Category: Big Thoughts

Total Recall: Looking Back On The COVID Crisis

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn” – Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman.”

[Wilder Note:  I’ve been meaning to dig this post out for a while, especially since something that WordPress did mangled a bit of the original with weird characters.  I wrote it originally on March 25, 2020.  This was meant as a prediction of what we’d see going through the ‘Rona.  It has been wilder than even I would expect, and in many ways I think I undersold what we’d see.  That being said, I’m not sure we’re done going through The Cliff phase and into Disillusionment.  I’d love your feedback.]

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?  You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.  Good times.  I do have a concern:  The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriere, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly, we want to get this all behind us, in the rearview, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?  Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis.  This provides way in which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the others this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.

This is like the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.  Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?  It’s so nice and cheery.  The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar?  Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say no.  The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN© and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:  in the end, the wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.  It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.  The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.  It’s the spark that lights the fire.  When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards.  The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.  It is disruptive.  It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.  In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.  COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.  Was it poised for a fall anyway?  Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:  what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction.  COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk.  I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism is realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story:  Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.  My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home-cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home-cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

What’s Going In Your Head?

“I’ve narrowed it down: either mind controlling LSD or sorcery.” – Chuck

Teddy Kennedy was the big alcoholic of the family, but John more famous for taking shots in public.

What goes in your head?

Really, what goes in your head?

The CIA did some significant experiments in the past under the collective name of “MK-Ultra”.  If you haven’t looked them up, this won’t be the place to get good information about it.  Heck there are very few places to get good info about MK-Ultra because the CIA just shredded it all.  Or burned it.  The biggest reason we have information about it is through accounting records.

No one in the 1970s remembered to burn the receipts.

The goal of MK-Ultra was mind control.  Why?  I’m not sure, perhaps to create a group of super-secret assassins?  The CIA already had zillions of ways to kill people and topple foreign governments.  So, not that.  What minds would they want to control?

Dunno.  Maybe ours?

There are lots of different types of mind control.  The MK-Ultra type is really cool for movies, because it involves creating what I think of as the ultimate horror – a human being whose mind has been hollowed out, and whose actions no longer belong to them.  The goal of MK-Ultra was to create zombies.  And not the Rob kind.

When the Moon hits your knees, and you mispronounce trees, sycamore.

Again, we don’t have the data from MK-Ultra, but we do know that the one thing government craves more than any other is the power that it has.  Jerry Pournelle called it Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  To allow Jerry to describe it himself:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

This is the story of government since, well, forever.  Thankfully, Federalism and the Constitutions slowed it.  A bit.  The real power, though, got into place around the turn of the century – the turn of the 20th Century.  The CIA wasn’t the cause of it, it was more the result.  If the CIA was willing to drug unknowing citizens with LSD and also to conduct experiments on hundreds (if not thousands) of other people, it’s not very hard for me to believe that they also spent a lot more effort studying how to influence the average American.

I made it my mission to fight poverty:  I wrestle homeless people every weekend.

When it comes to persuasion, the most potent medium is visual.  It creates it’s own reality – it creates an emotional investment.  I remember as a kid, when the Death Star® blew up, I felt the emotion, just as if I had flow the X-Wing® down that trench myself.  When the alien was about to munch a scantily clad Sigourney Weaver, pre-puberty me felt a zillion emotions.  Seeing the video made it seem like I was there.

There’s a reason for that.

The medium of video is “hot” (in the theory of Marshall McLuhan) and is especially wonderful for propaganda.  Hot media fully engages one sense, and spoon feeds the content directly into the viewer’s mind.  Cool media, like this blog, demands interaction, and demands thought.

And you thought those memes were just for fun.  In reality, they serve a purpose – they exists to counter propaganda.  It’s why the Right is so good at memes and the Left is awful.  A great meme from the Right tells the Truth in just a few words.  The Left, on the other hand, has to build an entire reality for their meme to even make sense – if you’re not already on board with the worldview of the Left, they have to build it for you.

But media today is everywhere.  Especially, it’s on phones.

And it’s addictive.  I was at dinner with Pugsley today and he was on his phone.  I said, “Please, put that down.”  He didn’t.

“Pugsley,” I said, “You don’t want to have people watching you databating in public.”

He turned sixteen shades of red, and the phone went down onto the table like it had been sucked down with a magnet and his hand moved away like the phone was hotter than the Sun.  So, Internet, if you ever want your kid to put the phone down, let them know you don’t approve of public databation.

Why did the hobbit® set his cell phone to vibrate?  He was trying to get rid of the ring.

And that explains the memes.  They break the programming, and break the addiction loop.  But back to the programming itself.  What values does the world want you to have?  What values are those who program the algorithms at YouTube® attempting to create in our minds?  What values and beliefs does Hollywood™ want to create?  And how are those values being rolled out?

When you look back at a television show like Sex and the City, showing how strong independent women don’t really need men, what impact did that have?  I wonder, because the writer whose stories the whole series was based on is now in her sixties, and was lamenting that she never created a strong marriage and family.

Ooops.  But what about all those girls that bought the message?

And what about all those divorced moms, living in houses that (in reality) they’d never be able to afford?  How many women were influenced that divorce was the key to freedom, prizes, and a home version of the game?  Even if you ignore the awful emotional consequences of divorce on the family and on children, divorce is generally economically devastating on all the participants as well.

I hear that Putin is divorced – he never got along with his NLAWs.

Divorce was featured and glamorized on film and television starting in the 1960s.  Why?  Who benefits?

Well, families don’t.  Churches don’t.  Communities don’t.  So that leaves lawyers, the court system, and the alimony/child support complex, which employs thousands in most states.

But that’s not enough.  A strong family is like an atom – self-sufficient.  It provides strength, and a way to transmit values from generation to generation.  But families don’t consume welfare, mostly.  They aren’t dependent and that’s why Nu-Government® has little use for them, and would like them to disappear.

Who benefits from this?  The Left.  They want the families destroyed, so that individuals have to turn to government for their money and values.

Movies are also used to try to influence public opinion on policy.  How many movies do you see in 2022 where immigrants are here dealing drugs or committing crimes?  Contrast that with how many films that show immigrants in a ludicrously positive light.  Why?  Studies show that immigrants coming into this country are overwhelmingly in favor of strong states that provide massive welfare and restrict (for instance) the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Hmmm.  Who would that make happy?

Oh, yeah.  The Left.  You can think of plenty of other examples of how film and television and news has been used to create a version of reality that leads to Leftist values, which always, always leads to the horror and carnage of Leftism in action.

In other news, Sean Penn has a badger living on his head.

There is that alternative, though.  When done well, film can really be uplifting, and fun.  It has the ability to provide examples of the very best values that man can strive for, and share them back with us.

Always, always, guard what goes into your head.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Divide Grows

“We can take whole by force what they propose to divide.” – Star Trek VI:  The Undiscovered Country

The book I ordered about clocks finally came in.  It’s about time.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same.  Tensions are still high.  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 – The Divide – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Growing Farther Apart – 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 over 700 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The Divide

One thing that hasn’t changed, at all, since Biden was installed in the White House is that the tension hasn’t dropped.  It’s a matter of Team Blue being in charge, and is looking at every way that they can stick it to Team Red.  It’s not a new story, but it is a continuation of a fundamental divide in the country, about nearly everything.

