men.
The West: The middle class.
The Left: The lower class, victims, victims, victims.

Even a virtue, charity, has been turned from a voluntary act that provides spiritual growth in the terms of the classic West, to taxation to provide forced “charity” to the (often) undeserving.

I’m thinking I don’t want to know how my tax dollars are spent because I’m afraid all mine went to buy crack pipes in San Francisco.

This inversion bleeds over into all of society. “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

Wonder why they don’t read to old folks in nursing homes, or to the blind? Whenever I hear about that, my mind sees:

And then there are questions that are more difficult to answer:

Inversion, of course, shows up in the obvious things:

Jazz Jennings is a transgender person who feels no need to change with no sense of irony:

And their goal is that you will live and produce and that you should be okay with not being meaningful or having any joy, so live in the pod, and eat the bugs, wagie.

And we now have a Marine Corps who worries about people’s feelings. Perhaps they’ll land with Nerf™ guns so that they won’t have their feelings hurt.

But the pushback is well underway. Or overweigh:

But there’s a catch:

And I think this has broken the Left, mentally:

And the internal contradictions in their “victimhood” matrix are starting to show:

Canada has shown that it certainly can’t be trusted with the power of life and death:

The inversion has hit, but people (and maybe Higher Powers) are pushing back. And, I think we will win. Why? Because we’re so very pretty. And? PEZ®.

The Great Rollover

“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.

Yellow Freight® shut down. They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.

Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs. What went on? Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks. When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million. During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest. They’d also paid down $230 in principle.

Not $230 million. Not $230 thousand. $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.

Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.

I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.

Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.

This isn’t the first. Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%. The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data. It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.

I guess no one is making them account for their problems?

The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds. Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.

As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”). Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.

Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity. Seems that someone made a payment.

That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency. One competitor, of course, is precious metals. Another is land. My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.” After the debt ceiling deal (translation: spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months. I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!

I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.

Eventually that has an effect on all assets. Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%. Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.

Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when. That’s the goal. Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?

Of course not. In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem. If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s? The 1990s? The 2000s? In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better. I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.

Why do central bankers never travel together? They’re a bunch of loan wolves.

I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.

But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough. After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.

You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Repost from 2019 . . .

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working. So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny. We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader. But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them. Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid. I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting. Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
(Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes? His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from? Yup.

Everything.

Why? Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger. Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring. She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.” Me: “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know. It would make sense that it was. The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching. Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends. There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

Don’t Ask Why People Are Poor. Ask Why They’re Wealthy.

“Some actually value wealth of knowledge over material wealth, Harper.” – Andromeda

My butler just quit his job here at my stately home. He said he refused to be ordered around in that manor.

I find it sort of hilarious that economists spend a lot of time fretting about what causes poverty. I love economics, but often think that they create pocket universes to study that have no real connection to the here and now. I think that’s called sniffing their own . . . uh . . . emissions.

But sometimes it’s not just economists who ask the wrong question. As bad as they are, the worst offenders are politicians. Let’s start with the dumbest question that has been asked in my lifetime (at least in the United States):

“What causes poverty?”

That’s letting Whoopi Goldberg loose in a chocolate factory stupid. It doesn’t help the chocolate and leaves Whoopi sticky and needing an insulin shot.

But why is that a stupid question?

Because poverty is the dominant condition of humanity everywhere since we didn’t have two rocks to fight over. People throughout history have been devastatingly, living in mud hut, sleeping in straw beds filled with more bedbugs than straw. Mary and Joseph had to walk uphill, both ways, to get to the manger.

That’s a joke that keeps you coming back for myrrh.

Only in rare times, and only for a small percentage of the population of the world have some humans felt prosperity. Fewer still have felt prosperity for most of their lives. Fewer still experienced enough wealth in their society for them to think that wealth was normal, and poverty was the exception. We call them Pampered Coastal Elite Leftists.

Why? Because every farmer in the Midwest, every rancher in the High Plains, and every shrimper in the Gulf (among many, many others) knows how close they are to failure, and how close poverty is, especially if a free-range Whoopi Goldberg is free to eat and trample their crops.

Ma Wilder was impacted by the Depression (she was a lot older than my biological Mom, I was adopted) to the point that, living up on Wilder Mountain she’d save aluminum foil and old pickle jars and have enough food for six months because, “You just never know when you’ll need it.” It was kinda cute until she made us re-use Q-Tips®.

The Wolf is always at the door.

I couldn’t find the wolf, which I guess makes it a where-wolf.

So, the question to ask isn’t “what makes people poor”. We can see that as all the systems around us break down like they are now when morons are at the helm.

We should ask the important question: “What makes us wealthy?”

