Category: Canada

Censorship Comes Home

“The name’s Francis Sawyer, but everybody calls me Psycho. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I’ll kill you.” – Stripes

Yes, YouTube® gave themselves a free speech award. It’s not parody – this happened.

The Mrs., Mark (LINK) and I have a little podcast we’ve been working on for a while. It’s not very big, but I don’t advertise it much, either. We livestream every Wednesday at 9pm Eastern. You can find it here (LINK) if you’re interested. It’s a lot like The Grand Tour® (or old Top Gear©) with me as Clarkson, Mark as May, and The Mrs. as Hammond. Note: The Mrs. does not wreck nearly as often as Hammond does.

What we have been doing with it is practicing – we’ve practiced format, and types of stories, and even how we interact. I like to think that in the last few months we’re getting better on all points. I think we’re getting better, because more recently after completing the podcast I feel “up” and excited, like we did a good job and I know we did. The podcast content is pretty lightweight, mainly commentary on the news and making fun of The Powers That Be.

One thing that has always been in the back of my mind was that we would (at some point) be censored.

Our first strike was a copyright strike.

Why?

How does a polygamist hippie count his wives? “One Mrs. Hippie, Two Mrs. Hippe, Three Mrs. Hippie . . .“

The Mrs. used a bit of Rockin’ in the Free World to make fun of Neil Young and his blatant attempt to gain publicity in order to censor Joe Rogan’s ‘Rona commentary that differed from The Narrative. The irony on that one is hilarious. It’s obvious that Neil’s idea of an ideal “free world” would probably make Stalin red with envy.

So, that was the first censorship. The Mrs. replaced the now-verboten Rockin’ in the Free World with a public domain music bed and that podcast was re-uploaded. The fact that we were using only a snippet of Neil’s music and then criticizing him for being a hirsute hippie hypocrite of questionable personal hygiene would probably have made a claim of Fair Use quite defensible.

But, whatever. It was easy enough to cut out that bearded road apple’s music.

This time, however, I accidently touched one of YouTube’s® third rails – an absolutely verboten opinion. Here’s what I said in the podcast:

“There is a theory that I’m working on: Wilder’s Theory of Greatest Amusement. What would be the most amusing 2016 election? Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. What’s the most amusing outcome? Donald Trump winning. Let’s go to 2020: what’s the most amusing opponent for Trump? Joe “Dementia” Biden. What’s the most amusing outcome? Biden stealing the election.”

That’s what I said, more or less. I can’t give you the exact quote because YouTube™ nuked the podcast not only from external view, but we can’t see it ourselves. When Google® is serious about putting something in the memory hole, they are serious.

They did highlight the offending bit: “Biden stealing the election.”

Out of a fifty-minute podcast (more or less) it was a throwaway line. The Mrs. appealed the strike. It turns out of you appeal a strike and the strike is upheld, the appeal is a second strike. The end sentence in her request for an appeal? “Lighten up, Francis.”

When I played baseball we couldn’t wear Adidas©. Three stripes and you’re out.

I’m not sure that the millennial who is in charge of determining if we violated “community standards” will get the reference. But if his, her, or xirs name is Francis? Maybe he’ll lighten up. I don’t think they’ll accept the appeal – and in that case we get an immediate suspension.

But if we get three? They delete our channel forever.

That’s okay. Our channel has an approximate net worth of . . . zero. There are literally an infinite number of channel names we can come up with, and an infinite number of email addresses we can us to create those channels. It’s not like the podcast team is worried about losing out this name. Heck, we’re not even a streaming channel that investors spent $250 million putting together.

Here’s the policy that they say we violated:

  • Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to:
    • Any past U.S. Presidential election
      • The 2021 German federal election
      • The 2018 Brazilian Presidential election

Free and fair elections?

So, the result is simple: if there is ample evidence that there was fraud that impacted the 2020 election, (and there is) you can’t make that claim on YouTube®. Why? Because they have already determined that those claims are “false”. 2,000 voters all registered to one address in Georgia? One person committing multiple felonies on film by delivering votes to boxes? Stacy Abrams eating the votes that had “Trump” marked on them?

I did searches of those very serious stories, and there were no hits on YouTube®. Zero, despite evidence on film of these things having occurred. Obviously, according to YouTube®, those things never happened. They’re facts (well, not the Stacy Abrams thing), but facts that YouTube® suppresses like a 1915 woman voter.

The classroom even had a duck. They made it wear a mask. It was strange looking, but it fit the bill.

It actually gets worse. If a person’s YouTube™ videos are nothing but, oh, I don’t know, hairstyles for squirrels, but it turns out that you actually write and perform disco music? Okay, that might be justified. But the reality is that once a person becomes “unpersoned” it happens across all platforms at the same time. Facebook™, Twitter©, and YouTube® (and others) will permaban you.

And you’re done. There’s no appeal. And if you have information stored on their services? Gone. Where do you do your recovery passwords? Records? Past email files?

Strangely, this cast of characters is very familiar . . .