When Donald Trump allegedly tossed hush money to a tramp, it was nearly grounds for impeachment.  Joe Biden allegedly funds tens of thousands of dollars for Hunter’s periodic chemical and biological safaris?

Not a word.  So, it’s an offset, right?

Not really.  The Left has a deep hold on the institutions of this nation, who will, apparently, actively run cover for the Left, no matter what they do.  Which institutions?  Not big ones.  Just the FBI and the major news media.  The mere fact that CBS® is now running the story that the Washington three-letter agencies are all-in for Biden shows that the Left is getting ready to ditch Biden, or at least sending him a warning.  I mean, it’s not like he’d notice.

The cultural divide is far worse that that would indicate, though.  Let’s take the children.  No, really, that’s the slogan of the Left:  “Let’s take the children™.”  They want them desperately, and are dedicated to doing whatever they can to indoctrinate them.  Case in point:

As near as I can tell, this defines a lot of what’s going on with kids, but it’s not just schools, it’s media as well.  There is a reason they want unfettered access to kids – it’s not about education, it’s indoctrination.  What proof?

Imagine what the world would look like if teachers were secretly trying to make kids moral and Christian.  The ree and cry would come from the usual sources, and then all the Left would dress up in Handmaid’s Tale outfits and pretend the United States was near to becoming a theocracy when it is farther than it has been, ever and the danger to kids isn’t coming from the Right.  And the biggest fairy tale is coming from the Left:

Violence And Censorship Update

First, the Left wants to create conformity, and make sure that if your opinion differs, that you’ll feel left out.  Their bots are Legion:

So, your opinion isn’t valid.  But neither was the past opinion of the Left, if it was inconvenient.  Left is always the direction of the Censor.  And one of the biggest goals of the censor is not only to censor your current views, but it’s also to censor their past views.  Why?

Because only the current view is valid.  If the past view (for example) was that it takes an actual man and an actual woman to get married, why, that view is very uncomfortable now.  So, any view that contradicts the New Truth® is forbidden.  And when people try to use your own views against you?  That’s hate speech, right?

It was Winston Smith’s job in the novel 1984 to make facts inconvenient to the Left disappear from the record.  That job continues:  the Left cannot accept the idea that the economy of the country is in very bad shape – and is in a technical recession.  It hasn’t been long enough for Google® to take the previous definition down:

But at Wikipedia®?  The Leftist editors are all too happy to change the definitions in near real-time just to make the Left happy.  They do it for nothing but Good Boy™ points.

I think Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There had it right:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master:  that’s all.”

Biden’s Misery Index

Last month’s inaugural edition inspired Aesop (LINK) to come up with his own version.

That’s a lot of Kamalas!

But when we look at the reason behind the graph, it’s simple:  this is the pain associated with a planned Leftist transition.

Here’s the current graph.  I suppose the good news is that even though things are getting worse, they’re not getting worse as fast as they were?

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 ticked downward again this month.  I think it continues to be muted because the Left has kept their dogs on a leash.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it dropped a tiny bit in June.  Elections are coming up – I’m wondering if we’ll see more?

Economic:

Economic indicators ricocheted upwards this month.  Looking at the reasons:  the markets stopped falling, the interest rates stopped shooting up – this is related to the Misery Index being slightly less awful.  This is an instantaneous look, and things aren’t as awful as they were last month.

Illegal Aliens:

It set a new record for this time of year.  But it was down from last month, for the first time in ages.  Must be hot out.

Growing Farther Apart

The first story was the divide – the second is that the divide isn’t getting better.  People are making choices to move to areas that match their ideology.  And what about the people there?

They’re ready to check out.  Red State Secession (LINK) conducted a poll at the end of June and released the results at the beginning of July.  The result?

People are talking about breaking up.  In the eight states they polled, (HI, TX, LA, MS, AL, FL, and SC) the results were fairly similar:  They felt that if California were to want to leave the Union, that 56% felt there should be no penalty, 41% felt that there should be economic sanctions.  Only 5% were willing to use military force to keep California in the Union.

The numbers were pretty similar if Texas wanted to leave.  Texans, on the other hand, were ready to go to the next level.  69% of voters want to hold a referendum on separating from Texas, including a majority of Democrats and independent voters.

In Arizona (not part of the study) you can see that the Democrats don’t much care for the United States, either:

And the showing of a Revolutionary War flag on a coffee cup.  It wasn’t me, even though I own one myself, which I bought at a United States National Park:

People are sorting themselves based on ideology, as long predicted:

And I’ll leave this Tweet® for the last word on how close we are to being one country:

Sounds like someone is a bit butthurt?

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1544768644244049920

https://twitter.com/i/status/1542746999245549568

https://twitter.com/i/status/1545705450703912960

https://twitter.com/i/status/1546007176002408449

https://twitter.com/i/status/1546000131744759808

https://twitter.com/i/status/1545917339467661312

https://twitter.com/CrimeWatchMpls/status/1544240651734228994

https://twitter.com/CPD1617Scanner/status/1543577251681390597

https://youtu.be/SVDWQv5lWPM

https://twitter.com/CPD1617Scanner/status/1553032236760535041

https://youtu.be/Vz4r8nNWOHA

https://www.foxnews.com/us/video-shows-utah-child-4-shoot-police-outside-mcdonalds-drive-thru

https://www.revolver.news/2022/07/the-hidden-agenda-behind-new-york-times-desperate-ray-epps-puff-piece/

https://www.insidebidensbasement.org/

Good Guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg7q00OczIU

https://twitter.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1550500701465452545

https://twitter.com/i/status/1544337951332655110

https://twitter.com/i/status/1545874643994787840

https://twitter.com/Tr00peRR/status/1544619495100145664

https://youtu.be/ELDO8tJx0iY

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/off-duty-correction-officer-hailed-hero-after-shooting-man-who-pointed-gun-crowd

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fourth-of-july-mass-shooting-richmond-virginia-thwarted-police-tip/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-teen-hailed-hero-helping-rescue-girls-officer/story?id=86300178

https://abcnews.go.com/US/93-year-man-shoots-home-intruder-fends-off/story?id=85991432

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article263351778.html

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2022/07/even-if-it-saves-but-one-life.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcrimeresearch.org%2F2022%2F07%2Fuber-driver-in-chicago-stops-mass-public-shooting%2F

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2022/07/27/10-times-a-good-guy-with-a-gun-saved-lives-n2610406

One Guy

https://heavy.com/news/elisjsha-dicken/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/us/eli-dicken-indiana-mall-shooting-bystander/index.html

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/special-reports/greenwood-mall-mass-shooting/armed-citizen-was-not-the-only-one-with-a-gun-at-the-greenwood-park-mall-shooting-the-first-victim-killed-had-one-too-indiana-elisjsha-dicken/531-e5f3c8db-8f58-4c62-b8b0-acaab48ec4d1

