Category: Civil War

The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage

“Is life in bondage better than death?” – The Ten Commandments

I heard Leftists can’t find tasty mushrooms:  someone said they lost their Morel compass.

Henning W. Prentis, Jr., presented a speech at the mid-year graduation of the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.  Mr. Prentis was the President of the Armstrong Cork Company.  Now, you might think that a cork company would only be of interest to the Swiss Army, but Armstrong was a different breed:  during World War II Mr. Prentis had Armstrong Cork making .50 caliber ammo, tips for warplane wings, sound insulation for submarines, and camouflage.

If your wife can fix a car, fix dinner, and then set a broken bone?  You have a Swiss Army Wife.

Eventually, several divisions were spun off, and it’s certain that you’ve walked on Armstrong Flooring and sat on furniture that was made by yet another Armstrong subsidiary underneath ceiling grids and ceiling tiles that were made by yet another Armstrong company.  All of this was started in a little Pennsylvania cork company way before Pennsylvania’s voting fraud made Kim Jong-un consider moving to Philadelphia.

Anyway, Mr. Prentis seemed to have an awful lot to say – his commencement speech clocked in at 4,953 words.  At 125 spoken words a minute, that’s nearly 40 minutes of straight talking, with zero memes or bikini graphs – looks like he didn’t know how to put a cork in it.  And all of those speeches were before the long lines of diplomas.

Graduation must have taken six days back then.  If you want to read the whole address, it’s here (LINK).

Mr. Henning Prentis’ essay has some very relevant content to today – I’ve posted just a few bits of it below.  I’ve fixed some punctuation, but the words are still Henning’s.  But I still haven’t found the answer to the most important question:  Who the heck names their kid Henning?

The historical cycle seems to be: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas.

Usually, so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three millenniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out.

Yet, it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Prentis’ quote can, thankfully, be summed up in a single chart that won’t take you 40 minutes to read:

Let’s not be like Russia circa 1917, okay? (Source for base: Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0, J4lambert)

In the United States, we were (mostly) blessed by abundance for decades at a time.  The Great Depression wasn’t the normal condition for the United States – it was an aberration of a fairly prosperous place.  But the Great Depression really was bad – Bob The Builder® was just called Bob then.

Inertia has a quality all of its own, but luck always helps.  After World War II, Europe was mostly devastated by the war.  Half of a decade of bombs and artillery shells and tanks and armies had killed millions, but also destroyed a majority of European and Asian governments plus much of the productive infrastructure.

America, meanwhile, had been untouched.  It had the oil, the steel mills, the agriculture, and the workforce.  It created consumer goods for itself and products for the world.  There was little competition.

Last time I bought land it was in Egypt.  Turns out I fell for a Pyramid scheme.

Oh, sure you could buy the Soviet version of Chevy Camaro® called the Lada Latitude©.  The Latitude™ was modeled on the Soviet T-34 Tank (500 horsepower diesel engine) that went zero to 32 mph in 45 seconds, and sported a stunning 1.17 miles per gallon in the base model.   It was also available with optional dual jet engines from a MiG-21.  Sadly those engines didn’t allow the tank to move, but did allow the wolf to blow down that pesky brick house, along with those capitalist swine.

There are many things you can call Soviet engineering.  Subtle is not one of them.

But post World War II gave the United States, and then, gradually the world, abundance, leading to selfishness.  Selfishness was probably best showcased in the 1970s and 1980s.  Tom Wolfe even titled the 1970s “The Me Decade.”  The 1980s followed suit – the pursuit of wealth was seen by many as the goal.  Morality?  The market (and leisure suits) were the definition of morality.

The 1980s bled into complacency, and finally into apathy.  The Grunge movement was a reaction to materialism.  What did it all mean?  What does any of this matter?  Pure apathy, so let’s not bathe and get a bunch of piercings and tattoos.

Now we are in a nation where citizens aren’t seeking freedom – they’re actively seeking dependence on the government – free money (guaranteed basic income), free healthcare (Medicare for all), and all manner of other support systems.  To quote one Mr. Harvard McClain (1950s?):  “If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away from you everything you have.”

Sure, I want everything for nothing from the State, but in every single time that’s been tried in human society, it always ends the same way – with the people becoming the enemy of the State.

And that’s how you get to Mr. Prentis’ last stage: bondage.

For a guy dealing with cork, Mr. Prentis has some pretty good vision.

Oh, and I don’t have to yell to get The Mrs. to come downstairs – she can hear a cork pop all the way across the house . . . .

The Four Best Stocks For After The Death Of The Last Human On Earth

“You kids change partners more than square dancers.” – That 70’s Show

Marie Antoinette should have known the time was right for a revolution in France – she had a Coup Coup clock.

Okay, the title is clickbait.  We all know the Four Best Stocks For After The Death Of The Last Human On Earth are Rock, Paper, and Scissors.  Oops.  I think the real answer is Rock, Rock, and Rock.  I mean, who is going to make the paper and the scissors?

Oh, wait, I said four.

Add Google®, I guess.

One constant theme of this blog since I started writing it is that I want to convince everyone I can that tomorrow may not look like today.  I think this is important, because too often we start to think that our lives of today are the lives that people will live forever.

Why?

That’s the way we’re wired, to think that tomorrow will look like today.  It’s complacency.

Dozens of my ancestors lived as kings, having all the food they wanted and the choice of the peasant maidens in the dozen miles (metric conversion of one deciliter) around the mud hovel they lived in.  It may sound dreary, but it’s still better than Netflix®.

Genghis Khan is far better known than his brother, Gingivitis Khan.  

My ancestors lived every day of their life just like that, until they died at age 32 after they got a nasty infection because they were sharpening their bronze and flint nosehair trimmer, and accidentally conquered China.  That seems to keep happening.  I blame . . . well, all the people that conquered China.

For 100,000 years our brains, as wrinkly and wonderful as they are, grew up in a world where yesterday was mostly like today, and today is mostly like tomorrow.  Except for you people who have wonderful smooth brains.  I think I have some Bernie Sanders™ coloring books for you.

There’s a danger to thinking that tomorrow will be just like today.

Let’s pretend you’re a turkey on a farm.  There’s a nice farmer that feeds you every day.  What a nice guy!  You keep gaining weight, and getting bigger.

What a nice farmer!  Farmers must love turkeys.

Then, one November near Thanksgiving the impossible happens:  the farmer fires the turkey due to the COVID-19 outbreak and his turkey 401k drops 90% and his turkey wife tells him that . . . all those eggs?  Not his.

That turkey has found a fate worse than being roasted at 350°F for three hours (6.02×1023 Watts for six fortnights).  Turkey alimony.

The point remains:  life changes in an instant, never to return to the way things were.

I shot my first turkey this year.  Scared everyone in the meat aisle, and now I’m banned from Wal-Mart.

Here’s another one (I’ve used this example before):  I’m quite sure that there was a British guy at the dock watching as the last Roman Legion left Britain in 407 A.D.  What was he thinking?

“The Romans have been in Britain since 43 A.D.  They’ll be back.  Why wouldn’t they?”

It’s nearly a 100% chance that was exactly what he was thinking.  Our hypothetical British dude had never lived a single day when Roman troops weren’t controlling Britain.  They have to come back, right?

Well, not really.

There are reasons that hordes of Roman coins are found buried in Britain.

When Rome was strong, a Denarius (Roman coin) contained about $4.00 worth of silver at today’s prices.  As Rome continued, successive Caesars trading in Rome’s military might, reduced the amount of precious metals in the Denarius until it hardly contained a whiff of silver.

I hear there are extraterrestrials living in Rome – someone said that there were Italiens there.

Then one November near Thanksgiving, the impossible happens:  the guy in Britain gets fired and the Roman 401k drops 90% and his British wife tells him that Joe Biden (who was only 35 in 407 A.D.) was elected.  The worst part?