From the trends that I’ve seen, eventually, all media on the Right that questions The Narrative will get banned. One website I try to visit regularly has been under DDOS attack for weeks. Others, like Western Rifle Shooters Association, were deleted (and came back, thankfully!). But tonight, I tried to hit one of WRSA’s links and found . . . .

No such page. There are tons of reasons other than censorship, but, let’s be real. It’s censorship. Some of my most popular posts led to unwanted attention, to virus attacks, and to being taken offline.

The momentum is headed towards more, not less censorship right now. The Digital Services Act recently passed by the EU parliament increases censorship. Expect more here in the United States.

If Hillary wins in 2024, I’m moving to Benghazi. At least I know she’ll leave me alone there.

They say that it’s darkest before the dawn, but sometimes it’s darkest before things go pitch black. I fear the times will get even darker. That’s okay. It just makes some of us search ever harder for the Truth, and we all know: the signal can’t be stopped.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

  • A decadent people
  • Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
  • Because they live in abundance
  • Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World.  They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed.  As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy.  That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

  • Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need.  As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative.  Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life:  you can’t outrun your teeth.  But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
  • Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them.    Will one a week kill you?  No.  Will one a day?  Maybe.  Same with chips.  I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago.  Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy.  Same with donuts.  When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product.  Which they are.  Corollary:  don’t let your teeth dig your grave.  I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
  • Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff.  A baked potato or French fries?  Baked, thank you.  Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap.  If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week.  At most.  Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today.  It sure made his parents mad.
  • The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier?  Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full.  Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour.  Insulin tells your body to store fat.  Do the math.
  • Get exercise.   It’s good for you.  If nothing else, walk.  If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain.  One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away.  Keep moving.  Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
  • Avoid it, except, say, once a week.  Maybe.  I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®.  I want to hear the news.”  Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

  • Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth.  Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting.  Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative.  And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Psaki about COVID.
  • The media lies. But I repeat myself.  “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet.  Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait?  She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.  Look it up.  Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this:  your emotion is the aim.  Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
  • Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
  • Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad.  There’s plenty.  Twitter® is a sea of it.  Most social media is a sea of it.  That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13th
  • For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now.   There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them.  Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy?  There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad.  When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim.  Stop it.  Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once.  It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage.  These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on.  It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago.  If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

  • If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care.  A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly.  And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
  • Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps.  And never go casual.  Get competitive.
  • If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why?  Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
  • If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
  • If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values.  Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
  • If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
  • And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have?  Yours?  The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate.  Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

  • Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice.  Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it.  Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
  • I have one.  I could pay it off in cash.  Why could I pay it off?  Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997).  I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
  • Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month.  Second, there’s a moral cost.  Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character.  But every month, and forever?  It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
  • Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time?  Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights?    GTA is a life stealer.  And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
  • Why live in a big city? The high housing cost?  The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you?  Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
  • Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them.  When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question:  “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?”  If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on.  The worst case?  Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
  • Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau.  How will you prepare for that?
  • You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away?  It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic.  It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life.  He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario.  It isn’t.  Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

 We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

 We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

 With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

 When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.” 

 On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” 

 In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”  

 Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

 And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg.  Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us.  The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating).  This last one deals with the essence of the modern world:  Money.

We are being farmed.  For money.  For time.  For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s.  I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman.  To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee).  Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921.  Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough.  Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car.  Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies.  You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys’r’Us© kid . . . bankrupt and empty inside.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff.  Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me.  The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction.  Then they (generally) fail.  I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required.  Example?

Car insurance.  There was a time it wasn’t required.  As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding).  Before 1956, no states required car insurance.  Is it a good idea?  Yeah.  But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird.  The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking?  The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

  • Cable TV,
  • Subscription streaming,
  • Internet,
  • Elvis impersonators,
  • Property taxes,
  • Mortgage or rent,
  • Trash,
  • PEZ®,
  • Water,
  • Water soluble dog wax,
  • Sewer,
  • Johnny Depp, and
  • Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going.  Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes.  Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory.  It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association.  And Johnny Depp?  Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse.  It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income.  Then, enter feminism.  It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®.  Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s.  Help the Clampetts?  I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday.  I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce.  So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result?  Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much.  The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress.  The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me?  Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up.  And government dependency went up.  Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes.  How can the Left keep winning like this?  That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money.  The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™.  The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business.  But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school.  But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan.  This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school.  I don’t think I can ever repay you.  I kid.  But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013.  I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts.  More students plus higher tuition led to more loans.  This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000.  The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go?  To climbing walls.  To cool dorm rooms.  To spring breaks.  To new buildings.  And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have?  Part C.

Yes.  Medical care.  In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can.  Eat healthy food.  Get exercise.  Stay hydrated.  Wash your hands.  Try not to get crushed under heavy things.  Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry.  Healthy people are lousy customers.  Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”  Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea.  No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight.  No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes.  And they actually want you to get cancer.  This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report:  “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm.  Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now?  If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event.  Does that sound sustainable?  I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites.   The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset.  According to their thoughts:  We’ll own nothing, and like it.  Then, our time could be farmed forever.  Our desires could be controlled and programmed.  We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed.  And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them, in their own words:

The Modern World, Part I: Health And Strippers

“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High

“Sir, I found the IED – Ice Cream, Eggos® and Diet Coke™.”