Body Count

https://youtu.be/aakhNFhbhWk

https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1550526039234908164

https://thepostmillennial.com/52-shot-in-new-york-city-over-july-4-weekend

https://news.wttw.com/2022/07/05/68-people-shot-8-killed-shootings-across-chicago-over-july-4th-weekend-police

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-4th-july-weekend-violence-160718752.html

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63182

https://www.unz.com/article/28-black-on-white-homicides-counting-white-hispanics-middle-easterner-unspecified-juveniles-etc-june-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10976437/How-Californias-legal-cannabis-dream-public-health-nightmare.html

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-17d

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/will-physicians-ever-speak-out

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/the-safe-and-effective-narrative

https://twitter.com/ElectionLegal/status/1549833362919112704

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/color%20map.jpg?itok=NWg8Tskj

https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx

 

Vote Count

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/voterga-uncovers-massive-election

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nyc-election-sites-had-no-republican-ballots-primary-election

https://dnyuz.com/2022/07/05/on-conservative-radio-misleading-message-is-clear-democrats-cheat/

https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/07/07/poll-majority-of-americans-believe-midterm-elections-will-be-tainted-by-fraud/

https://www.kawc.org/news/2022-07-04/biden-administration-to-sue-arizona-over-law-requiring-proof-of-citizenship-to-vote

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-donald-trump-wisconsin-supreme-court-05166e3f3ef970b5cde8ac15cd30e18b?taid

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/07/01/u-s-supreme-court-takes-case-that-could-impact-future-elections/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-case-voting-rights-experts-say-bring-chaos-elections-rcna34033

 

Civil War

https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10971195/A-QUARTER-Americans-say-ready-arms-against-government.html

https://www.science.org/content/article/half-of-americans-anticipate-a-us-civil-war-soon-survey-finds

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/contributors/2022/07/03/americans-divided-civil-war-unlikely/7767742001/?gnt-cfr=1

https://mises.org/wire/avoid-civil-war-learn-tolerate-different-laws-different-states

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-07-27/fear-of-a-second-us-civil-war-ignites-debate.html

https://dnyuz.com/2022/07/02/spurred-by-the-supreme-court-a-nation-divides-along-a-red-blue-axis/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/on-the-campaign-trail-many-republicans-talk-of-violence/ar-AAZTYhP

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/07/11/are-we-looking-at-another-civil-war-n2609990

https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/theres-gonna-be-a-war-in-montana

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-that-is-here-and-the-one-that-may-yet-come

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/07/04/50-year-attack-right-wing-corporate-forces-leading-us-back-towards-civil-war

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/a-president-asking-for-civil-war

https://www.businessinsider.com/civil-war-expert-barbara-f-walter-us-heading-toward-insurgency-2022-7

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jeff-sharlet-on-the-martyrdom-of-ashli-babbitt-and-whats-to-come

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/experts-make-case-for-the-ar-15-only-defense-in-civil-war

 

Progress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6tOAafAJCA

White House Insider Scoop: The Economic Plan

“Television? My God! If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

“Old McDonald had a farm . . .” sang the cheerful repo man.

Note:  there’s some meta content at the end on recent site issues at the end of all this.  Apologies for any issues.  I know that the subscriber stuff didn’t work on Monday, but I have faith it will today.  If you’re not a subscriber, I suggest you tempt fate and subscribe in the box over there to the right . . . .

This past week in the economics side of the world there has been a recent dust-up.  The generally accepted definition of a recession is that there are two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.  I’m not sure exactly how they measure that, but I assume it’s by throwing a bunch of chicken wing bones from the Buffalo Burnin’ Hot® Pizza Hut™ wings into the air and seeing if they fall in a pattern that is pleasing to Gorto, god of the Great Charts of Giza.

Or maybe not.  That sounds pretty high-tech for an economist, since it might involve higher economics like counting.

But at least it’s more scientific than how economists judge if there is a recession or not.

Regardless, the White House has suggested that the same definition that’s been used since, oh, I was knee high to Farrah Fawcett-Majors (which wasn’t bad, I’m thinking) is no longer operative.  Nope.  Now (according to Wikipedia®) recessions only occur when the National Bureau of Economic Research©, a privately held group, says so.

When will they say it’s so?

Probably years after the recession has occurred, and probably then only if it’s something the Left want’s to see.

Winston Smith would be proud.

I can’t help, though, wondering what the conversation was like in the White House when they discussed the horrible economic data that showed there was a recession, or at least what would have been called a recession in every year every except for 2022.

I hear homeless horses never get married.  It just isn’t a stable relationship.

Joe Biden (BIDEN):  “I’m really glad you all could join me this wharngm *cough* smaglerpump.  Anyone have a steak?  Oh, wait, can’t eat ‘em.  Gets stuck the dentures, you see *wet phlegmy cough*.”

Biden takes dentures out to show group.

Kamala Harris (HARRIS):  “Wow!  I could have used that trick!”

Secretary of Treasury, Janet Yellen (YELLEN):  “Mr. President . . . .”

BIDEN:  “Oh, is Barry back?  I think I’m sitting in his chair.”  Jill Biden (DR. JILL) kicks BIDEN.

BIDEN:  “Ow!  What??”

YELLEN:  “Pardon me, uh, Joe.  The recent economic data had come back, and it’s not good.  From a technical standpoint, and primarily due to our plan, er, bad luck, er, Putin, we’re showing that the economy of the United States is contracting.”

It could be worse.  Gas could be really expensive.  Oh, wait.

BIDEN:  “Does that mean the baby is close?  I think I’m hoping for another boy.  I’d like to name one Hunter.  What a pure and noble name.  No way a man with such a strong name would become a degenerate dissolute drug addict who hires ladies-of-the-night.”

YELLEN:  “What?”

BIDEN:  “Whores, we used to call ‘em.  Street-walkers.  Strumpets.  *Long series of coughs.*  You know, loose women?”  Pause.  “I mean that.  Do you know any loose women?”

YELLEN:  “Pardon me, Mr., um, Joe.  What I’m trying to tell you is that the economy is a mess.  Prices are shooting through the roof, and where we once saw labor shortages due to paying people to not work, now we’re seeing companies starting to lay off people, and demand dropping.  Not at all good.  It’s what we economists technically call a recession.”

BIDEN:  “Recession?  What will President Carter say about that when he gets back from Camp David?  That’s no good at all.  We simply can’t have a recession.  We need ideas, people!”

Secretary of State, Antony Blinken (BLINKEN):  “Heh heh, we could send that crazy witch Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.  That would distract people.  Heck, maybe no one would notice that the price of gasoline requires them to ‘donate’ a kidney to get a fill-up.”

Joe wanted Hunter to slow down on his cocaine habit – he said, that Hunter had to draw a line somewhere.

Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin (AUSTIN):  “Great idea!  We could send over some aircraft carriers.  We’ve got dozens of those.  Really pump up the tension.”

Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas (MAYORKAS):  “And import Nicaraguans.  Perhaps sixty million of them.  They don’t vote.”