That’s a much better question to ask, since LBJ’s War on Poverty has just subsidized being poor and created a permanent underclass of voters for Leftists to farm, dependent on the Left for a constant stream of handouts. If you were late to Leftist language class, that’s their word for “compassion”.

So, what makes us wealthy? I can only go from history in those places where the world has deviated from the “nasty, brutish, and short” version of life to that “shining city on the hill”. What matters?

The first thing that comes to mind is Liberty, tempered with Virtue.

When a kangaroo gets hurt, it requires a hop-eration.

Liberty is important, but Virtue tempers Liberty and creates a boundary, otherwise Opium and Fentanyl Den™ would be the new Waffle House®. Or is that the existing Waffle House© after 2am?

What Liberty does is provides options, for millions of people to make individual decisions on how to better serve fellow citizens. Virtue means that they shouldn’t destroy their fellow citizens in the process, since that’s generally bad for business. I guess that cigarette companies have found that it’s okay if you kill them slowly after decades.

Not only that, it’s regulation. Who loves regulation? Big companies. Regulations make it hard for small companies to start, make it hard for them to compete, but increases their profit margin. I mean, I would have loved to compete with Pfizer® with my “Super Saline Covid Injection” that didn’t cause myocarditis, but they would probably want to make sure mine was entirely WD-40® free.

Which would still likely have been better for people than the mRNA Vaxx. But who is counting? Not the CDC®.

What else?

I hear Senator Mitch McConnell stole my rabbit. Mitch better have my bunny.

Intelligence. If you ask ChatGPT® about the correlation between intelligence and national prosperity it blows a fuse. Bing™ chimes right in: “There is a correlation between IQ and economic prosperity. A one point increase in IQ is associate with a 4% increase in welfare for the average country. High IQ is associated with high per-capita GDP and fast economic growth, as well as more equal income distribution.”

Ouch! That’ a truth bomb that most folks don’t want to hear. IQ is not really something that anyone can change for the better. Sure, I can drink a few shots of Jim Beam® and take mine down, but what I’ve got, is what I’ve got, from birth.

But smart people in an economy can keep a more stable economy, and can better grow a complex economy than a group of people who don’t know what vowels are. Sure, I’d like to think that groups of dumb people could get together and solve the nuclear fusion problem, but I’ve met dumb people – they can’t figure out how to split a restaurant tab without a knife fight then a follow-up sacrifice of a live chicken to Gorto the Destructor god.

Or I could have just said, “Imagine Haiti” and everyone would know what I meant.

Why is Haiti spelled without an “e”? Simple. They hate e.

Again, I’m not blaming Haitians for making Haiti, well, Haiti, but if you want to cry, go look over the difference in income between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I’ll save you the time – the Dominican Republic has nine times the per capita income, despite being on the same exact island. The data I found (on the ‘net, mind you) has the Dominican Republic has an average IQ of 80. Haiti has an average IQ of 67.

Haiti has an average intellectual capacity (if this data is correct) at the level where Social Security would consider them disabled (on average).

Having great resources? That doesn’t appear to help. It’s the System. It’s the People. If Hong Kong and Singapore can create wealth out of zero resources in a location that almost anyone in the United States would consider so crowded they’d have to make an appointment to change their mind, it’s not space, it’s not stuff.

We can change our laws to allow more Liberty and increase Virtue and reverse the trends away from the nonsense of the last fifty years that encourage large corporate growth at the expense of the People.

But if we change out our People?

Who are we? Will we see the continuation of turning our cities into Haiti on the half shell?

Studies of the genetics of dead Romans (LINK) showed that “intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27).”

Why did Rome fall? Many reasons. It lost Liberty, it lost Virtue, and it replaced Romans with people who weren’t Romans.

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

FBI: Time To Break It Up And Put Them On Trial

“We’re gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess.” – Die Hard

The Mrs. is a lot like an FBI agent. She never asks a question she doesn’t already know the answer to.

When I was just a wee Wilder, I began to doubt the government.

I was fairly young when I heard about the secret files that J. Edgar kept on powerful people in order so that he could maintain his perch atop the FBI® that he had created. Hoover had spent decades developing not only a United States Police Force, but the aptly-named Hoover sucked up all the data on people that he could. Hoover likely gave favors to hundreds of people by not sharing their dirty secrets so that he could maintain his perch. It was so bad that I think Hoover even invented the Memory Foam® mattress so he could blackmail people.

Hoover also was a genius at self-promotion. He made the “G-Men” a meme in the 1930s, trying to set up a propaganda campaign to convince the American public that the FBI®, instead of being an unnecessary internal police and propaganda forum, was instead just like Superman™ – the paragon of truth, justice, and the American way®. Oddly, both of those ideas are fiction.