I had (before Vlad decided to put on the Imperial March and send the tanks down south) promised a three-post series based around a single theme.  As the name of the blog implies, this first one covers the “health” theme of the blog . . . .  Unless events in Ukraine dictate, expect parts two and three on Monday and Wednesday.

What happens when society conspires to make people . . . unhealthy?  We’ve experienced an upheaval in the traditions and previously self-imposed and society-imposed limits to behavior (behaviour is the metric spelling for you in Chairman Trudeau’s People’s Republic of Canada).

By (nearly) any measure the United States is far less healthy as a nation than it was five or six decades ago.  About only good thing we’ve seen is a lowering in heart disease and other diseases related to smoking.  That’s a bright spot.  Many of the metrics are fairly grim, though on other health statistics.  Even life expectancy, which had been increasing, is now trending downward faster than Kamala Harris at the county fair zipper pull.

So, Joe Biden sent her over to manage the Ukraine situation.  I’ll bet she’ll suck at that, too.

I’ll throw out this idea:  many of the health issues that we are facing are the product of modernity – changes in society that break with time tested traditions:

  • I can pull up numerous articles that point to how America is the fattest that it has ever been. Homer Simpson was portrayed as comically obese in the 1990s when he reached the weight of 239.  Now that qualifies him to wear medium clothes.  From the child’s section.
  • We’re also at a high point of kids being raised in broken homes, which causes health issues as well. I mean, if being in jail is a health issue.
  • Finally, we’re in many ways unhappier than ever before – opioid deaths aren’t happening because life is peachy. Kids in high school today don’t think they’ll do as well financially as their parents.  And people are looking for increasing escapes from reality.

Let’s start with weight – I’ll spend more time here since I think it’s a topic where we tend to blame people because they’re fat.  However, I am not particularly a proponent of the idea that self-control just disappeared and that’s why America decided to pack on the pounds.  Nope.  Things changed which made it much easier to pack on the Dorito® muscle.

This is exactly what AOC weighs when she has both her saddle and feedbag on.

Join me for a minute in a time machine back to the 1960s.  What did people eat?

Food.  Duh.

But what kind of food?  Food with much lower levels of processing.  For example, frozen pizzas and microwave Pizza Rolls® and Bagel Bites™ didn’t exist.  If you wanted a TV dinner, they were required to be placed in an oven for approximately sixty years and then pulled out.  I never had a 1960’s version of a TV dinner, but the photos I’ve seen made them look as attractive as Nancy Pelosi.

They were a novelty.

When I was growing up, Ma Wilder made dinner.  Sure, she bought noodles sometimes, but she also made her own, from scratch.  I can’t remember my mother ever making something from a kit.  She bought me some pizza kits about twice a year where you made your own dough because I think it amused her to watch me try to cook.

No, when Ma Wilder made mashed potatoes, she started with . . . potatoes.  Then she added milk and butter and salt.  Four ingredients.  She even made gravy from scratch.  Much of the food Ma bought didn’t have labels.  Why would you need to label a steak?  I mean, the only ingredient is:  steak.  Same with lettuce.  Same with tomatoes.  It’s . . . food.

I think I channeled Aesop for a minute there.

How many moms in 2020 have the time to cook like Ma Wilder did?  How many are, instead, thrown to work and then due to time pressures toss the kids Pop Tarts® and Tropicana™ and Kid Cuisine©?  When I was a single dad (and much stupider than today) I’ll raise my hand – I did.

So did/do a lot of people.  The food that is convenient is categorically different.  And, at least until inflation makes it nigh unaffordable, it’s now ubiquitous.  Soda pop costs less now (adjusted for inflation) than ever.  Buy it in the 2 liter (2 milligrams in metric litres) bottles and it’s amazingly cheap.  Buy the off-brand stuff and you can get it inexpensively enough that you could bathe in it.

Food is also available all the time, everywhere.  When I was a kid, there was breakfast (I always skipped it due to the high quality of my genetics) lunch at school (I nearly always skipped that because I could buy a comic instead of lunch if I saved my lunch money) and then dinner at home.  Mom may or may not have made dessert – it was generally a once a week thing.  And convenience stores are selling Snacky Cakes© at 3am.  When I was a kid, everyone was asleep at 3am.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  But what if there’s no fast to break?

Compare that to today?  All school food is free for all students this year.  Pugsley could have free breakfast, a free snack, a free lunch, and then a free afternoon snack if he wanted.  Every day.  And then dinner, and then a fridge filled with snacks.

The cooks at school aren’t (mostly) getting actual food ingredients to cook, either.  They’re getting highly processed foods that contain (in some cases) ingredients other than salt that were mined instead of grown.  They contain oils and chemicals that were made in facilities that would make an oil refinery blush.  Oh, wait, the “vegetable” oil is made in a refinery that uses solvent extraction and then bombards the oil with hydrogen to create a chemical reaction to make it shelf stable.