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg (BUTTIGIEG):  “Dr. Jill, what are the first symptoms of monkeypox again?”

DR. JILL: “Pete, I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m the kind of doctor that people have to call “doctor” because I insist they do.”

BUTTIGIEG:  “Oh, what was your thesis title?”

DR. JILL: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.”  (J.W. note:  this is really the title.)

Vanilla Ice is both more vanilla and more ice than Jill Biden is a doctor.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused:  Laughter.

BIDEN, looking at DR. JILL:  “Missy, are you new here?  I could use a sandwich.  But nothing too tough.  Dentures.  See?”  Pulls them out to show her.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused:  Laughter.

DR. JILL exits.

BIDEN:  “Well, now it’s just us guys.  Anyone want to watch a porno?  My son Hunter,” long pause “sent me this one.  Shared it to me on FacePlant®.”

YELLEN and HARRIS glance at each other.

BIDEN:  “So, what’s the plan?  I mean we have this regression, I mean digression, er, um, digestion.”

YELLEN:  “Mr. Pr . . . er, Joe, it’s a recession.”

BIDEN:  Agitated.  “No, it’s not!  It’s not a recession until Obama says it’s a recession!”

All look at each other in stunned silence.

YELLEN:  “That’s perfect.  We pretend we’re not in a recession.  Just say it isn’t one.”

All nod, except Biden, who is staring vacantly toward the ceiling at a point near the opposite corner.

Chief of Staff Ron Klain (KLAIN):  “It’s decided.  I’ll mobilize the usual folks.  CNN®, the New York Times™, the Washington Post©, and oh, yeah, I’ll mobilize our trolls.  Let’s put the old definitions down the memory hole.  Start with Reddit® and Wikipedia™.  In a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can’t have Twitter© ban anyone using the r-word.”

Meeting adjourns.  BIDEN remains seated, looking uncomfortable.

BIDEN:  “I was told there would be ice cream.”

Now, the meta content.  On Monday, I normally get a copy of the post delivered to my inbox for a couple of reasons:  the first is to show that the software worked.  Since it’s worked nearly 800 times, I was surprised it didn’t.  The second is to make sure the content showed up.

On Monday, that didn’t happen.  Why?  I’m still not sure.  I went to the website and saw that the website itself was down.  Why?  Still not sure.  It turns out that I’ve been fighting the hosting company of the site for the better part of four calls (over three hours of time) and it seemed like everything they did made things worse.

I think it’s all working now, though.  Let me know if the RSS or any other component isn’t working.

Is the Vaxx AIDS?

“Um, well, as with any new vaccine, there were certain side effects associated with it.” – Evolution

I tried to get a refund on some bad batteries I bought.  They wouldn’t give me one, since they said the batteries were free of charge.

Hey, I’ve got a golden oldie from, oh, right before the Russians invaded Ukraine:  the ‘Rona.

I am not vaxxed.  I am not jabbed.  I thought about it, but they told me there were no refunds, so I opted out.  But I have had the ‘Rona.  I haven’t been tested to prove that, but The Mrs. was tested and had the antibodies.  So did Pugsley.  I was around those two losers enough if it is physically possible for me to get it, I’ve had it.  I even remember the afternoon I had it.  Felt a bit bad, had a temperature of 99°F (345 km) that day, and thought about going home early.

I’ve had it.  It wasn’t especially bad.  But then I was exposed again:  I sat for several hours next to a person who had it, 13 days ago.  He was vaxxed.  Again, if I caught whatever variant this was, I had no symptoms other than some extra phlegm.  And who doesn’t want extra phlegm?  It makes it so much easier to hock a gnarly loogie.

I give that to you only as background, though I freely admit I do appreciate the aesthetics of hocking a good loogie.  In all the people I’ve ever met in my life, I know of only a single person who died of the ‘Rona – and when I heard he had died, my response was, “He was still alive?  He was old!”  I did the math, and he was approximately 473 years old.

After getting the vaxx, my friend can’t hear himself urinate.  I guess the p is silent.

I have talked to friends that have lost older loved ones as well.  One of my friends even lost two relatives in their fifties – which was pretty young for COVID.

So, that’s the background.

As I said before, I’m not vaxxed.  I was against it because I generally believe the mice should do human trials before people.

So, what are the long-term implications of the vaxx?

Right now, some implications are showing up that look a bit grim.

One of the big concerns that had shown up in past trials of vaccines against strains of Coronavirus had been, well, AIDS.  The problem was that the vaccines that we tried to create made our immune system act like Nancy Pelosi surrounded by bottles of vodka – useless.  Oh, wait, that’s just regular Nancy Pelosi.

The concern of vaccines is that they can, sometimes, cause “immune dysregulation” which means the immune system doesn’t work right.  T-Cells, which are the semi-trucks that make the immune system work, have life cycle.  Those are the guys that roam around the blood stream and look for stuff that isn’t right – and kill it.

Sadly, still no refunds.

T-cells are like a Terminator® against disease.  No, that language won’t get me a doctorate in immunology, but since I’m typing this while watching a James Bond movie (Diamonds are Forever) while drinking wine, that ship has probably sailed.

To quote an actual immunologist-doctor dude named Bowdish stated, “Once a T cell commits to responding to one thing, it can’t respond to anything else.  As we age, more and more of them become committed to responding to infections, or all the other things we might be exposed to, and fewer and fewer are available to respond to new threats.”

Huh.

A super-short version of the nightmare scenario is this:  the vaxx injects mRNA, which creates a storm of COVID spike proteins.  The original thought was that there was a burst of these would tickle the neck of the immune system, give it a thrill and then be gone – which is not how the mRNA vaxx works – it’s really gene therapy.  Gene therapy might be a technology that will change the future, but right now, it appears to me it’s like we’re taking sledgehammers to fix a fine gold pocket watch.

Oops.  Apparently, the mRNA concoction (in some studies) stays active longer than anticipated.  Beyond that, the spike proteins don’t degrade very rapidly in the body.  The result?  They keep on jazzing the immune system.  But they don’t give a full picture of the virus that a T cell normally would attack, just the spike.

Still no refunds.

So, the vaxx hijacks the immune system and causes it to focus for a really, really long time on only one portion of the actual virus, and not respond like (for instance) mine did when I actually had the ‘Rona in looking at the whole virus, and not just a tiny bit of it like someone who was injected with mRNA vaxx.

This is bad.

It focuses a big chunk of the immune system on a single part of the virus, and ignores the rest.  Minor modifications would then lead people who had the Two Shots and All The Boosters® to be more and not less susceptible to the ‘vid.

This is combined with all of the other signs that we’ve seen:  amazing numbers of very healthy, world-class athletes either collapsing or just plain dying in the prime of their life in numbers like we’ve never seen before.

And, in the end, for what?

COVID wasn’t pleasant during the afternoon I had it.  And it absolutely killed quite a few people.  But it wasn’t going to kill kids.  And it wasn’t going to kill hardly anyone below the age of 50.