Superman® challenged Chuck Norris to a fight. Loser had to wear their underwear on the outside.

Instead, the agents have spent their time illegally wiretapping (over 7,000 times by 1985, who knows how many more now) American civilians. The FBI© was more than happy to also jump in and get involved in:

the ATF© created quagmire in Waco,
entrapment of the innocent Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge and the murder of several people in his family,
failure to investigate the massive Chinese investments in financing Bill Clinton in 1996 (ever wonder how they got all that access??),
having an agent (Robert Hanssen) who was utterly in the pocket of the Soviets and, later, Russia,
editing Wikipedia® to make the FBI™ look better,
covering-up the Hillary Clinton® e-mail scandal,
warrants to tap Trump’s campaign,
Andrew McCabe,
Pete Strzok, who never should have gotten a clearance based on the number of consecutive consonants in his last name without a vowel,
using personal data (DMV photos) for a vast database,
“losing” Hunter Biden’s laptop,
despite having certainty that the Hunter Biden laptop data was 100% real, contained evidence of multiple crimes, and misled and intentionally tried to suppress laptop information by lying that it was hacked, despite knowing that it wasn’t.

Everything in italics above is from the last 10 years. This is another reason not to trust Italians, I guess. But in the last decade it’s almost all extremely partisan in nature, showing that the FBI™ could probably just be renamed the Grand Enforcement, Support, Tyranny and Police Organization (GESTaPO) of the Democratic Party. As the Leftists keep whining, they want to safeguard “Our Democracy”. Sounds very good until you being to understand that “Our” doesn’t include you or me.

In a moment of clarity, the FBI decided to dedicate themselves to the mission of fighting crime. Just kidding.

I do know that FBI® has done some good things in the past, especially when it came to rooting out commies after World War II. Say what you want about Hoover, but he did hate commies. But as it stands here in 2023, the FBI© has become a liability for anyone who is actually interested in freedom.

The problem comes from breaking the Constitution. The idea of Federalism is that we don’t have parallel laws, we have a single set of laws. If the state regulates insurance or regulates mustache length, why should the Feds do it, too? Well, what about kidnapping? That’s one that can cross state lines, right?

The Lindbergh kidnapping case led to a law that let the FBI® look into kidnappings.

Did you know you can fit 34 bananas in a kangaroo pouch? Also? I have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

The big idea was to look at crimes and figure out how to get involved. It turns out, the Federal government which was intentionally small because the Founding Fathers mainly just wanted to be left alone to mostly do what they wanted, as long as it didn’t violate state, county or city law. Federal law? There were a few back in the day (see: Whiskey Rebellion) but most laws were local. Murder someone and have it be a Federal issue?

Not going to happen.

Well, back in 1787 it wasn’t going to happen. But after decades of creeping laws encouraged by propaganda, the FBI™ only strengthened with time. Like a camel with a nose under the tent, the FBI© now looks into (spins wheel) things they don’t like (not illegal things, mind you, just things the FBI© didn’t like) said on the Internet.

My puns aren’t listed as a war crime. Yet.

The last example is real – the FBI worked with social networks and Internet companies to stop the spread of information that would be damaging to the Democratic party.

The FBI® is now a fully partisan appendage of state power. It always existed to support itself, but now it explicitly exists to support parties and politicians instead of the American people.

The fact that this doesn’t surprise anyone is perhaps the most telling thing about where we are as a people. The FBI™ is shown to be institutionally corrupt at the highest and lowest levels and (probably) irretrievably partisan for the Left and . . . no one is surprised.

Hmm, wonder why I’m getting all these hits from Washington and Langley?

How Feminism Is Destroying The West, One Virgin At A Time

“Wait a minute. Connie Swail? Don’t you mean The Virgin Connie Swail?” – Dragnet (1987)

I slept with a rich girl who was a bit of a tramp once. Got lobsters.

I’ve had several posts about how sex and economics are intertwined more tightly than a bachelor weekend at Bill Clinton’s place. It is one of the more misunderstood parts of what is slowly destroying the family in the West. This, in turn, will gradually destroy the economics of the West. Without the culture of the West, the West effectively disappears.

This post will be pretty heavy on pictures and memes, almost all of which are as-found.

Let’s take a step back to 1776. I would love to do that in reality, and (in future posts) we’ll look to see how close we are to that. But back to the people that were there the first time. They were, mostly, pretty young. Sure, there were old dogs like Ben Franklin, but Jefferson was only 33. Madison, who would steer the Constitution to completion just over a decade later, was only 25.