Joe Biden is carrying the British woman’s baby.

Our Roman’s world collapses.  Everything that he knew changes overnight.

When archeologists go digging in old British trash piles, they find something interesting.  The trash at the bottom of the pile (when Rome left) contains really cool broken plates.  Archeologists love plates.

Why?

Because angry wives break them all the time, so they make it easy to date a culture by the number of wives that go crazy and start throwing plates.  Apparently, the number of mad wives that throw plates is a scientific constant like the speed of light, so trash pickers archeologists can date the change in a culture based on broken plates.

The archeologists determined this:  the broken dishes at the time the last Roman Legions pulled out of Britain were awesome.  They were great dishes.  And everyone had them.  It turns out that dishes in the Roman Empire were mass-produced in southern France and shipped everywhere in the Roman Empire.  Southern France was the Wal-Mart® of quality dishware.

You can plainly see that Indiana Jones’ least favorite band is the Rolling Stones.

Then archeologists looked at dishes that were 100 years later in the trash pile.  They knew this particular trash pile was a king’s trash.  The dishes in the king’s trash were something that a kind parent would have congratulated a mildly retarded child for because the mildly retarded child tried really hard.

But these Roman plates weren’t widely available – only a king could afford them.

History happens one day at a time.  People lived it, the hard way.  Let me give you some examples that might add some perspective:

  • A French girl born at the start of the French Revolution would have been 26 and had multiple children when Napoleon finally lost at Waterloo.
  • A German girl born at the end of World War I would have been 27 and had multiple children before the end of World War II.
  • An American girl born at the end of the Clinton administration already has 43 earrings, sixteen tattoos, and herpes.

What I’m trying to explain that there are two types of changes the first one is fast, really fast, like the turkey’s bad November day.  The second type seems fast only when viewed from 200 years in the future.  Remember, love can last for a lifetime, but herpes is forever.

In my estimation (for what it’s worth) we are in an atmosphere where both types of change will happen.  We will have sudden changes, like the turkey, or like Marie Antoinette. These will be changes we cannot go back from.  If you burn a receipt from Arby’s©, there’s no going back to get those curly fries if they shorted you.

We all burn our receipts from Arby’s™ as soon as we get home, right?  Otherwise The Man would know how much we like Horsey Sauce®, and you where that leads:

Tyranny.

I digress.

But I will* note that I had a conversation with a friend over a year ago.  He and I were talking about investing and other things.  During this conversation, I had an epiphany.  Where was my money?  Mainly in a single bank (this has now changed).

Where does the Federal Reserve hide its economic failures?  In debasement.

My question to my friend then was this:  “How much of your money is diversified?”

His response was, “Well, it’s in mutual funds, and in a wide variety of stocks and bonds.  So it’s diversified.”

I followed up:  “No, I mean how much of all of that is in dollars?”

There was a long pause.  “All of it.”

I guess this post is mainly to point out that just like we don’t buy things in 2020 with a pocketful Roman coins, and we don’t buy things with French Francs from before their Revolution, and we can’t buy things with Soviet Rubles, how long will we be able to buy things with Dollars?

Just asking.

I’m not even suggesting any particular path, though I will disclose that if everything goes well, my kids might inherit some silver and gold when The Mrs. and I pass on.  Like any turkey, I know one thing:  tomorrow generally looks like today.

Until it doesn’t.

*Standard I’m Not A Financial Wizard Blah Blah Blah And If You Listen To Me For Financial Advice You’re Insane Differently Mental Disclaimer.

Equity And Equality – Why Leftists Cheat At Elections

“Equal, but not even.” – Die Another Day

What did the Frenchman yell as he went down the slide?  “YES!”

On Wednesday after the election, I consciously decided to sleep in – I had taken a vacation day from work.  I slept in.  It was luxurious.  Like a Roman soldier, I really enjoy resting on my pila-case.  At a time that was later than I’ll admit to, I rolled over in bed and picked up my phone.

Substantial leads for Trump from the night before had evaporated.  For whatever reason, this reminded me of the story of the Fox and the Scorpion.

Fox and the Scorpion both wanted to cross a river.  Why?  Probably a decent discount on quality unpainted furniture on the other side.  Scorpion wants to ride on the back of Fox.  Fox, not being stupid, says, “Dude, you’re a scorpion, you’re going to sting and kill me!”

Scorpion, logically, responds, “C’mon, man!  Let me tell you what my dead son Beau would say.  You know the thing. But if I sting you while we’re crossing the river, I’ll die, too.”  Scorpion paused, ”Just like I died when I fought Corn Pop.”

Fox, remembering his mandatory training on systematic speciesism, agrees and apologizes for his microagression and his foxist privilege.  Fox says, “Hop on.”

Fox begins swimming through the river.  Halfway to the other side, Scorpion stings Fox.

Fox, through the haze of pain and spreading paralysis as Scorpion’s neurotoxin spreads through his system says, “Scorpion!  You’ve killed us both!”

Scorpion responds, “C’mon man!  You knew I was a scorpion when I got on your back.”

I pushed the fable out of my mind as I slowly scrolled through all the data.  I then turned off my phone.  I went into the front room and sat down to read for a while.  Pugsley and The Mrs. were off at school and work, respectively.  It has been as rare as late-night TV show hosts with a sense of humor since 2016 that I’ve had the opportunity to just sit in silence without any work or a blog deadline hanging over my head.  I decided to grab a burger and a beer.

How many vegans does it take to eat a Double Quarter Pounder® with cheese?  One, if no one is watching.

In Modern Mayberry, we have five fast-food restaurants.  The day was perfect in temperature, which means it was on the cold side for most people.  I got to the speaker and ordered.  I then drove home, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and ate my burger.  I tried to remember what my doctor said.  I think it was “Don’t eat anything fatty.”

It was good – cheesy and greasy and just the right amount of pickles.  I then remembered what my doctor had really said, “Don’t eat anything, fatty.”

For me, Wednesday was about balance.  It’s easy enough to fall into the trap of getting so wound up about politics that you lose perspective.  Honestly, one of the nicest things about living in Alaska was that Lower 48 politics was thousands of miles away.  You could nearly ignore it.  I’ve found that turning off my phone works almost as well.

On Thursday, it was back to work, and back to writing.  Of course, I have thoughts about the election, and you can probably guess what many of them are.  But the big thing that comes to mind with the 2020 election is fraud. It’s easy enough to look for fraud, heck, when that psychic told me she’d take my check I knew she was a fraud.

These ballots are from Seattle, so they definitely got mac n’ cheese.

Honestly, if you look at nearly any election, you can find things that look like fraud if you look hard enough.  The exception, of course, is my election to LOCAL OFFICE, where I estimate I had 335.33% more votes than the nearest competitor.

Hmmm, that sounds suspicious.  33533 is the same backwards as forward.  And it’s all 3’s with one five.  Normal numbers never look that way . . . except . . .  I was running unopposed for a job that no one else seemed to want.

You can confirm your bias that I stole the election – that 335.33% just looks too perfect.

From an ideological perspective, stealing an election is the last thing I’d do.  What ideology says that?  The ideology of the Right

The ideology of the Right is very different than that of the Left.  The Right is focused on Equality.  The Left is focused on Equity.  It’s really the fight between Equality and Equity that best defines the split between thinking on the Right and thinking on the Left.

A Marine with a salt and pepper beard is likely a seasoned veteran.

Western Civilization has always been a civilization of Equality and the philosophy of the Right.  You are born.  If you make your peace with God?  You can go to Heaven.  It’s up to you.  No one will drag you across the line.  If you want to create a business?  Be a glorious hero?  Sure, class may have come into it, but there was always room for the barbarian to make it to king.

The Right is Equality.