Do we wonder why we’re fat?  We’re not eating food.  And what we are eating is so available that we’re stuffing ourselves with it constantly.

Why?

Moms have to work because society says that making PowerPoints® is more important than raising kids.  Besides, it takes a village, right?  Oh, and since all the moms are working, a family can’t afford a house on just one income.  That’s, of course, if the family is intact.  Single moms and dads have even less time.

Yup.  This modern world is a winner, am I right?

I tried pole dancing once, but Kowalski didn’t like it.

That brings us to issue two:  single parents and blended families.  Do I understand that it’s sometimes required?  Yes.  I was married to someone before The Mrs., and it didn’t work because it was a mixed marriage – I was human and she . . . wasn’t.  I kid.  She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.

Society has made divorce a go-to option.  Again, I’ve been there as a parent.

But not as a kid.

I had two parents for most of my childhood, which was awesome.  (I was adopted after the mother wolf left me on the Wilder doorstep, which was seen as a fulfillment of the Great Prophecy that I would be the one to unite the mayonnaise and mustard – the condisatz haderwich – I even survived the Everlasting Gomstopper© jabbar.) Sure, they argued.  Sure, there were problems from time to time.

I never had to worry, though, who Ma or Pa was going to bring home.

I never had to help them emotionally through a divorce.  I got to be a kid.  And when Ma said, “Wait until your father gets home,” I was damn scared.  They were united in punishment, and they would absolutely not undercut each other.

But Pa saved his blue shield for special occasions. 

If I was in trouble, I couldn’t escape the consequences.

Now?  The pathology of single parenthood is clear:

  • 43% of prison inmates grew up in a single-parent household
  • 90% of repeat juvenile arsonists live only with their mother
  • 75% of patients in drug abuse facilities came from a single-parent household
  • 63% of youth suicides are from homes without a father

I could go on and on.  Society has made divorce by women for “fun and prizes” cheap and easy.  It’s even celebrated by the “I don’t need no man” crowd.  Who suffers?  Society.  And the kids.

So, the tradition of divorce being very, very hard to get and socially undesirable seems so outdated now.  Right?

Let’s add on our final contestant for this post:  the financial pressures and collapsing economy brought out by a relentless globalization and continual change.  Careers are gone.  Gigs are in when an economy has all turned to “services” driven by cheaper labor.

In many cases, businesses are built with just the idea to use cheap labor to financialize the industry.  What’s the forty-year-old guy who used to carve gravestones going to do when the boss buys a laser engraver that does twice his work in half the time?  There’s not exactly a market for monument carvers.

At Mozart’s grave, you can watch him decompose.

Let’s also add this into the mix:  The constant streams of gratification available from infinite Internet porn to infinite Internet social apps (I hear the kids have found something called MySpace®) haven’t created the sort of real-life experiences that were common in the past.  Now, the negatives are accentuated, amplified, and immediate.  Is it a surprise that kids today are nihilistic and escapist and jaded on male-female relations?

Still, in all of this, there is room for personal responsibility.  We are each responsible for our individual outcomes.  I can’t pass the buck for my failures back to society, but I can look at the trend.  Have the people who got fat changed?  Not really.  It’s just far easier to get fat today, but still the responsibility of the individual.

Have plenty of kids from broken homes turned into champs?  Sure!  But the statistics show that parents, shockingly, matter to the outcomes.

If I pick a career that gets replaced, is that on me?  Yes, yes it is.  But how many people have picked careers where they have been replaced?  Twitter® even banned people for telling journalists (who had told coal miners, “learn to code”) to “learn to code.”  We live in a society where careers are ephemeral, coming and going faster than Nancy Pelosi’s bouts of sobriety.  And what do we do about a generation raised by computers that are programmed to be as addictive as possible without creating actual achievement?

I heard an actual journalist was recently at CNN®.  They had Security escort him out.

If I leave a kid in a candy shop politician unsupervised, it’s my fault, as well as the kid’s politician’s fault.  You just don’t leave irresponsible people where they can cause damage, even though the moral choices were made by the kid politician.

Perhaps, moving away from traditions means moving away from problems that have been solved before?

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure you can inflate construction costs and launder money through it.” – Ozark

I wonder if everyone can figure out why China built their own Internet now?

Biden has miscalculated.  Again.  As he has his entire life.  He has moved from one miscalculation in his life to the next.  So, it’s not surprising that perhaps the greatest failure in the history of the United States has shown up on his watch.  Let’s go, Brandon, indeed.

To be fair, it’s not entirely Brandon’s fault.  The United States economy, as I’ve gone to great pains to show over my posts, has been hollowed out over the years.  We have gone from one that manufactures things and exports goods to one that mainly manufactures movies (we’re very good at that) and consulting and intellectual property and Starbucks™.