If I had taken the vaxx, I’d be mad.  Very mad.  They were marketed as safe.  They’re not.  Tens of thousands have died from them, and there are reports coming in that female fertility had been impacted.  They were marketed as effective.  As the last data seems to show, they vaxxed are more likely to get COVID than the unvaxxed.

Perhaps he has an agenda?

No, he’s clearly well respected.

In order to get people to take this untested new technology, the government engaged in massive amounts of unfounded and knowingly false propaganda and, in the end, coercion.  The ‘rona itself was a disaster, but in the end, the betrayal by every edifice of our public sector is worse.

I am in hopes that the worst is past.  I don’t wish evil on any person.  But in the case of the vaxx?  There’s one theme:  no refunds.

Parents, Photos, And Moving Out

“Well, the part where Romeo dies is sad. But where Juliet died is sad too. But I think the saddest part of all is when Jan said ‘Who goes there?’ before Peter said ‘Hark’.” – The Brady Bunch

Definitely would have been a better show with this cast.

There’s a larger point to some of these stories that I’ll be putting out on Friday that will become obvious over time.  But I want to stress this:  outside of the obvious jokes, 100% of these stories are true.

I remember the first time I called Ma Wilder “mom.”  I know that’s a memory that really most people don’t have, since most people don’t even know what a mom is when they call them mom.  Heck, it isn’t even the earliest memory I have, which involves PEZ®, a claw-foot bathtub, and a poorly insulated electrical appliance.

I don’t recall how old I was, exactly when I first called Ma “mom”.  I do recall it was a bright spring day and Ma Wilder was ironing in the laundry room.  The back door was open, letting light and air in through the screen door that led to the backyard.

What Ma Wilder figured out while ironing:  she had more pressing concerns.

I think what the sentence was (memory is a bit fuzzy on this, too), but I think it was something, “I’m going to go to my room, Mom,” or something like that.

I recall being a bit scared.  How would she react?  I was pretty sure I was supposed to call her “mom” but what if she reacted poorly?  What if it made her mad?

She said, “Okay.”

And it came out of her mouth like it was normal, though, looking back on it I think even she had to hold back and concentrate on it being . . . normal.

The reason I remember this is because, unlike all those people who have to work at it, I was born a bastard.  Longer version, I believe that this was the day that my adoption was finalized and I became an official Wilder rather than “that blonde kid that keeps hanging around the house and breaking a nearly endless stream of things.”

Because I did that, too.  Most of the calamities that I caused were out of a sense of experimentation.  For instance, one day I was watching The Brady Bunch after coming home from first grade.  Now, as rankings on television programs go, The Brady Bunch was certainly the lowest tier of after-school television.  Much higher was F-Troop and also Hogan’s Heroes.  Of course, the gold standard was Star Trek.

Obscure fact:  Ricardo Montalban had a tough time finding work after Star Trek II:  No one wanted to hire an ex-Khan.

Anyway, it was The Brady Bunch that caused much of the destruction of my family’s stored memories.  You see, in one episode, Greg (it was Bobby, I think) had taken a picture that proved the receiver’s foot was out of bounds on a key catch in a football game.

How did he prove this?  He took a picture into a dark room, and then put it in water with some chemicals.  Presto, he was able to stretch the picture and make it bigger.  Why on Earth was the Wilder family making do with these little tiny 3” by 5” (2mm by 5 liter) snapshots when I could just dunk them in water in the bathroom and stretch them to make them larger.

I was no dummy!  I knew that to make this work, you had to be in the dark, so I closed the door.  Thankfully, this bathroom was an interior one with no windows!  I put the picture in the water and tried to stretch it.  No go.

Huh, looking back I could have died of exposure.

Maybe if I soaked it longer?  I’m sure I waited for at least 15 seconds before my sucrose-addled brain realized the problem.  Of course!  It was simple!  Greg had chemicals in the water that made the photo stretch!

Where could I find chemicals?  Yup, mom kept them under the sink.

I added pretty much every chemical I could find under the sink to my impromptu photo embiggening water bath.  I believe I probably created a stew of chemicals that would have been recognized by OSHA as not a violation of civil law, but probably regulated by the Geneva Convention as one of those pesky “war crimes”.

I took the photo and tried to stretch it.  Still a no go.  Well, it must be this particular photo.  Why not put all of them in the sink to try to stretch them?  I’m sure it’ll work.

Hmmm, no go on any of the dozens and dozens of photos that chronicled the life of my brother (it’s now obvious why his name is John Wilder, too) from birth to 8th grade.  Well, no harm, no foul, right?  I’ll just let the toxic brew of chemicals water out and leave the soggy mass of soap, home cleanser, and hand lotion (I do distinctly recall adding that) covered photos dry out.

The best way to let them dry out?  In a soggy mass.  I’m pretty sure that when they “dried” they stuck together well enough that the only things left of my brother’s childhood are his dental records.

This was my attempt to teach my newly minted parents that I was certainly not like the other children and that, just perhaps, I shouldn’t be left alone quite so much.  Silly adults.

They didn’t learn.  Their next attempt was for Ma Wilder to quit her job to take care of me.  There was one two-week period Ma was needed down at the bank that Pa ran to help get The Books ready for the Bank Examiners.  They did what every parent would do:  hire a local teenager to watch me.  The first one quit after a day.  The second one quit after two days.

Ma Wilder, actual quote in my room after I did this:  “Do you smell something burning?”

I’m thinking that it was about this point that Ma and Pa were regretting paying that attorney all of that money to get me free and clear as their child.  And I think I had broken them.

“John, would you please, after school, just come home.  Make yourself a sandwich.  And then sit and watch TV.  For two weeks.  If you do this, we’ll pay you.”  The equivalent they were offering me, per day, calculates in 2022 dollars as $78.39.  For a first grader.  All I had to do?  Just not destroy the house during those hours.  I could destroy at will when I was off the clock.

This was a good deal.  I accepted it, and kept my end of the bargain.

So, my first paying gig was to just restrain myself from being an insurance hazard for two weeks, for which I was paid the (2022 equivalent) sum of $783.90.

Tax free, baby.

So, they paid me.  I didn’t feel slighted that they put my money into a savings account.  But, what to do with all my newfound wealth?  I thought about it and decided.  About a month later I announced at breakfast, “I think I’m going to move out and get my own place.”

These people had all these stupid rules.  It was time to fly free.

There’s nothing sweeter than a baby’s laughter.  Except when it’s 3am.  And you’re home alone.  And you don’t have a baby.

Ma Wilder, again, didn’t react poorly.  “Please tell me about your plan.”

I explained to her that I had $783.90, and I was going to go get my own apartment.

“What will you do for food?”

“I have money, $783.90 in 2022 dollars.”

She gently went through what food for a week would cost, as well as rent.  She never said I couldn’t move out, but after doing the math, it turned out all the money I had would be gone in a month.

“Well, I guess I’ll stay then,” a pause, “Mom.”

Our Financial System: It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

“So, I am to receive thirty percent for finance, for legal protection and political influence. Is that what you’re telling me?” – The Godfather

Hunter was so stoned he ate a kid’s meal at McDonald’s® yesterday.  The kid’s mom was not happy.