Equality is a 100 yard (3450 meters) dash.  I line up on the same line with my opponent.  When the starter pistol goes off, we start running.  If I’m running against a moderately athletic high school-aged boy who doesn’t have tularemia, tuberculosis, typhus, and tetanus, he’s going to make it to the finish line first.  If it’s a fat kid?  Okay, I might dust him.

As long as he has typhus.

Equality is about having the same opportunities.  The opportunity, in this case, is the open track.  It’s the same for both of us.  The opportunity includes the starter pistol.  We’ll hear it at the same time.  Each of us have the same conditions.

I have had many of the same opportunities in my life as Elon Musk.  I’m thrilled that he’s doing so well.  We had an equal shot at the world, and he ended up with billions.  I’m good with that.  He ran the race very, very well.  His running allows us to win, and in the end, makes us all wealthier.

If Musk flew his Tesla® through a black hole, because of tidal gravity forces, he’d be Elon-gated.

Equality is obsessed with fairness.  One person, one vote.  In Modern Mayberry, I think that getting the local officials to bend the rules during voting would have a penalty worse than speaking loudly in the local library.

The rules matter, and we follow them.  When The Mrs. had to get her license when we moved to Modern Mayberry, you could see the gleam in the DMV clerk’s eye as she ticked off the things The Mrs. had to produce to get her license.

  • Birth certificate?
  • Proof of address?
  • Current electrocardiogram?
  • Head of John the Baptist?
  • Marriage certificate?

Yup.  She was denied because she couldn’t prove that I’d married her.  Ha!  You can bet that The Mrs. wasn’t very happy when I drove her home singing, “Guess you are my property, doo-dah, doo-dah; my wife’s my chattel property all the doo-dah day.”  Of course, as I said this I had a brand-new Upper-Lower-Midwestia license in my wallet.

The Mrs. was not amused.

But the DMV clerk was 100% being fair.  The rules are the rules, no matter how stupid they might be.  The rules are the rules, no matter who you are.  And DMV clerks should follow them.

To the letter.

That’s Equality.  No matter who you are, when you walk into the DMV office, you’re all equally dirt in their eyes.  I think the DMV clerk even shed a tear when I had every single document she requested.  Getting through on the first time was like cheating to her.

Never get behind the Devil at the DMV if you need to do paperwork – the Devil can take many forms.

Believing in Equality is why people on the Right don’t steal votes.  They want to see the race run fairly.  If you don’t have the right paperwork?

No license for you.  I will say that when I got my license, the DMV clerk tried to get me to be an organ donor.  That was a girl after my own heart.

The DMV, at least here, is Equal.  Equity is different.

Equity is the belief that fairness isn’t measured on the starting conditions but on the outcome.  If a 100 yard (.31 centimeter) race was run on Equity measures, I would only have to run, say, 50 yards if I was running against someone twice as fast as me.  The goal of Equity isn’t to see who is fastest, it’s to structure the race so that people finish the way you want them to finish.

Given that Leftists are focused on Equity, or the outcome of the race, does it make sense that they’d try to steal an election?

Certainly.

Leftist focus only on the outcomes.  If a process like the 100 yard (34 milliKelvins) dash produces results where someone is faster, it’s the process that’s wrong.  If the process consistently produces a race where the fastest person wins?

To a Leftist, that’s unfair.

Not mine.  Second time I’ve used this recently.  The main problem is that the Equity in Reality panel is missing the pile of skulls that Leftism always, inevitably produces.  And the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist, either.

Equity, in the mind of the Leftist, isn’t in the casting of ballots.  Equity is in the counting of them.  Your favored candidate is losing?  What’s a few hundred thousand extra ballots?  They can punch them with a hammer or a sickle.

Why do Leftists cheat?

C’mon man, it’s because they’re Leftists.  What did you expect?

Election Day 2020: Liveblogging Post

“No thank you, Delmar. A third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite without beddin’ ‘er back down.” – O Brother, Where Art Thou?

How many Russians does it take for Hillary Clinton to lose an election?  None.

Front Matter:  I will start liveblogging (in the comments of this post) the election results when they come in.  I expect this will be about 8pm Eastern Standard Time.  I’ll stop when the mood strikes me – there isn’t a set end time.  I will say this – Standard Time Rules, and I really, really hate Daylight Savings Time.

2020 marks the most momentous election of our lifetimes.  Why?

Trump 2020?

No.

Wilder 2020.  Yes, I am an official candidate.  I can explain.

I’m a skilled professional.

During the state primary season in Modern Mayberry, in Upper-Lower Midwestia, I got a text message from The Boy.

“I put you in as a write-in candidate for NAMELESS OFFICE.”

Immediately I texted The Mrs.  “Hey, honey, please vote for me for NAMELESS OFFICE.”  She didn’t respond.  That’s normal.

I made my own way to the polls, and proudly wrote “John Wilder” in for NAMELESS OFFICE.  It turns out that The Mrs. did, too.

I had three votes.

What does one do with three votes in an insurgent write-in candidacy for NAMELESS OFFICE?  You call the County Clerk the day after to see if you won.

I did that.

“A write in?  Umm, call us next week, sweetie.”

I forgot to call them back.  But then a few weeks later when The Boy was down from State College, he got the mail one Saturday, and brought it into the living room.

I sent a guitar back to the factory once.  I marked it “return to Fender®.” 

“Hey, Pop, it’s a letter from the County.  Are you still burning tires and diesel fuel in the backyard?”  The Boy handed me a big letter – one that might have held the x-ray of bigfoot’s prostate exam.

I opened it.  Nope – not a prostate exam.  It was an official certificate saying that I was an official candidate for election in the 2020 election.  How many of those do you have?

I am running unopposed in the general election.  Since I was running unopposed, I decided on a sneaky campaign:  not let anyone know I was running.  The idea I had was simple – if anyone knew I was running, they would have time to oppose me.  Ha!  I’m too sneaky for that.

But now it’s too late.  There will be one name to vote for:  mine.  I think my chances are good, since I’m sure I’ll get more than the three votes that propelled me on this political odyssey.  I’m hoping for at least a solid dozen votes.

If your refrigerator is running?  I know some people in New Mexico that would vote for it.

You may ask, what does the elected office require me to do?  I won’t give you most of the specifics.  But I did check online and researched the state statutes that describe what I’m being elected to do.  In one, very old book (1883?) I found that I was responsible for the control of underground burrowing rodents.  In none of the modern laws does it mention that I’m responsible for that, but, hey:

The law is the law.

I think I’ll make that the signature of my administration.  I’ll become John Wilder, licensed to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. A man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit. 

Ever.

If A is for Apple, and B is for Banana, what is C for?  Explosives.

I’m pretty sure that this will entitle me to a badge and unlimited access to fully automatic weapons, rocket propelled grenades, and plastic explosives.  Okay, maybe not.  But I’m also sure that there are absolutely zero laws in my state that prohibit me from making my own badge.  I think I might design my badge to be a big “W” with lightning bolts hitting an underground rodent.

Maybe it will all be over the top of a nuclear mushroom cloud?

Does my badge allow me to do anything special, like turn into a werewolf and roam the countryside naked in the cool autumn nights looking  for a safe spaceship flight.  Well, no.  But thankfully it doesn’t prohibit that, either.

Does my badge allow me to requisition nuclear weapons from the Federal government to control subterranean rodents?  Well, no.   But it does make the requisition request for fully automatic weapons, an old M-60 Patton tank, three F-16 fighters and 53,000 pounds of Compound C seem reasonable.

I mean, how else would you deal with gophers?  You wouldn’t.  That’s why you need a cold-blooded rodent killer like me.   Badgers?  You don’t need no stinking badgers!

My son said he got awarded the Leslie Neilson badge at school.  I asked him, “What’s that?”  He said it’s a big building filled with kids.

Here’s my campaign slogan:

“Wilder 2020, because you want John Wilder to have access to a badge and enough weapons to overthrow Brazil, even though he only got three primary votes.”