Man, John Marshall must have had a hard 20 years on him.

Men were young (even though, yes, the paintings above weren’t done in 1776), yet doing amazing and important things. George Washington was 57 years old at his inauguration, which is astonishing since our likely presidential candidates in 2024 will be a combined 741 years old.

Back then, most men could find a woman and get married, sometimes once or twice (when wife 1.0 died in childbirth). This led to a certain stability, combined with the family economic structure. In this case, most families were Corporate Families – everybody worked, and everybody pitched in to keep things going. The reason that schools had spring breaks wasn’t to go to drink tequila in Cancun and go “woo” but to help plant. Summers were off to work the farm. And fall breaks were necessary for the harvest.

Kids were small farm implements, which is why families had lots of them. Divorces: uncommon. Religion: common.

Sadly, not a bikini graph.

In my lifetime, the Wilder Family has generally always existed in the tan area, including great-grandparents with a male breadwinner, though Great-grandpa and great-grandma McWilder ran an inn near a railroad where they only rarely killed and ate unsuspecting guests.

The golden age of the Male Breadwinner model was between 1900 and somewhere between 1960 and 1970. I’d note that around 1920 when women got the right to vote that the decline in Male Bread started, though it really began in earnest at the Great Depression.

At least Canada knows the score.

During World War II, there was a need for female labor as many men were given multi-year European and Pacific Island vacations. When the war was over, the decline continued at the same pace as the dual income model became the norm.

Until feminism and Leftism infected society at large leading to the steepest decline in stable family economic structures. This predated the economic decline of the United States, which I date to 1970-1973. Gee, I wonder if they could be related?

Now, Dual-Earner is the predominant economic model, with Female Breadwinner starting to make itself known.

New York Times Headline, 2025: Fathers’ Day: Women and Minorities Most Impacted.

Are there any economic or societal consequences to this change in the economic composition of the family? Why, yes. It’s killing society. It’s killing the kids.

The kids even have a name for it: No Girlfriend, No Work. There are other names, such as No Heir, No Work. It seems that young men have become utterly uninvested in society because they don’t have a girlfriend, nor the prospects of one. Things like Tinder® haven’t helped. As noted below, one young man was on Tinder® 3 and a half years. Nearly 40,000 swipes. 2 matches. Zero dates.

What? What’s going on?

In their youth, women are all fighting over the smallest number of men, the 9’s and 10’s. Since on a slow night, a 9 man will hook up with a 5, the 5 now thinks she’s worthy of at least a 9. Consider a 5 man?

No way.

This is not unique. This is not cultural. This is built into the innate preference of women to date up for offspring, and men to create as many offspring as they can. Here’s an example out of China (LINK) where an (American) teacher gave varying treats to a mixed class of boys and girls. On the first day, the girls got to pick first, and picked the best treats. The girls shared only with the two most popular boys, ignoring all of the rest. On the second day, the boys got to pick first, randomly. The treats were randomly distributed among the boys, so the girls interacted with all of the boys and everyone was happier.

When women pick, the distribution is (at least) skewed like the graph below, if not more skewed.

Most 22-year-old girls can have an 8+, if it’s 2am and the 8+ is drunk enough.

What are the results? Virginity in boys (not girls) is rising. Dating is going down among people who should definitely be dating.

As difficult as that is for guys, women use it as a golden ticket (again, in their early 20s) for fun and prizes:

But when these same women hit their thirties, the game is over. The 9s and 10s are either married to 9s and 10s, or they’re dating 22-year-olds. Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo’s max age for dating is 25. And he’ll get 25-year-old 9s and 10s until he’s 75. Look at Al Pacino, who can barely walk:

I’m sure they’re super compatible, since she was born when he was only 53.

The woman who was in dozens if not hundreds of relationships in her 20s with the hottest of men will only settle in her mid to late thirties with a man who meets her qualifications. Those men who would have met those qualifications, being fit, making great money?

They’re married. They have kids, and that 5 (or less than 5) would rather be a drunken wine aunt then settle. Women use youth, beauty, and relative chastity to capture worthy men. If those are wasted on huge numbers of Chads? Off to the wine and cat farm with an empty womb. And the military will fight for that “right”, too.

I’m old enough to remember when the military was supposed to kill foreign enemies, not American babies.

Just like most things, this has a very, very simple solution. To be clear, the solution will be implemented when the circumstances require it. Oddly, the women will be happier, too. And we can finally stop listening to women complain about body shaming.