The thing that we’ve been best at is printing and then exporting dollars.  For decades now, we have been exporting dollars that we printed and then importing stuff like fidget spinners and PEZ®.  It was a great deal for us.  People used those dollars and we got stuff, but it was essentially a global tax on the rest of the world.

That ability to tax, however, only works as long as people believe that the dollar is worth something, and that the holder of that economic power won’t bend the rules.  Just like the bank runs up in Canada started when Trudeau broke the promise that the banks won’t steal people’s money, so the same principle applies to international affairs.

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

When Russia attacked Ukraine, Biden declared sanctions.  Sure that’s a fine idea when dealing with a tiny random country, but Russia isn’t tiny.  And Russia isn’t any random country.

See, one silver lining!

Russia is of huge importance to world commerce.  Russia exports the stuff that makes modern economies go:

  • Food
  • Steel
  • Fertilizer
  • Titanium
  • Nickel
  • Oil
  • Refined Fuels
  • Natural Gas
  • Coal
  • Gold

In almost every commodity listed above, Russia is in the top five exporting nations.  In several commodities, it is the world’s largest exporter.  Check out the graphs on energy and wheat when the market gets disrupted:

What does Russia import?

  • Telephones
  • Car Parts
  • Computers
  • Medicine

Russia also exports nearly double what it imports.  If there is a country that is nearly self-sufficient in this world, it’s Russia.  There is an economic concept called “autarky” – or a nationwide independence from imports.  Looking at the list of companies that are leaving Russia, well, could it be that Russia is better off without them?

Yes, Pornhub® and OnlyFans™ are on the list.  I wonder what the effects will be?  21-year-old girls will have to find jobs that involve wearing clothes?

Russia isn’t independent.  But it’s close enough.  Most things that it is missing can be bought from either India or China.  No iPhones®?  China has a bunch of other kinds of phones.  And all those businesses that left?  It’s not like the Russians don’t know how to make hamburger and buns, so McPutins™ could open up tomorrow, though I’d skip the polonium sauce.

Russians are talking about nationalizing all of the assets of companies that have abandoned them.  Why wouldn’t a country do that?  Well, other countries could seize the overseas Russian assets.

Oops.  Too late.  So what’s stopping the Russians?

What is the threat from the West?  That Russian audiences won’t have Netflix®?  The things that Russia has been denied are, frankly, not very scary.  They won’t get to see the next Marvel© movie?  Oh, yeah, they also went after Russia’s money and tried to cut it off from the dollar-based economic system and . . . entertainment.

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

What happens when that bluff is called, when Russia and China decide that they don’t need dollars?  What happens when Russia will sell natural gas to Europe only in yuan?  Or for gold?  Or that they won’t trade their commodities for anything at all?

The tent collapses, and by that tent I mean the dollar.

I actually think that Joe’s head is so far up . . . well, I’ll be kind and guess that he has Alzheimer’s rather than being this stupid.  Oddly, this is viewed as an ideological opportunity by the Leftist henchxirs in Washington.  They hate fossil fuels to the point of not caring about the relative plight of the American consumer.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them:

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal.  No matter what it costs.

There are even well-meaning Lefties starting to write articles to cope with the failure:

But here’s a sign:  Joe tried to get meetings with the Saudis and the very friendly folks over at the United Arab Emirates.  They wouldn’t return his calls.  Imagine:  a foreign leader refusing to even talk with the President* of the United States.  It’s almost like he’s a fraud?

I wonder if he’s going to drunk-text the Emir tonight?

One person sums it up . . . .

Beyond that, the price of wheat is getting ready to go even higher.  Together, Russia and Ukraine produce over 25% of the wheat exported in the world.  A quarter.  Ukraine’s planting season has been slightly impacted by current events, and Russian exports might be diverted to feed Ukraine.

The United States is certainly self-sufficient in wheat, but the prices of wheat are like oil:  they’re tied to the international price.  What happens when a loaf of bread is six dollars?  Nothing good.  But if there are price controls?  Bread will be priced at two dollars.  There just won’t be any in stores.

Domestic inflation is bad enough, but what happens when the Saudis start taking gold for oil from the Chinese?  Or start paying for Russian wheat with the gold they got from the Chinese?  The dollar, once indispensable, is done as the international currency.

The message is loud and clear – the end of the dollar is near.  Why is gold up over $2,000?  My question is why is gold only up to $2,000?  I fully expect that, should Russia succeed, 90% of the dollar’s purchasing power will be gone in the next 14 months.

That will lead to massive changes in our economy, political unrest, and, potentially, the dissolution of the United States as we know it.

Thanks, Joe!  Where is ¡Jeb! when we need him?

Civil War 2.0 On Hold: Russia, Russia, Russia

“If Russia mobilizes, there will be a war.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

I saw a billboard advertising clocks the other day – I guess it’s a sign of the times.

  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.

The Clock O’Doom has dropped back.  For now.  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 Clock Retreats – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Hungry Days – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 650 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Clock Retreats

February was on a pace to at least keep the pressure up.