See you in the comments tonight!

Free Speech? This Week Proves It Is Not On The Menu If The Left Wins.

“If you got a gun in your hand, you’re free to make any speech you want to.” – All in the Family

I believe this meme to be false.  Does that mean Snopes® has been debunked?

The biggest story of last week wasn’t the emails that allegedly show that Hunter Biden snorts coke off of hooker butts.  Oh, and that he and his father worked in an alleged scheme to illegally take millions of dollars from foreign companies and governments to gain influence inside the United States, or what politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. call “Tuesday.”

No.  That wasn’t the story.  Corruption?

The biggest story of last week was censorship.  Again.

This time, the censored were targeted by two of the usual suspects, Twitter® and Facebook™.  What they censored (fairly effectively) was all of the Hunter Biden-related pictures and emails.  Sure, millions of people have seen them, but they have largely been effective at shielding voters who are undecided from this information.  Let’s face it – the Democrat idea of a bookmark is a lit match.

And it wasn’t random “conspiracy theorists” – this time it was the New York Post®, the newspaper with the fourth-largest circulation in the United States.

Yes, that’s a real headline. 

Twitter® suspended account after account for publishing links to the New York Post™, including a White House press secretary, James Woods, and journalist Jack Posobiec.  Yes.  Twitter© turned off their accounts for publishing a link to a story in the New York Post®.  Then Twitter© changed their software so you couldn’t even post the link.

Normally they also delete posts that are connected to barbed wire – they don’t want to cause a fence.

What reason did Twitter™ give?  That the story contained personal email addresses and phone numbers, and that the story relied on illegally obtained material.  Well, there certainly are email addresses and phone numbers in the story, but those had already been obtained by thousands of Ukrainian strippers and also printed in the New York Post™ for over 200,000 people, and unknown (but huge) numbers of readers on the Post© website.

Yet, when Trump’s taxes were the subject of the disappointingly boring story that Trump has good tax attorneys?  Twitter® censored those posts, right?

No.

But Twitter™ took the account of the New York Post© offline.  Yup.  A newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton before he became black were taken offline for  . . . publishing news.  This like when they canceled the Chicago performance of Hamilton, the Musical because it was too cold.  Once again Brrr killed Hamilton.

I once locked my keys in my car.  Bothered me because it was going to rain and the top was down.

Twitter™ even placed a message on a Tweet® by a Senate Committee that the link listed was “potentially unsafe” and Biden hadn’t even sniffed anyone.

My mechanic told me my car was unsafe.  I told him that bad brakes had never stopped me before.

Facebook™ did much the same, by “limiting sharing” of the story and noting that it would be fact-checked.

By who?  Who is in charge of making these decisions?  Generally, the “fact-checking” executives and organizations are heavily Leftist.  And why not?  The Left views control of speech as a primary weapon in the cultural war.  Thankfully, there is someone checking on the checkers:

See, I thought corruption was only a problem at pretzel companies, where they’re all twisted.

Effectively, Facebook® and Twitter© have taken sides in an election.  How much would the Biden-Harris campaign pay for those companies to shut down negative coverage of Joe?  $100 million?  $200 million?

Yes.  They would (and could) pay them that much.  But they don’t have to pay them, because they are doing it for free.  At least it’s just Twitter™ and Facebook©?

Well, no.  Try Wikipedia®’s article on the Hunter Biden controversy.  If you were to believe that article, you’d be told that it was absolutely false that Hunter Biden ever did any of the things that we are now getting email confirmation of.  Here’s a Breitbart article on this (LINK) subject.  Thanks, Wikipedia™.

But not to be outdone, the New York Times™ shows that it’s been in the bag for Joe for months:

I heard a lot of New Yorkers had to use the newspaper for toilet paper during the Coronavirus shortage.  The Times were rough.

I suppose that everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  But when factual information that shows that potential crimes have occurred at the highest levels of our government are suppressed?  That shows that, finally, Leftist ideology will triumph over journalistic integrity every time.  But the biggest integrity champion?  The swimming pool on the Titanic.  Still full.

There is, of course, the big libertarian argument:  Facebook™, Wikipedia©, and Twitter® are private companies and can do as they wish.

Well, no.  They are private companies and can do any legal thing that they wish to do.  As I mentioned above, the Biden-Harris campaign would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for favorable treatment like they have been getting.  Have they written a check to those companies?  No.  But Biden and Harris intend to give them billions of dollars.

How?

Through laws that have yet to be put in place that will favor them.  Today’s actions to repress knowledge are (in my non-lawyerly opinion) nothing more than in-kind campaign contributions, even though Kamala has the California black vote all locked up.

Poor Bernie – he has Post Traumatic Debate Disorder.

YouTube® has joined in, too.  Thirty big channels were just permanently shut down – big in that some had nearly a million subscribers.  Here’s a list of just those greater with more than 200,000 subscribers, thanks to USSA News (LINK), H/T to Vox for the source (LINK).

  • X22 Report (952,000 subscribers)
  • SGTreport (630,000 subscribers)
  • Edge of Wonder (467,000 subscribers)
  • Praying Medic (391,000 subscribers)
  • And We Know (385,000 subscribers)
  • Amazing Polly (375,000 subscribers)
  • Joe M (367,000 subscribers)
  • Dollar Vigilante (304,000 subscribers)
  • Mouthy Buddha (296,000 subscribers)
  • JustInformed Talk (281,000 subscribers)
  • RedPill78 (269,000 subscribers)
  • The Patriot Hour (248,000 subscribers)
  • In Pursuit of Truth (242,000 subscribers)
  • Destroying the Illusion (238,000 subscribers)
  • TRUreporting (215,000 subscribers)

I wasn’t a regular listener of any of them, but I had heard a video or two from some of them.  The common thread?

All of them were on the Right.

This has been a theme since Alex Jones was shut out of the Twitter®-YouTube™-Facebook© ecosystem.  Jones was a canary in the free-speech coalmine, and when they attempted to silence him it was greatly disturbing to me.  Someone asked why I was so upset that a conspiracy theorist had been banned, and I said, “Why?  Who are you working for??”  It was obvious that this would not be the last banning, and the reasons for banning would become increasingly frivolous.

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar.  You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence!

Now, banning takes place regularly and goes after increasingly more innocuous content.  Innocuous unless you are on the Left, that is.  If you’re on the Left?  No dissenting voices are allowed.  How bad are they?

Worse than you can imagine.

A Reddit link sent me to a comment section there, where they argued that all (and I mean all) of the 1980’s action movies were fascist.  The people commenting were unwittingly sharing their true agenda – the destruction of everything that the United States ever was, or ever stood for.  I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was upset, even though he has given up movies for the pest control business: he is an ex-terminator.

Earl could talk for 70 minutes at the Town Council meeting about the best ways to feed gophers.

Freedom of speech was popular with the Left as long as they could use it to push their minority opinion.  Now?  They realize that freedom of speech is their mortal enemy once they get into power.  It’s fine to pretend that Leftism provides answers as long as we don’t actually use those ideas.  Every time, and I mean every single time they’ve been tried they lead to misery.

How do you keep miserable people under control?  No freedom of speech.

Oh, and never forget, the Second Amendment?

It protects the First.

Fear And Loathing In Modern America

“There is nothing so deranged as a man in the depths of an ether binge.” – Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I hear an angst-filled teen robot is called a sigh-borg.

Artificial Intelligence may be taking us down the path to Civil War.

How?