What Wal-Mart Taught Me About Being Happy

“Dredd, there’s no way in. Are you even listening to me? We can’t just knock on the wall and say “Hello, Cursed Earth Pizza”.” – Judge Dredd

If I had a nickel for every time I’d been cursed by a one-eyed Romanian gypsy after midnight at a 7-11®, I’d have two nickels. That isn’t a lot of money, but still weird that it happened twice.

I remember when we lived in Houston, we went shopping in Wal-Mart®. Once. We walked into the store and it was simply depressing. Not a person in the place seemed happy to be there. The clerks at checkout seemed to be quite angry, to the point where I wondered if the store’s policy required them to rub six tablespoons of Frank’s Red Hot® on their genitals before each shift.

It also showed on the shelves: towels, instead of being neatly stacked, were on the shelves in a random and sloppy way. There was residual trash in the shopping cart that we selected. Why not pick a different cart? Do I have a fetish for pushing trash around in a shopping cart? No, there was some sort of trash in each cart. I chose one, on purpose, that didn’t have liquid-y trash in it.

When my dog is cold, is he a chilly dog?

As is recall (and it’s been nearly two decades ago now) we were there to buy something kid-related that the store we normally shopped at didn’t have, so we had to trek all of the way to the back of the store to see the most random assortment of mis-stocked shelves that made me wonder if this Wal-Mart© had a store policy against hiring anyone with OCD.

I seem to recall we did buy something, and quickly left.

We never went back. The store wasn’t in a bad section of town, but it seemed oddly . . . cursed. It’s like they built the whole store over the pit where the hospital used to bury all the severed limbs that they amputated when the leeches and bloodletting didn’t work.

I’ve thought about that Wal-Mart© more than the one time I visited it. The place seemed so . . . off it’s hard to describe. It just made me want to leave that store faster than the Secret Service closes an investigation into exactly whose cocaine was in the White House.

After moving to Modern Mayberry, the experiences in Wal-Mart® was drastically different. It’s a small detail, but when I go in there, the towels are always neatly folded and stacked. There is no, and I mean zero trash in the carts and the floors are always entirely spotless.

Where’s Arnold’s favorite spot in a Wal-Mart™? Aisle B. Back.

And the people who shop there and the employees who work there seem happier. Sure, some of the employees grumbled, but they grumble at me because I’ve known them for years. The checkouts are fast and efficient, and if the store policy requires rubbing anything into their crotch, it’s not Frank’s Red Hot®.

I don’t mind going to Wal-Mart™ in Modern Mayberry because it’s not a gloomy place. It seems to be a happy one. People smile while they buy their ham and mayonnaise and potatoes and chicken thighs. They’re polite to one another, and I’ve seen more than one adult talk to a kid they didn’t know to tell them to stop shenanigans in the aisles. And I’ve done it myself.

And the kids stop the shenanigans.

I think part of the reason that Wal-Mart™ here is different in Houston is that none of us are anonymous. We walk into the store and see people we know. Be a jerk to a clerk? That might just be your friend’s kid who is just having a bad day.

Congrats Whitney, you’ve been drug free for years now!

The other part is I think there is a much greater sense of community in a place like Modern Mayberry. We’ve been here a decade, and while I’m not the new kid on the block, many people I come into contact with have been here for generations. Oops! That makes them sound like vampires. But parts of The Mrs.’ family have been in this area at least since the 1890s. When Pugsley goes out with people, we ask “who” since you can generally infer if the family is trouble just through the last name.

We never let him hang out with anyone named Clinton. I mean, the parties are great, but bad things happen if you get on their bad side.

I knew someone would want an Epstein joke, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging.

But all of that aside – what I’ve found to be a good idea is to avoid places that suck. No, I don’t think that Wal-Mart© in Houston was cursed, but I do think that the people in there didn’t like their work, and didn’t want to be there. They were unhappy. They were victims.

In my experience, people on the Right are happier (by far!) than people on the Left. In study after study, it’s weird that people on the Right are more tolerant of the viewpoints of others. One recent study (LINK) of college kids (is it bad that I assumed their species?) showed that Leftists absolutely hate people on the Right and are scared to be exposed to their ideas. 62% of Leftists said they would probably or definitely not room with a normal person. 28% of students on the Right said they were fine rooming with a commie.

Leftists also show much higher rates of mental problems (I could link a study, but you have search engines and also know Leftists) and are generally far less competent. I think the “far less competent is why they’re Leftists in the first place.

My county voted 85% for Trump, so by inference we’re happier, more competent, and far more tolerant than any Leftist enclave.

What do you call an Italian Chad? An Alfredo male.

Regardless, once again the pathway to being happy proves to be devastatingly simple: avoid cities, be on the Right, be competent, and don’t put Frank’s Red Hot® down your pants.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.