  • COVID was causing Canada to rip apart.
  • The Department of Homeland Security decided that (see below) that anyone who put forward “misleading narratives which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” was a threat.
  • Truckers in the United States were getting ready to replicate the Canadian example in D.C.
  • Biden was less popular than syphilis.

Then?  Ukraine.  It’s completely stopped the concern about COVID.  Corona is . . . gone.  All hail Putin – the man who cured COVID.  The truckers are still on the side of freedom in the United States, but the press isn’t covering them at all.

From the Civil War 2.0 standpoint, though, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has completely sucked all the oxygen out of the room.  It is the only thing being discussed.  And public perception is moving quickly.  When the invasion was first launched, only 26% of people (mainly Leftists) wanted to have any American action taken.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution 426-3 supporting Ukraine, up to and including troops.  It’s a resolution, so it’s not a declaration of war.  But the Congressmen think their voters support intervention.  They’re right – 74% of people in the United States support a “no-fly” zone over Ukraine.

The only way to do that, of course, is for Americans to directly shoot down Russian planes.  I don’t think the Russians would take that well at all.  I don’t expect a no-fly zone because even Biden isn’t foolish enough to consider that.  I hope.

Regardless, the focus of the American public has been distracted.  They’ve stopped fighting each other (sort of) and for the moment, Civil War 2.0 is off the menu.  This is only a short-term event.  As we’ll cover down below (and in much more detail on Wednesday), this reprieve is only short term.  The invasion carries the seeds of stress that will ultimately make Civil War 2.0, much more likely.

For now, though, I’m moving the clock back to 10 minutes to midnight.

Violence And Censorship Update

As mentioned above, at the beginning of February, stress was actively added to the system.  First, the DHS decided that differing options counted as terrorism.  I’m hoping that they don’t see me calling their little note a blatant violation of the First Amendment as being in violation.  I mean, who wouldn’t trust a government that doesn’t want alternative views published?

See for yourself:

Certified Genius Adam Kinzinger (just kidding, I’m not sure he’s smart enough to spell his own name) said that “targeted assassinations” were coming if civil war breaks out.  I’m just hoping someone finds a room where he can have his coloring books in peace.

TD Bank, in Canada, gave funds for the Canadian truckers to the courts.  Why?  Having a different opinion means you’re a target.  The Emergencies Act gave them the right to do that.  As well as cut anyone who supported them, even verbally, out of the modern economic system.

And never forget – the Left wants people who love freedom bankrupt so they can never have a voice again.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is flat.  February isn’t (usually) a big month for violence, so that’s to be expected.  I would expect the next few months to remain calm as well, perhaps turning back up in April.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, but instability fell in February.  Short month, and the focus is now more outward.

Economic:

The drop in economic confidence turned around this month, mainly on lower unemployment.  This is short term.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year.  All-time record levels.  Again.

The Hungry Days

I’ve tried to model the way that people feel about the economy, politics, and violence above.  One thing those models don’t do is predict.  Here’s where a prediction is coming in, but it’s easier to predict what’s going to happen than predicting what will happen to a chocolate Easter bunny if you leave it alone in a room with a fat kid:

  • Ukraine is a tremendous producer of food for the world.
  • So is Russia.
  • Ukraine produces a lot of fertilizer and exports it.
  • So does Russia.

In the very best case, Ukrainian harvests will be far below normal.  If the war continues, the harvests may be nearly zero.  Ukraine may export no food – zero.  Their industry for producing fertilizer might be wrecked beyond use, or the docks might be destroyed.  Or the docks might be in Russian hands.

Russia, even if allowed to export, may choose to export food only to countries that don’t have sanctions against it.  Would you choose to export to people that have cut you off, and might not even have a mechanism to pay you, to people who cut off your Netflix®?

What happens if wheat producers comprising nearly 26% of wheat exports in the world . . . stop selling to most people either because they can’t or don’t want to?

The world gets hungry.  And if the millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas is off the market, the world gets poor.

So, we can end up in a world that is cold, hungry and poor.  Quickly.  And those are ideal conditions for Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1490379402005393413

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1487927709456031749

https://twitter.com/i/status/1484612953672347648

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490144736732188677

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1489137527659319298

https://twitter.com/i/status/1491418120086454278

https://twitter.com/Networkinvegas/status/1489654175570874368

https://gab.com/DrPaulGosar/posts/107814488157277312

https://twitter.com/NY_Scoop/status/1493116710173429761

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10483307/Shocking-video-shows-man-beaten-gang-Harlem-run-passing-car.html

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-bad-is-crime-in-l-a/

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/BettyKPIX/status/1494117970221547521

https://youtu.be/R4Y-6zg6rL8

https://youtu.be/Z0qSqtKcUtQ

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494460147246067720

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494431313452941323

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490900444494712834

https://twitter.com/Orwells_Ghost_/status/1491944537299771400

https://roycewhite.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-the-black-bourgeoisie

One Guy

https://youtu.be/WOZI59tSv_4

Body Counts

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

https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/2021%2001_OCME%20Overdose%20Report.pdf