I am a fan of capitalism, mostly.  Over time it has proven to be the single best way to have people contribute.  It gives them a reason – if they do well, they gain more.  By combining lots of people competing fairly, the entire world gets wealthy enough to afford a full tank of gas.  How we split it 8 billion ways is up to us, I guess.

It’s simple – with capitalism, people don’t try to get more of the cake, they make the cake bigger.  Or they make more cakes.  And it’s all voluntary, unless it’s for a gay person.  I’ve been told that baking cakes for gay people is the one thing in capitalism that’s not optional.

Capitalism is so excellent that it (along with several thousand nuclear weapons) was the primary weapon that allowed the United States to not become fragmented into places like Collective Farm #1701 in the Nebraska Oblast of the Greater Soviet Union.

I saw a the Davis twins at my high school reunion.  Those two sure looked the same!

However, there is a problem with pure capitalism.

Morality, or more specifically, the lack thereof.

I used to be a complete libertarian, and I thought that, generally markets would take care of any imbalances over time.  They don’t.  What has happened is that the economy has been warped.

When I graduated from college, I didn’t really have the vocabulary to describe the way that I felt about it, so I said, “I really don’t want to work for a financial company, I want to work for a company that makes something.”  At 21, that was about all I could come up with to describe it.

Thankfully, I’ve spent more time out in the world and have come to understand what I was trying to say so inelegantly back when I was young.  Here’s what I’d say today:  “I don’t want to work for a company that’s a vampire leaching off the economy by providing nothing.”

Still better than Goldman Sachs®.

And that’s what a lot of the economy of the country has become.  It’s led by companies that don’t fundamentally produce anything.  Black Rock® financing private investors who bought hundreds of thousands of houses across the country is a great example of this.  Why?  To turn renters into profit centers.

They were creating no value for society, instead their entire idea was to turn a necessity – a place to live – into a profit center and create no value in doing so.  And that’s the segment of society that’s increased – finance, real estate, and insurance.  We make less stuff, but spend more time and effort on the segments of society that only leach off the cake, not make it bigger.

I hear the Vatican started an online bank.  They call it Pa-Pal®.

I won’t argue that banking isn’t important as a way to store and fund money, but banking isn’t the purpose of the system.  Banking, insurance and real estate are services to make food, to make cars, to make radios, to make planes, to make movies, and to make plants that make PEZ® dispensers.

Why is it like this?

The short answer is:  because we let it be like this.

The long answer is that, since they had lots of money, they bought enough bureaucrats and legislators and judges that they changed all the rules of the game in their favor.  And we let them do it.

The good news is that it wasn’t always like this.  And there’s no reason that it has to be like this.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of blogs go off the rails when the writer comes up with a complex system that will be the one and only true system that will get the world out of difficulty.  Uh-uh.  Not this guy.

But throwing light on the problem is important, because after the system collapses (and it is collapsing) we should recognize the reason that it is collapsing and not let it get back like this again.  Ever.

The signs are clear.  Look at Boeing® – offshoring an entire industry to teach China how to make planes so China could learn to make planes so they could . . . make planes.  I’m not sure exactly what Boeing™ makes anymore, but when they decided that having everyone else make all the parts instead of them was a good idea, they ceased to be a plane maker and began to be . . . a vampire.

Looks like Boeing® hired the Wrong Brothers?

Boeing© isn’t all the way there, but you can see it headed that way.  They want the profits without making the plane.  They have ceased to be a plane maker, and will take any profit that they can at any time.  In a search for profits, they have lost their sense of self.

I believe there’s an old statement that covers this situation very well – “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  And I think that particular quote covers a lot of the issues that we have as a country right now.

So, I guess if we have a vampire problem, we have a lot at stake.

Mr. Jones And The Lies Of Communism (And Communist Tools)

“Good morning. My name is President Taft and this is my brother-in-law Lee Harvey Oswald. This is the 35th season of our Oscar-winning radio series Prune Farming in the Ukraine.” – Penn and Teller

What sound did Stalin make when he drank water?  GULAG, GULAG, GULAG

Some subjects for these columns seem to select themselves.  An example is today’s topic – the movie Mr. Jones.  Mr. Jones came out in 2019, and I had never heard of it until the screen saver on my television said I could watch it for free even though it did not feature James Spader.  Or was that why it was free, because it was Spader-less?

I was already familiar with the titular (12-year-old me snickered) character of Gareth Jones.  I was actually sort of shocked that this film was made.  It was released in 2019, and is a very anti-communist film, showing that the Soviet Union was totalitarian and homicidal in a way only exceeded during Mao’s China in the twentieth century.  The fact that anyone was putting money down to fund a film, especially in 2019, that was this anti-communist surprised me.

The subject of the film is Gareth Jones’ discovery and reporting of the Holodomor.  I know that many of you are already familiar with the Holodomor, but a brief recap is required for context for those that aren’t familiar with it.  The Holodomor was, essentially, the Soviet government giving the farmers of the Soviet Union a “going out of business” sign so he could create collectivized agriculture.

No Leftist idea is so bad that Justin won’t try it again.

Lenin had tried to corral the farmers, but he discovered fairly quickly that the Revolution doesn’t run on good intentions, and had to back off.  Farmers were allowed to farm so that the Revolution could be fed.  But after Lenin died, Stalin took over and decided to make a “kinder, gentler” nation.

Just kidding.  Stalin started purging right and left.  And as poor as everyone in the Soviet Union was, a hardscrabble farmer (wink) that made a few extra bushels of grain was considered very wealthy.  They called them Kulaks.  Who was a Kulak?  Well, anyone with just a little more than the average peasant.

So, Stalin decided to go to war against his own people.  He mobilized factory workers, gave them guns, and sent them out to root out the real enemies of the revolution.  Keep this in mind when you hear about the war on farmers in Canada or the war on farmers in the Netherlands.

How does one get rid of millions of farmers but not starve the rest of the nation?  Take all of the food the farmers have.  All of the food.  From all of the farmers.  Then let them die.

I guess they won’t be having any Holland Oats anytime soon. 

Yup, that was it.  That was the strategy.  And it worked.  Bodies were collected on a regular basis, and all across the Soviet Union, millions died.  Many were shipped off to the GULAG system, too.  This is yet another reason the Soviet Union wasn’t the inspiration for many theme parks.

This is where Gareth Jones comes in – he was a British writer/reporter who talked himself into the Soviet Union, and talked himself into visiting the Soviet countryside, specifically in the Ukraine.  What he saw wasn’t good – it was exactly the mass starvation that I wrote about in the paragraph above.  If only he had read that, he could have saved himself some time and a whole lot of trouble.

But the main reason we know about the Holodomor is that Gareth Jones wrote about it.  He told the outside world, so we owe him.  The movie, Mr. Jones, depicts this journey across the Ukraine in a pretty unfaithful way – meant to shock the viewer, and also meant to particularly show that Ukraine was the victim.  In reality, Ukraine was hit particularly badly, but millions of farmers across the U.S.S.R. outside of the Ukraine were also treated in a similar fashion.