Artificial Intelligence is upon us.  To be clear, there’s little likelihood that A.I. in 2020 is conscious in any way that would be recognized by a human even though it has exceeded human ability in things like “playing” chess and “not forgetting to pick up Pugsley at school for three hours in winter.”  A.I. doesn’t need to be conscious to be amazingly useful.  Even in its limited form it is already important to the economy, and becoming more important every year.  Here are some ways that A.I. impacts us here and now:

  • Shipping – from individual route selection to package delivery schedule, no single package is managed by an individual until the UPS guy pulls it off of the truck and walks to your door. The rest of it is scanned and the delivery path is optimized by computer as the delivery guy drops it at the wrong house.  I wonder why my neighbors needed all that latex and baby oil?
  • Shopping – Amazon™ (or any other retailer I purchase from with consistently) knows my buying patterns as well as I do. Is it super accurate at picking things that I’d to buy?  Yes and no.  I went to the site to give an example of a ludicrous suggestion.  And I bought a book instead.  (Darn you Allie!  Whatever you do, don’t go to her website and read it (LINK) the hilarious chapter from her new book because then you’d blame me if you bought it.)  Then I went back to Amazon® to look for a bad purchase suggestion and bought yet another book.  So, it beat me tonight.

I hear even A.I. is having to deal with LGBT stuff – they keep talking about trans-sisters.

  • Banking – three years ago I got a text from my credit card issuer – they thought a purchase charged to the card was fraudulent. It was.  The A.I. was smart enough to realize that I probably wasn’t in Chicago at 4 A.M. on a Monday morning buying $300 sneakers.  And, no, Amazon® didn’t recommend them to me.
  • Advertising – the websites I go to feature personalized ads meant to match my interests, but yet no human ever made the decision of what ads to place there – it was all based on the profile they’ve built of me. This might explain why they assume I need binoculars, dehydrated “survival” food, duct tape, a machete, and a subscription to “Sour Patch Kid®” candy of the month club.
  • Job Search – résumés of job seekers are submitted based on A.I. recommendation to be read by the A.I. that the hiring company bought to read them.   People are being rejected for jobs by computer programs.  I suppose it’s better than the future when unemployment claims are kept low by use of the Terminator® HRBot 3000.

A Terminator makes a really bad sales clerk.  Whenever anyone asks where something is, they always say, “Aisle B, back.”

  • Journalism – simple stories such as football or baseball game descriptions have been written by A.I. for years. One could argue that any intelligence at the Washington Post® or New York Times™ has been artificial for decades.
  • Social Media – Twitter® and Facebook™ and YouTube© are carefully calibrated to maximize use engagement to maximize company profits. And they’re the companies that are causing all of the problems.

The easiest emotions to get engagement on are:  fear, outrage, and anger.  The reason is that it’s easier to make someone mad than it is to make their day better.  Sure, we love “I can has cheezburger” cat, but to get people to click you need to get them scared or mad.

What emotions do you think the A.I. amplifies?  Yup.

Fear, outrage, and anger.

It’s also sad when your navy can be defeated by asking it to identify which pictures contain a stop sign.

If A.I. has a profile of you that can select what t-shirt you’re most likely to buy, what else does it know?  Well, it knows what your ideological profile is.  It knows what stories resonate with that ideological profile, and will make you mad.  Then?  It shows them to you.

The motivation isn’t evil.  The motivation is entirely neutral.  The A.I. is there to make profits for Twitter©.  Since it makes money for employees and investors, people will stop you from turning it off (to paraphrase Scott Adams from a recent podcast).  Their 401k’s depend on the A.I. making money for them.  I think Glenda from Accounting would slit your throat if you killed the goose that made the golden 401k.  And the stock options!

But this A.I. behavior reflects back into human behavior even beyond Glenda from Accounting’s bloodlust for anyone who messes with her 401k.  A.I. is also making divisions show up in the country.

Let me give an example:

A.I. was great at feeding polarizing videos on YouTube™.  Up until a year or two ago, YouTube© was great at giving me a list of suggested videos that were farther and farther Right.  Then, the great purge started.  Content creators of any degree of popularity were banned, forever, if they were on the Right for no particular reason that YouTube© would share.  Alex Jones was among the first banned, which is strange because he’s like the WWE® of radio hosts.

Sean keeps his pistol in his library.  It’s for shelf defense.

The Right has stayed, from an ideological standpoint, in about the same place for the last 30 years.  The Left, especially since 2004, has moved wildly Left.

Was A.I. to blame for all of that Leftward movement?  No.  There are other factors at play – especially a demographic shift of population with a huge influx in immigrants that come from countries that are all further Left than the United States.  Why they want to escape their Leftist hell-holes and then vote for Leftism here is beyond me.

But A.I. certainly pushed people who were leaning Left, farther Left.

So, A.I. can change people by surrounding them with a nice, warm Leftist echo chamber.  In what might be worse, A.I. is likely no longer just changing people, it’s changing events because that echo chamber exists.

Let’s take St. Louis, when Mark and Patricia McCloskey defended their own property.  Most people who reviewed their actions who have a legal background have said everything they did was clearly lawful.

Except.

Not an original.  Is this all the Terminator that 2020 could give us?

An elected prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies.  What amount of A.I. inspired Twitter®-fueled hate-rage against the McCloskey family resulted in her having the courage to file the charges?  It feels like to me, that online rage influenced her in some fashion.  It probably doesn’t hurt that Ms. Gardner’s election was funded in part by George Soros’ foundations, but even one of Soros’ creatures knows they need to get votes in an election year.

To what extent is the decision of the District Attorneys around the country to release violent rioters aided by a compliant A.I. that feeds the idea that arsonists are, somehow, freedom fighters?  People on the Right generally shake our heads in confusion as blatant criminals are charged with only the most minimal of charges yet bail for Kyle Rittenhouse is set, in cash, at $2 million dollars?

If the goal of the Left was to destabilize the country, causing everyone to lose faith in the justice system is a great start.  But none of that is the goal of A.I.  It doesn’t care.  If an A.I. was programmed to make shopping carts, and turned the entire planet into a big ball of shopping carts orbiting the Sun, well, mission accomplished!  A.I.s simply do not care.

Meanwhile, use of A.I. tech helps Google™, Twitter®, and Facebook© reach record stock prices.  The big danger is that the forces of polarization and the actions that the various A.I.s unleash gets out of control.  It’s not like those A.I.s are designed to realize that they’re destabilizing an entire country in a way that might lead to the most destructive war the United States has ever been a part of.

But, hey, those guys at Twitter still have stock options, right?

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened.  I’m kidding, of course.  I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living.  Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race.  For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President.  By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored.  Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump.  His other advantage is, well, you know.  You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind.  Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open:  21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day.  Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

  • Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
  • Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
  • Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
  • New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

  • Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
  • News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
  • Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
  • Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
  • Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward.  It won’t be.  Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire?  A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states.  A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later.  But has anything about 2020 been best case?  The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth.  In reality, the tension has been building for four years.  In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt.  We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable.  This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good.   This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral.  I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic.  In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week.  I ignore most of them.  Today?  I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate.  You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses.  Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability.  The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral.  Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it.  It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California.  Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%.  California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants.  The result?  The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money?  You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times.  They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

The Silenced Majority: How The Left Censors The Right

“You can’t stop the signal.” – Serenity

Joe Biden wants to win, so his kids can get jobs closer to home.

Sometimes my jokes are greeted with silence.  You could hear a pun drop.

Nixon famously used the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” during a speech in October of 1969.  Leftists were demanding an end to the Vietnam War.  There were plenty of valid reasons to end the Vietnam War, but hating America wasn’t one of them.  This was a speech to the American people about just that – and Nixon knew that the people not out in the streets were with him.

But in 2020, we face a different world, but in the movie.  We still have a group of silent people who aren’t on board with the Left – and I believe them to be an absolute majority, or you and I both would be in a gulag right now.  But there is another group, a group that would speak, but can’t.

I call them the Silenced Majority.

I write about the first type of the Silenced Majority almost every month in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  Why?  The amount and type of censorship tells you a lot about how far a country has fallen towards a Leftist totalitarianism.

Also the Left:  It puts the sanitizer on its skin, or else it gets quarantine again.