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/gun_control/gun_violence_most_americans_want_stricter_enforcement_not_new_laws

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542549/More-Americans-killed-GUNS-car-crashes.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500759/Police-shot-dead-record-1-055-people-2021-young-black-men-disproportionate-majority.html

https://nypost.com/2022/02/06/bidens-first-year-in-office-saw-73-police-officers-killed-most-deaths-since-1995/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-cartel-terror-schools-in-mexico-give-cannibalism-exams-failure-is-not-an-option

Vote Counts

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1486032341210480645.html

https://apnews.com/article/elections-wisconsin-local-elections-election-2020-general-elections-6f786ced357f2d89f61a6bd32afcdd08

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/01/breaking-special-counsel-finds-mark-zuckerbergs-election-money-violated-wisconsin-bribery-laws/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/12/texas-voting-requirements-ballot-rejections

https://www.newsweek.com/film-claims-it-has-video-mules-stuffing-ballot-boxes-2020-election-1679583

https://heritageaction.com/toolkit/election-integrity-toolkit

 

Civil War…

https://rollcall.com/2022/02/03/civility-downhill-biden-poll/

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bridgewater-s-ray-dalio-sees-u-s-on-path-to-civil-war-as-political-polarization-rises-1.1718043

https://www.conwaydailysun.com/opinion/columns/ross-douthat-let-s-not-invent-a-civil-war/article_921df052-74a0-11ec-a4e5-b37129c65643.html

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/ross-douthats-civil-war-blame-game

https://www.oleantimesherald.com/opinion/is-america-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_280c209d-0480-5284-9421-95d71b83eb9b.html

https://bobschaffer-53068.medium.com/how-does-one-grasp-a-civil-war-5101af781ba2

https://greensboro.com/community/rockingham_now/opinion/are-we-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_9caf04b4-a6f0-5687-b55d-040a1271fddc.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/january-6-civil-war.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-close-to-violent-conflict-book-how-civil-wars-start-2022-1

https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/stephen-marche-next-civil-war-review.html

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

https://www.newsweek.com/our-second-civil-war-opinion-1670408

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/targeted-assassinations-coming-if-civil-war-breaks-out-adam-kinzinger/ar-AATKbqK

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2022-02-12/ucsd-prof-walter-civil-war

https://www.newsandtribune.com/news/worries-valid-troubling-but-civil-war-unlikely-experts-say/article_5a61c30c-7d40-11ec-ba25-67f07cf005fb.html

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/new-civil-war-apocalyptic-rhetoric-news-media-far-right-liberals

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adam-kinzinger-civil-war-warning_n_62022630e4b0725faacec344

https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaire-investor-says-us-seemingly-on-path-civil-war-2022-2

https://observer-reporter.com/opinion/op-eds/op-ed-vigilantism-and-a-new-civil-war-a-warning/article_01df8b3e-853c-11ec-a851-cfae67c239f1.html

 

…Is Not The Worst That Can Happen…

http://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/03/1969_NEWSCHELLINGMEMO.pdf

Financial Vulnerability – Who Owns Your Money?

“Also, I’ve been told that the company’s expense accounts have been frozen. . . “ – Arrested Development

It’s hard to explain theft to a government, because they take things, literally.

The power to regulate is the power to destroy.  If you know who has that power over your life, that’s one aspect of preparedness – financial or otherwise.

Here’s an example I saw play out in real life:  In Modern Mayberry there was a retailer who had a small specialty shop.  Now, in Modern Mayberry there are limited shopping opportunities.  There’s the Walmart®.  There are seventeen antique stores selling stuff from nearby barns.  There’s a used kids clothes store – they’re very specific about just taking the clothes.  I tried to sell Pugsley during his difficult phase, and they simply wouldn’t take him.

But this shop was different.  It was a very specialized store – bicycles and parts – and nice bikes, the ones that cost more than the $75 that Walmart™ wants for a Huffy© with “some assembly required.”  It just so happened I was going through a biking phase, so I was gearing up.  One day, I got a package that I’d ordered from Amazon™ – I noticed that this small package (bicycle stuff) had come from the local retailer.

I thought to myself, “That’s weird.  Not as weird as a badger wearing underwear and lip gloss, but it’s not Saturday night yet, either.”

I did find two badgers in a U-Haul® once and called the ranger.  “Are they moving?” he asked.  “Maybe.  I guess that would explain the U-Haul®,” I replied.

I walked in there since I’d bought my bike from him and asked the owner what was up.  About the bikes, not the badgers.  I don’t think anyone can explain the badgers except people over at the military base, and they’re not talking.

The owner explained his business model to me.  It turned out that he did very little business locally.  What he had done was to build a small niche business selling specialty bike stuff on Amazon©.  Even though his merchandise was branded by non-Chinese makers, he bought it in bulk from China and sold it via Amazon®.

“I even sell some of it back to customers in China,” he laughed.