But it will be different this time, right?

That’s one of the beefs that the Jones family had with the film – Jones never ate nor witnessed the items on the menu that the film depicts.  They were also a bit miffed that they felt that his memory was used to be anti-Russian, rather than anti-Soviet.  You can see a bit more here (LINK) on how the family felt.  In one sense, it looks like this movie was made not because of the anti-Soviet theme, but because of the anti-Russian propaganda value.  Maybe because of Trump and muh Russia collusion?

Who can say?

But one other thing to note is that the Soviets aren’t the only bad guy – there’s another:  Walter Duranty.  Walter Duranty is one of the scummiest people to have ever lived.  The fact that he enjoyed a life of power and debauchery was only part of it.

For an example of how degenerate Duranty was, he was best buds with Aleister Crowley.  They did magic together as well as drug-fueled orgies with participants of all varieties.  This, of course, made him the perfect hire for the New York Times©.  Duranty wrote such a glowing portrait (“there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be”) that he received a Pulitzer Prize® for his work denying the Holodomor.  Duranty’s writing about the Soviet Union was influential in getting the Soviets accepted and into a cozy sleeping bag with FDR.

Some things never change . . . .

So, given that his hands are stained with the blood of literally millions of farmers, you can understand that this is probably one of the few times this sentence has ever been written in the English language:  In retrospect, Duranty’s drug-fueled pederasty might be the nicest line I can write about him.  Oh, wait, he’s dead.  That’s something positive I can write about this vile leach that stained the lives of millions.

In the movie Mr. Jones, Duranty is depicted as just the depraved greasy worm I sketched above, so it’s got that going for it.  And the family of Gareth says they got his character spot-on, that’s two for two of the main cast.  Oddly, they have Jones meeting George Orwell, when in fact during all of Gareth Jones’ life Orwell was still an avowed socialist who had yet to become disillusioned by fighting with the commies in the Spanish Civil War and there’s zero evidence the two ever met.

Overall, the movie made $2.8 million at the box office, so unless they made mad bank from Blockbuster™ rentals, they ended up losing lots of cash.  Again, it was an art-house anti-commie movie released into the woke world of 2019.  What did they expect?

My birds were stuck together.  I took them to the vet – he said he couldn’t help – it was toucan fusing.

So, do I recommend it?  Dunno.  It wasn’t bad.  I probably wouldn’t watch it again because it’s a “one-time” movie and did not have James Spader in it.

The Best Post You’ll Read Today About Almost Anything

“You don’t know what cold is. I once survived an entire week trapped in a Swiss glacier eating nothing but frozen Neanderthal. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.” – Futurama

So, after 232 ties in a row . . . Gung decided that “rock beats skull”.

Usually, I write about money and finance and the shenanigans going on in the world now.  I thought I’d deviate from that formula for several reasons.  First, I’d like to have some good news about the financial world, and that didn’t happen this week, unless Biden had a brief moment of lucidity and finally figured out that the sanctions are actually hurting us more than Russia.  (Checks news.)  Nope.

Second, on Monday I wrote about collective vengeance.  It was, in modern Western Civilization, an anachronism that is rapidly returning.  The post talked about how I had grown up in shell where collective punishment simply didn’t exist and that it was rapidly returning.

I’ll note that my youthful innocence on collective punishment didn’t extend forever, but the point of the post was that the Left fed on collective punishment – I might write more about that in the future, since (last time I checked) I still seem to have an infinite amount of words combinations left.

I am, however, very aware that collective punishment was at one time the norm.  Reading in the Bible, when the wall of Jericho came down, not a single person was supposed to be left alive, so historically in a story we all know, collective punishment was a thing.

Why don’t the Amish complain when people make fun of them on the Internet?  Amish:  “What’s an Internet?”

I’ve written about things even farther back in history, and (perhaps) why people are the way they are based on tribe sizes in a theory that I think is entirely unique (read this because it’s awesome) until someone shows me that it was already written about the year I was born.  I’m still irritated that Newton figured out F=ma when I was only six.  Conversely, wouldn’t it be a hoot if an Internet humorist actually figured out why people are nuts?

Third, this post is really related to Monday’s post, and it shows this:  collective punishment may be actively written into our DNA, and only during brief moments of history (as brought about by Western Civilization and its particular individualist elements) is it not the norm.

I’ll start this rather unusual post with a concept that many a familiar with:  the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is that weird place that we get when something looks human, but isn’t.  An example would be CGI that looks like a human, but there’s something in the CGI that makes us step back because we process the simple equation:  it looks a lot like a human, but it’s not human.

Well, it’s nice that the spirit of Yoko lives on.  Except this one takes out a monarchy that started in 1066.

Zombies are a perfect example.  For me, that idea that something that is so close to human is propelled by an intelligence that is certainly not human is one of the scariest ideas.

Why?  Why do things that inhabit the Uncanny Valley between human and observably not-human give us the creeps?  The Uncanny Valley implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like us, and wasn’t us.  It must have been a very, very big deal if tens of thousands of years later it still can inhabit our collective memory and produce a (general) revulsion and fear.

What was it that did that?

I’m sure they had a very complicated order at Starbucks®.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was the Neanderthals.  This was spurred on by the book Them+Us by Danny Vendramini.  He’s got a website here (LINK) and the image of the Neanderthal below is from his site, which he allows based on terms that seem to have disappeared, so, I’m thinking Fair Use covers it all.

I like the book.  Spoiler, Them is the Neanderthal, and Us is, well, our ancestors.

He starts the book by attempting to reconstruct what a Neanderthal really looked like.  For most of my life, what I’ve seen were the pictures of people who, with just a wee bit of barbering, you could toss into a suit and they’d be at home at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange®.

Vendramini thinks not.  First, he thought that they might have been covered with hair.  What’s his evidence?  The first part of his evidence is that there is no evidence that they could make clothing of anything more than the most basic “throw an animal skin over your shoulders” type.  So, how do you keep warm?

Hair.  Hair is the norm for mammals in the world, except for people (sorry, Italians).  So Danny (sorry, Vendramini is too many letters to type again and again) came to the logical conclusion that, like other primates, Neanderthals inhabiting Europe and the Near East would be quite hairy.

Pretty much no one argues that Neanderthal was about six times as strong as modern man, or even of the beta version of homo sapiens that existed at that time, so about a 431 times stronger than a typical soy-latte-based ambisexual® Leftist.

But Neanderthal wasn’t just strong, he was smart.  Neanderthals made things, like spears.  Like stone blades.  Like stone axes.  Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.  I don’t see any mochachinos.

Based on the size of their eyes, Danny thinks they were huge.  What needs huge eyes?  Things that hunt in low light.  So, Vendramini thinks that Neanderthals might have been low-light, nocturnal predators.  What else would low-light nocturnal predators have?  An amazing sense of smell, so there’s no reason to have a nose like ours – a nose like a pug.

And eyes?  The most efficient eyes for low-light hunting are slit-pupil eyes – like a cat.  The brow ridge?  It shielded the eyes during the day – and the eyes were much higher than a normal human, like where our forehead is.  So, huge eyes in the forehead with slit pupils.  Not scary, right?