The vanguard of this behavior has come from Silicon Valley.  YouTube® has been the great censor, keeping dogma from Leftist organizations but banning content from only moderately Right of center sources.  But there is one way that YouTube© is like the United States government – both break their own rules.

The libertarians and Right-libertarians make the point that these are “private companies” and that free speech doesn’t apply.  Sure.  That’s what the cashier at the Burger King drive-through keeps telling me.  But it’s not just Facebook®, Twitter™, and InstaSnap©.  It’s also Gofundme.

Jason Blake, the guy in Kenosha who got shot while allegedly stealing a car with kids in it from a woman he allegedly raped, has a Gofundme® of nearly $2.3 million dollars.  Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old whose previous brushes with the law included being in a youth crime prevention organization, was prevented from having a Gofundme® at all because self-defense is the scariest thing in the world to the Left.  You don’t need Papa and Mama Government when you can protect yourself.

Hmmm.

Living with the systems of the Left is difficult.  Discover® recently said it won’t process payments going to Gab®, the free-speech alternative to Twitter™.

Twitter® has banned the term “treason.”  Now it’s supposed to be “undocumented foreign supporter.”

Why?

Does it matter?

The Left has co-opted the media.  And it’s not just from wild-eyed people on the far-Right.  On my YouTube™ feed a video showed up from a (as far as I can see) balanced, centrist journalist.  Like a real journalist, who has news Emmy® awards and everything.

The video was about Antifa®.  This video was so good that I subscribed to her channel, along with 67,000 other people that week.  That’s rare – I think I’m subscribed two three or four total YouTube® channels.  Total.  It was that good.  And it was fair.

She got a million hits on that video.  People are fascinated about Antifa™, and they want to learn more.  To have the opportunity to learn about it from an unbiased journalist with credentials?  What a hit!

Until YouTube™ shadowbanned it.

What’s a shadow ban?  It’s tuning the search and recommendation algorithms so they don’t point to specific content.   She’s got a great example in the video below where she searches for her exact video title with her name . . . and, well, she’s not the number one hit, I’ll tell you that.

You can search her channel for the vidya on Antifa®.  The first one hit over a million people.  This one  was at less than 15,000 (LINK).

For whatever reason, Antifa™ is a sensitive subject for the Left.  They don’t want people knowing about the group that’s responsible for riot after riot all across the country.  The FBI® has joined them, with the Director noting that Antifa™ isn’t an organization, it’s an ideology.  I wonder if he wear Stalin PJ’s?

YouTube™ will, if they bother to answer it at all, blame it on the algorithm, expecting us normies to not understand that every single algorithm is written by a human.  Or at least an autistic person who they pay with chicken tenders.

Fox News™ doesn’t have that excuse.  Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was on some news show on Fox®.  Newt was shut down for mentioning that George Soros funded the campaigns of dozens of far-Left District Attorneys.  Fat George is proud of this.  He’s bragged about this.

But Newt mentioning this?  Forbidden.  Fox News© shut him down.  Cold.  Don’t take my word for it, watch it here (LINK).  It’s less than a minute.

It’s like the computer chip that Fox™ HR put into their heads started putting electroshocks into their brainstems.

What subjects can’t you even mention anymore?  Antifa® and George Soros, certainly.  How many others?

The second type of Silenced Majority are people who don’t speak.  Why?  Fear.  They live in fear because a person on the Left can make the most outrageous claims and have job security.  Heck, job security?  Make outrageous claims in some organizations and you’ll be rewarded.

“All White people are racist.”  Yup.  You can say that and not get fired.  Heck, in some companies you’re required to say it.  You can work in academia and call people who disagree with you “subhuman” on Twitter® and pray for their extermination.  As long as the people you’re insulting are on the Right, of course.  Your punishment for that?  Enjoying your tenured position and taxpayer-funded job.

After I asked my astrophysics professor how stars died, he responded, “Overdose, usually.”

But saying something simple and factual like, “The autopsy report on George Floyd showed that he was as high as my electric bill in summer after I left all of the windows open, the AC set on 60°F (8,675,309°C. or “Jenny” degrees), the oven open and set at ‘broil’, and a pack of 37 blenders running continuously for a month.”

Factually, that’s correct.  George Floyd was so high you can see his footprints on the Moon.  George Floyd nearly certainly killed himself with drugs.  But could you say that at the typical workplace that has offices and desks and HR?

I was amazed at how many people are offended by breastfeeding.  Heck, I was just trying to bond with my dog.

Sure!

But if you offended someone?

Then you’d be fired.  And then HR would whisper “fillintheblankaphobe” every time you tried to get a reference.  Good luck finding work after that, right?

And, yes, the idea isn’t that you said something offensive, it’s that you offended someone.  That’s the standard.  And in 2020, every single Leftist is looking to be offended.  Wear a Trump 2020 hat?  I’m sure that you’ll say something to upset some Leftist burrowed into your organization.  They’re watching.  Understand they don’t want justice, they want Social Justice, which to them means you being fired.

There are dozens of other, equally factual comments you could make that would get you fired.   Cisco Systems® fired several people after diversity training.  What did they do?  Well, on was fired for saying “All lives matter.”  So you can be sure that whatever those people said was the worstest evar!

I Googled® cigarette lighters, and got over 56,000,000 matches.

Another example?  James Damore was fired from Google®.  Why?  He questioned the “ideological echo chamber” at Google™.  Since (for now) it’s illegal to fire an employee in California for their political ideology, it’s likely that Mr. Damore walked away with a big pile of cash – but he’s the exception, not the rule.

The idea of the Left is to take us from the Silent Majority to the Silenced Majority.  They don’t want anything to spoil their “ideological echo chamber” because the one thing that Leftists cannot tolerate is competing ideas, especially competing ideas that work.

Nixon had this one right.  He wasn’t alone, at least not then.  But you’re not alone now.

And they can’t stop the signal.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: 56 Days To The Last Election Ever In The United States

“It appears we will be required to ignite the midnight petroleum, sir.” – ST:  TNG

It’s all fun and games until it hits midnight.  And we’re getting pretty close.

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

We are at step 9.  Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock.  Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue:  Front Matter – What Is A Civil War? – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 56 Days Until The Last Election – Links

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, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

What Is A Civil War?

Multiple comments that I’ve had, both in the comment section at the blog, as well as in email and even text message asked the question – what happens to the index this month.  The answer is that we’re still at a 9 out of 10.  The only thing remaining to take us to a 10 is a body count.  That’s because I’m using this (admittedly academic definition by Doyle and Sambanis in 2000) as my definition for the existence of a civil war:

  1. The war has caused more than 1,000 battle deaths. This war hasn’t yet done so.  Is 1,000 an aribitrary number?    This is the only criteria not yet met.
  2. The war represents a challenge to the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state. I think it’s clear that Antifa® and BLM™ want nothing less than the dismantling of the existing state and construction of a Marxist Utopia©.  The fact that they are aided and abetted by fellow travelers in district attorney offices, mayoral offices, and congressional offices doesn’t mean that they aren’t communist revolutionaries fighting against freedom from the inside.
  3. The war occurs within the recognized boundary of that state. This is an easy one.
  4. The war involves the state as one of the principal combatants. One of.  Not the only one.  Ask a policeman in Portland if they feel that they’re in control.
  5. The rebels are able to mount an organized military opposition to the state and to inflict significant casualties on the state. It states casualties, not deaths.  And that also makes this an easy one to check off.  Organization discussion is directly below in the Violence And Censorship Update.

 

I list all of the five criteria for a simple reason – to show that the only thing between us right now and a full blown, internationally recognized definition of civil war is the number of body bags we have yet to fill.  When I started this update last year, I was expecting things to move faster than you expected.  I did not expect things to move faster than I expected.

They have.