Then one day, Amazon© changed (in some fashion, I’m not aware of the details) the terms of the deal.  Within six months the shop was closed.  Within a year, he was divorced and had sold his house and had left to wander and find rights to wrong, or wrongs to write.  Or something.  I kinda got bored after he kept wanting me to snatch a pebble from his hand and stopped listening.

The six or so employees?  Also gone.  Not dead.  Just had to find new jobs, like looking for stuff in barns.  Side question – where did barn owls sleep before we invented barns?

The entire business gone – all with one, simple rule change.

Is there freedom of speech in Canada?  Sure, but if the government doesn’t agree with you, there won’t be freedom after speech.

Canada made a simple rule change, too.  They suspended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  They decided that if you disagreed with them politically, you could have your money frozen.  I’d use the word “stolen” but it’s not clear that’s the case yet.  Of course, like any breaking news in the land of the Internet, take every story you see below with a grain of salt.

I knew Trudeau had a fixation on single moms, but this is ridiculous:

And they can shut down your life nearly immediately:

The idea is clear, though.  Just like that small businessman in Modern Mayberry, one tiny rule change can make everything go away.  In this case, of course, the rule change wasn’t tiny.  It allows banks to shut down the accounts of those people who try to get all their money.

And for what crime?  Giving (in some cases) token amounts to the Truckers Who Honked.  A $50 donation, made before the emergency act, before it was “illegal” resulted in all of her cash being (at least for now) forfeit.

To be clear, if the government can do that with a stroke of a pen, is it really your money?  Thankfully, though the Canadian government is taking a stand against tyranny.  In Ukraine:

Roses are red, sorry for the hypocrisy, we’ve just updated our foreign policy.

There was a push a while back for what’s called “Universal Basic Income.”  The idea that everyone would get a check each month for breathing.  Think the government would manipulate that to manipulate you?

Nah, no danger in with this, right?

It gets worse.  It turns out that this is, by far, the biggest dream that Leftists have had since, well, forever.  Let’s hear it straight from one of them on Plebbit® (Reddit©). . . .

This is what they admit that they want to do to those who don’t follow their dictates.  They admit this in public.  The poet and well-known philosophizer Samuel Hyde perhaps said it best:

And there’s certainly no danger and nothing you’d have to prepare for with this new government change, is there?

Canada, Lies, and Videotape

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie, until we can no longer remember it is ever there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” – Chernobyl

I hear Justin got great Marx in school.

On Friday the folks that run the hosting service told me that the place was infected again.  This is a (more or less) normal occurrence since I wrote the post telling Mr. Biden exactly where he could shove his bald-faced threat of war against average Americans.  That’s when the hacking started.  It comes and goes in fits and starts.

The most frequent times are when I bring up points against The Narrative.  Particularly, they were worried about COVID and any sort of deviation from “vaxx is Mother, vaxx is Father, and you should do anything that the State says.”  Those things tend to correlate strongly with attacks.  Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is enemy action.

I think the latest thing to set them off (and this was a fairly strong set-off) was the post /pol/ versus The Canadian Banking System.  Huh.  Who would have thought that central bankers would have thought that the idea of collapsing the banking system would be so very scary that they would go after anyone who dared point out that Empress Justine (and the Canadian financial system) had no clothes?

I would think that the deeper the truth, the more they’d go to suppress it.  And that appears to be just the case with everything going on in Canada.

First, there’s the law itself.  The Emergency Measures apply to, shall we say, a very limited group of people.  If LGBTQ+ Afghan refugees wants to burn down Ottawa, that’s fine.  Just can’t have truckers with bouncy houses.

The long-term goal is to make these new powers permanent.  This allows government to have nearly unprecedented control in Canada.

Thankfully for Justin, many world leaders liked his methods:

The police in Ottawa also have signaled that they want revenge.  They will not stop until every single person involved in the peaceful protest in Ottawa is punished.

Leftists, of course, agree fully with this:

They agree so much, that they probably bought the story that was going through the news media.  As the police were breaking up the protesters, they brought in mounted police.  According to the radio station I was listening to, a protester had “thrown a bicycle at the horses.”  At least we know who would have turned in Anne Frank so that they could have been good boys.

No, it’s not your imagination, there isn’t a bicycle there.  Why?  Because it’s a mobility scooter.  Soon enough, the Toronto Star© jumped in and said that people were faking photos to make the Mounties look bad.

Thankfully, I have a picture of the top Toronto Star™ correspondent.  I think his name is Bob.

I also got a copy of the Toronto Star® journalism guide.  It’s low on words, since I’m not sure many of them can read:

Here’s a picture of the event, with the mobility scooter crushed in the snow.  It could be fake, right?

Yes, it could be fake.  I had that thought myself, until I found not one, but two videos that corroborated it completely.  I tried to upload the media files in a player, and if that failed you can download the media below:

Video 1

Video 2

Here’s what the nice lady looks like:

Solzhenitsyn perhaps said it best:

So, they will lie to you.  They will take your jobs, take all your money.  They have threatened to take children from protesters, and have threatened to kill their pets.  It’s clear how they feel about Canada.

Always remember, when they give you no choice, that’s where freedom begins.