Okay, I’ve finally found something scarier than my ex-wife.

Oh, every bit of evidence says that Neanderthal ate meat, so he was a carnivore.  But he also ate . . . Neanderthals.  So, he was a cannibal.  Eating puny humans?  That’s pretty easy if you’ve eaten Neanderthal.  Probably more tender, too.

Neanderthal lived in the forest.  Oh the forest, my dear, is lovely, dark and deep . . . .  One anthropologist described Neanderthal as this: wolves with knives.  So imagine that there are wolves in your neighborhood that are at least six times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. And they are as smart as a human.  And they have knives.

Think that might help you sleep at night?

So, our ancestors, say, 50,000 years ago were wonderfully happy, living in a world where they were the king.  It was Eden-like.  Garden-like.  Hmm.

Anyway, one day they wander across a border and find?  Neanderthals that want to eat them.  Or, make babies with them.  Yup, they could make babies with humans, and between 1-3% of your DNA comes from nocturnal, cannibal, predators, unless your DNA is entirely from Africa.

So, when a Neanderthal group of hunters found a human group, it was the equivalent of a college party:  sex and food.  I’m not sure what order makes it better.

This, of course, baked our noodles.  It made it necessary for us to become smarter.  Vendramini suggests that this was the stepping out of the Garden which required us to have the knowledge, skills and brainpower to fight the Neanderthal, to beat them, and to become much better.

Does one hate the stone that hones us?  I think not.  Note:  my beard is better, but my abs need work.

It describes the Uncanny Valley in many respects.  What are the myths of our monsters?  Werewolves and vampires and cannibals and (Biblically) the Men of Renown (look it up).  It also explains our instinctive fear of the dark, where the huge, strong, cannibal near-human that can smell you from two counties over might be hiding waiting to get frisky or to turn you into a snack.

But we fought back.  The mark of a conquering civilization is the Y-chromosome, because, well, dudes give that part.  As I read it, the Y-chromosome in humanity is, human.  In the end, we won.  But they changed us even as we eliminated them.  It’s likely we did our own collective punishment and killed off all human males that looked too much like the enemy – too Neanderthal.  So, yeah, collective punishment.

And this also provides an explanation for the Uncanny Valley, and why it is generally the source of the ultimate horror and fear that humanity feels.  But we won.

There’s drinking, fighting, and death and drinking and fighting.  I think this is an insurance company’s nightmare.

As Western Civilization fades, the barriers to collective punishment fade as well.  So, sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight . . .

And we’ll win again.

Collective Punishment: It’s The Plan Of The Left

“Could be race memory stored in the collective unconscious.  I wouldn’t rule out clairvoyance or telepathic contact either.” – Ghostbusters (’84)

Reminder to Leftists:  the Geneva Convention is not a checklist.

One of the things that I was raised with was the idea of individual responsibility.  That didn’t come from society – it came from Ma and Pa.  If I drew on the hardwood floor under the bed in ink I’d blown out of ballpoint pens?  Like a dozen ballpoint pens?

It was on me.  And when it was found, it was my responsibility to scrub it until the ink came off.  I could add in another few dozen things I did, but what parent doesn’t remember coming home and seeing the family photo collection curling up because their six-year-old thought he could make bigger copies by stretching them in water?  I mean, it worked in the darkrooms on the TV shows.  I mixed in all of the cleaning chemicals under the sink because it seemed odd that the pictures weren’t stretching.

And those are not the worst examples of my behavior – not even close.

I once told a joke about the Hindenburg.  It didn’t land well. 

For society as well, that seemed to be the rule.  While groups might have different attributes, if someone broke a law and was convicted, they didn’t send grandparents and children and uncles and nephews to jail – they sent the guy who broke the law to jail.

Certainly, families may have felt shame, but the person who did the crime did the time.

That is so deeply ingrained in me that it took me quite a while to understand that viewpoint is no longer the default in Western Civilization, but rather it is on its way to becoming a quaint anachronism.  What’s replacing it?

Collective guilt.  You can see that nearly everywhere, and the 1619 Project®, the BLM™ and reparations movements, anti-Christian movements, and others are proof.  Reparations:  people who did no wrong paying people who weren’t injured 150 years ago.

When Elizabeth Warren canceled her presidential campaign, it wasn’t the first race she had to leave. (meme not original)

The theory is rather simple – every person related to someone who did something in the past is guilty.  The idea is that groups are collectively sinful and must be punished collectively.  This is certainly not an idea that is enshrined in the West.  Oh, sure, the town of Mudstinklebottom was been put to the torch because the Earl Hootertinkletwerp of Snottlyford was not amused because his trousers weren’t pressed properly.  But these examples of collective punishment are rightly viewed as atrocities, not a “how to” guide.

And I wasn’t at a single one of them.  And neither were you.  As I wrote last week, no one alive should feel even the smallest amount of The Guilt® that is featured on display every day in our world.

But yet, the statue of Thomas Jefferson has to come down because the things he did, which were considered normal back in 1780, are now realized to have been morally abhorrent.  The genius of the man, the founding of the University of Virginia, drafting the Declaration of Independence, and inventing sno-cones can’t be thrown aside based on the moral lens of 2022.

I named my daughter after Thomas Jefferson.  About 250 years after.

The real idea for the destruction of American (and Western) history loops straight back to the tactic collective punishment.  Dismantling the heroes of a civilization, the men and women who saw farther and did more is just part of the punishment – and more on that in a minute.

The Left hates Western Civilization and wants to bring it down.  The Guilt is simply one of the tools of the Left, in order to have the battle end even without a fight.  It’s demoralization, and it’s part of the playbook.  But it is intended on a collective basis.  Who is the guilty party?  Based on what I know of my readership, if you’re reading this, you can nearly be assured that the coming collective punishment is intended for you.  And this collective punishment is indeed a tool of the Left.  If you’re not familiar with the Left’s regular use of collective punishment, here’s a taste from your humble author (LINK).

But news of the broom really swept the nation.

Because, as I’ve written before, the aim of the Left is to win before the first battle is joined.  To do that, they have to make us hate our past.  Why?

In order that the enemy (us) will accept collective guilt.  Again, I’m a poor test subject because I feel zero guilt about you can’t effectively punish a people if they have pride in their past, and pride in themselves.  If every American was evil, and the country was founded on that evil, then everything the country has done since then must be evil, too, right?

Sadly, there are many Americans who have utterly fallen for this concept.  They blame themselves for actions that they have never taken, for thoughts they have never felt, and for crimes that they have never committed.  And the Left wants to take down, to erase all of it.

I’m working less at the cat shelter – they reduced meowers.

Why?  Because they believe, deeply, in collective guilt, and the West has been tried and convicted as far as they are concerned.  The sentence, if they can carry it out, is death.  As has been said before, the Left hates you and wants you dead.

Yes, I still believe in individual responsibility and individual guilt – Ma and Pa Wilder certainly taught me that.  So I guess most of the Leftists should have individual trials.  And individual punishment.