Violence And Censorship Update

Violence this month is obvious.  The killings have started.  Outside of the increasing violence tied directly to police standing down because they have no support which I talked about last month, bullets are now flying in the “mostly peaceful” protests.

Outside of the CHAZ murders, where two teenagers were killed, much of the violence has been peripheral.  I moved the index up to nine out of ten when killings became commonplace.  As near as I can tell, the killings directly associated with the Antifa™ and BLM® action is probably somewhere short of 100.

But two of those deaths are deaths that Antifa© cannot abide.  In Kenosha, I wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse’s clear self-defense shooting against both a pedophile and a wife beater, and alleged self-defense shooting against a person who was (by the film I saw) drawing down on him.  You can read it here – reviews say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’d suggest my signature on my divorce papers from my first wife was better (Have The Kenosha Riots Given The Right Our Rosa Parks?).

From my vantage point, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero.  But Antifa™ cannot let that stand.  At all.  It’s my estimate that out of rage, the killing in Portland as well as the attempted murder by car in Portland were “revenge” hits on people wearing paraphernalia of the Right.  If you read reports that break down the killing (HERE) and other experiences (HERE) in Portland, it becomes clear that Antifa® is using military discipline, and is broken up into a military command structure.  (H/T to Vox Day (LINK) and Mike at Cold Fury (LINK))

Antifa™ is a dedicated group.  They have undergone a brainwashing and are a religious cult – no Jim Jones Kool-Aid® drinking cultist could compete.  I wrote about that here (Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?), and stand by it.  Antifa® and BLM© stand against everything that has made America wonderful, rich, and prosperous.  And they are fanatics.

I’m not sure if you know what they have in mind for people that don’t agree with them.  It isn’t pleasant.  The idea is that there is a pure society coming, and the way to get to that new society is to eliminate everything that doesn’t fit.  Which almost certainly includes you.  But don’t worry – they want to torture people to death to show the remaining people how wonderful the future communist utopia will be.  See?  You serve a purpose in their minds.

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 lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II.  Let’s go to the graphs.  In general, I’ve used bikini graphs in the past.  Given where we are, I’m a bit more somber.  Here are the graphs, without bikinis.

Violence:

Up is more violent.  June pegged the scale of violence.  This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300.  It’s lower again this month despite clear assassinations by the Left.  Does that mean it’s less violent this month?  Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence.  Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking.  That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability is down, slightly.  I expect September and October to be down more, since voting generally has a calming effect and all emotions are focused there.  After that?  All bets are off.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, are down slightly.  Again, we’re nowhere near the bottom.  I expect that to drop off in October.  Maybe to historic levels.  But I could be wrong?

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Oops!  This metric is now nearly at the highest it’s been in years.  As the Wuflu® hits Mexico, the Mexicans are deciding to head north again.

56 Days Until The Last Election

I firmly believe the United States has had stolen elections in the past.  But the nice thing about the Electoral College is?  It makes it really, really hard to steal an election.  Impossible?  No.  Hard?  Yes.

Every single person in every graveyard in Chicago, California, and Queens can vote for a Democrat, and it doesn’t matter.  The Electoral College adds legitimacy to an election by breaking corruption at the state lines.  That’s one reason the Left hates it.  It makes elections hard to steal.  In my state, my vote doesn’t really matter – my state will go for Trump even if every person in every grave, ever, votes Democrat.

Mail-in voting changes all of that.

Yes, this was one of my favorite original memes that I created, but a new version.  Still valid.

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

It’s hard to cheat in a Red State.  You have to steal zillions of counties.  It’s easy to cheat in a Blue State – you just have to cheat in the big cities.  If everyone in Chicago voted Trump, Illinois would still go 60% for whatever Democrat was opposing him.  But with mail-in voting?

Examples I have seen show the party on the outside of the envelope.  How hard would it be to casually “lose” a few thousand votes from envelopes that had a big, fat, R on the outside?  Or a few thousand from precincts that consistently vote Right?  Not hard at all.  This is on top of demonstrated voter fraud in Left cities where poll workers were caught on camera dumping ballot after ballot into the box on election day.

If mail-in voting passes?  We’ve had our last election day.  From now on?  It’s selection day – selection of the candidate that the Left wants.

Thanks to the innovation of mail-in voting, you don’t even have to bring the corpses to the polls!  What else will modern technology come up with?

In a further, ominous sign, the Media® has been setting up the idea that Trump will win on election night in a convincing manner, but will lose as the mail-in ballots are counted.  This is particularly horrific.

If you knew which six counties you needed in close states, could you game the Electoral College?  Absolutely.  You could have boxes of ballots pre-staged in Philadelphia, or Milwaukee, or Cleveland to flip the results.  Simple.  Want Florida to turn blue?  Just found a box with 25,475 Biden votes in Miami.

Don’t think the Left wouldn’t try it.  They would do anything to win the election, since they’re contemplating electing a person who couldn’t navigate a corn maze with more than two stalks standing.

If mail-in voting is made the law of the land?  Expect that this is the final election, ever, that won’t be a simple selection of the candidate that best fits the desire of the Left.  Sure, there will be some token people on the Right elected, but they’ll mainly be people who believe in real conservative values, like only allowing 1,000,000 illegals in a year, and only allowing 7,000,000 people a year in on H1B visas, and restricting anything but a muzzle loading black powder rifle, like our founders intended.

Oh, wait, conservatives have conserved nothing!  They just pick the values from the Left from ten or twenty years ago, and defend those until the death.

LINKS

That’s a bad ending to a video game . . .

All are from Ricky:

MSM message: alt-Right continues the march to civil war….

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1316052/proud-boys-group-brawl-antifa-protests-kalamazoo-michigan/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1354432/portland-brawl-breaks-out-proud-boys-antifa-fight/

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/09/03/schmidt-trump-supporters-want-to-see-a-second-civil-war-in-this-country/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-incite-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/americans-sense-something-is-wrong-gun-sales-up-72_08272020

…a challenge that must be met with force…

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/08/18/berkeley-columnist-calls-for-violent-resistance/

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/08/12/this-war-cant-be-civil/

http://thesaker.is/will-hillary-and-the-dems-get-the-civil-war-they-are-trying-to-provoke/

…for abstract justice…

https://theweek.com/articles/931090/are-bread-riots-coming-america

https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/black-lives-matter-organizer-calls-chicago-looting-reparation/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

…and with concrete action…

https://summit.news/2020/08/14/black-lives-matter-mob-demands-white-people-give-up-their-homes/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-blm-protesters-shot-homeowners-while-marching-through-rural-pennsylvania-town

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/battle-zones-america/

This revolution WILL be televised, as documentaries…

https://theduran.com/steven-turley-new-civil-war-being-fought-on-three-fronts-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-is-here-part-i-the-combatants-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-part-ii-strategy-of-the-blues-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-civil-war-part-iii-update-dr-steve-turley-largely-confirms-video/

https://theduran.com/the-utopia-of-democrat-activism-video/

…an unending stream of gripping short-attention-span clips from the front lines…

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1300955946521432064

(Scroll here for more video gems:) https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/

….and an explosion of editorials…

https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/02/rowland-civil-war-real-possibility/5690696002/

https://themichiganstar.com/2020/08/28/commentary-in-kenosha-the-seeds-of-civil-war/

https://greensboro.com/rockingham_now/opinion/ending-the-civil-war/article_a2f83f72-eaef-11ea-88b4-e7bcbc8a60ec.html

https://signalscv.com/2020/09/jonathan-kraut-an-undeclared-civil-war-in-america/

https://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/singer-promoting-a-new-civil-war-in-america/article_399450b1-7aee-5a47-abd1-8555b616d0cf.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/portland-killing-trump-caravan-civil-war-20200830.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/kenosha-trump-kyle-rittenhouse-portland-antifa-20200901.html

https://www.newspressnow.com/opinion/editorials/stop-a-civil-war-before-it-starts/article_57576526-e7d3-11ea-a6c0-f31f4893dc90.html

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/08/20/thursdays-headlines-armed-for-the-civil-war-edition/

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://www.independent.com/2020/06/14/an-american-civil-war/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-kenosha-wisconsin-unrest-violence-shooting-20200826-m3e7zcqg7faxxou2xhqywmsobe-story.html

And as one (now-dead) Antifa guard claims to have fired the latest shot heard ’round the world…

https://www.insider.com/portland-shooting-suspect-said-saw-civil-war-coming-2020-9

…a newspaper founded during the last Civil War won’t be around to cover any new one…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/09/04/trump-and-stars-and-stripes-attacking-american-icon-column/5706859002/

Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?

“Prime minister? I thought Italy used a king?” – Archer

ANTIFA

There’s a joke to be made about that cake, but just like food under communist rule, you wouldn’t get it.

Sometime earlier this year, I asked myself a simple question.  Why would anyone be attracted to communism?  It’s the one single system that has never succeeded.  It’s a system that, when implemented as designed, kills tens of thousands, and in the twentieth century, over 100 million of their own citizens.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what would drive so many people to communism in the year 2020.  In 1900 in Russia?  Well, maybe.  A typical Russian peasant wouldn’t have known much about the failings in Paris of the Leftist French Revolution.  Some bald guy says, “free loaves of bread for life,” and that might have done it.

But during the 2000-2020 time period in the West, it’s clear that communism shouldn’t take root, right?  Up until the COVID-19, the economy in the United States was going so well that some of Joe Biden’s kids could afford to quit their second jobs in the Ukraine.  But even with that economy, young people were being recruited to communism.

Why?

I had no idea how they could be recruited.  But in roving through the Internet, I found a book, Anatomy of the Red Brigades by Alessandro Orsini, which had exactly the information I was looking for.  The Red Brigades were a Leftist terrorist organization that was formed in 1970 and lasted until the 1980’s.  They were most famous for kidnapping and killing a former Italian prime minister named Aldo Moro.  They were also responsible for the later kidnapping of American Brigadier General James Dozier, who was rescued.

PENCIL

I have other pencil jokes, but most of them are pointless.

Post-war Italy was a difficult place.  It was rapidly transforming from an agricultural economy to an industrial one.  Like me, I’m sure some were tempted to steal industrial cooking implements.  But I didn’t – I’m not a big whisk taker.

As people moved from rural farms to slums in the cities to work in factories, they were uprooted from centuries of continuity in life.  That uprooting was the first step in creating a communist.  As a rule, the Red Brigades recruits were disaffected.  These people were already at the margins of society.  Orsini calls this process disintegration.  The group manipulating the new recruits would do everything possible to remove the new members from their previous outside relationships.

Once they were removed from those old relationships, reality was what the group said it was.   And what reality were they focused on creating?  The basic idea is one familiar to doomsday cults around the world.  One Red Brigadist described it as the “fanaticism of a new religion.”  Communist recruits are taught that:

. . . they are “children of the light, arriving in this world to punish and redeem, to destroy and purify.  The Red Brigades want to wash away the sins of capitalism with blood.

GRETA

They are taught that the world is corrupt, and in danger.  Remind you of anything, say, Greta Thunberg?  The idea that capitalism is sin is now taught nearly uniformly to children of the world.  Of course, it has to have a name, and Global Warming® is probably the most convenient:  it’s a sin brought on by capitalism and the old people, and will kill them if they don’t take rides on multi-million dollar yachts and speak before the United Nations.  Oh, and then be invited by CNN™ to talk about COVID-19.  Yes, they asked Greta for her expertise on that.  And for her expertise on Some Black Lives Matter©.  Each of these three has the same story being pumped into the head of the Marxist – there is a threat to the existence of all that is good in the world, and only Leftism can solve it.

Radical Leftism.  See how that works?

The process of radicalization was described by Jean Guitton (as related by Orsini):

  1. Segregation – They are kept apart from healthy past relationships – their new relationships only come through communist contacts. They are then immerse in Leftist thoughts and theory.
  2. Permanent Indignation – Inner purity is confirmed (and signaled) through outer indignation – the Left loves to despise any who think even slightly differently than they do.
  3. Desire to be Persecuted – When people in the “world” make fun of the Left, the Leftist love it – it shows how virtuous and pure the Leftist is, and confirms to them how horrible the rest of the world must be.
  4. Purification of Means through the End – Any violence is justified because it will lead to the promised land of no work and infinite goodies. Building it on a mountain of skulls is just a feature.
  5. Principle of Secrecy – Antifa’s© external goals that they advertise aren’t their real goals. They know that what they really want is the complete destruction of society, and to have it rebuilt just as they see fit.  But they don’t say that – so every member is essentially a member of a secret society.  That binds them together – they can only speak freely to each other.
  6. Preventative Internal Terror – The one thing Leftist cannot stand is anyone to the Right. Anyone collaborating with the Right in any way?  Betrayal?  Any member who strays from Leftism is certainly the biggest enemy of the Antifa©, even more so than actual fascists.

CLEAN

I got a puppy, but the ducks attack it.  Last time I get a pure bread dog.

The focus then becomes one of purity.

Purity, of course, can never be reached.  That’s why SBLM® and Antifa™ aren’t fighting for anything real or measurable.  The goal of SBLM® is “the end to systemic racism,” whatever that is.  The problem is it can’t really be defined.  It’s not a real goal – it’s a stand-in for purity, a purity that can never be reached.

The reality is that this impossible goal of for their purification must be unreachable.  It must be ludicrous.  Why?  The goal isn’t to end systemic racism.  The goal is to engender hatred in the members.

How bad is the hatred?  “Love and Strength will subdue and destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie; we shall build a society free from the slavery of salaried work,” is directly out of their literature.  To quote Orsini speaking about them, even when Marxists kill people, they see themselves as the real victims.  “They are desperate people who have no real alternative to murder.”

OJ

We all know that OJ was the real victim, right?

And that’s the difference.  The people who manipulate the communists want power.  That’s not the goal of the communists.  They want the power so that they can personally cleanse the world.  In one interview, Orsini quoted a communist who didn’t want any luxury himself after the communists won.  Nope.  All this particular commie wanted was to be allowed to personally execute capitalists after the revolution.

Capitalism is what they hate the most.  And fascism.  What’s fascism?  Anything that’s not communist.  Don’t be fooled – Antifa© isn’t against fascists.  They’re against Bernie Sanders because he’s too far right, and think he’s probably a fascist, too.  Antifa™ wants to kill everyone even slightly to the right of them.

In their current state, the concept of logic and argument isn’t something a Leftist in Antifa™ or SBLM© can even hear.  They will, due to their programming, ignore any logical argument, any evidence.  Point out that when Pol Pot takes over Cambodia in a bloody revolution that kills off nearly thirty percent of Cambodia’s population.  If they’re not too far gone, they just won’t hear you.

If they’re far gone, you’ll just hear silence, as they think, “They deserved it.”  Purity is the goal.  Their thought process that they cannot let the lives of people stand in the way of the future Earthly paradise.

CLEAN2

I had to use this picture.

How did Italy defeat the Red Brigades?  Massive numbers of arrests, and large amounts of jail time for those involved.  Hundreds of Leftists were forced to flee Italy to avoid prison.  I’m fairly sure this was fine with the Italians – as long as they never came back.

And our Leftists in the United States?  Getting rid of them won’t be easy.  They’re fully supported in most cities, even as they slowly destroy the cities – some district attorneys won’t charge Antifa© or BLM™ rioters with anything more than a misdemeanor.  Beyond that, they’re well-funded – SBLM™ alone has hundreds of millions of dollars available.

I wonder if they’ll make reparations to the business owners that were destroyed through their riots?

Nah.  The looters were the real victims of the riots, right?