Category: Coming Dictatorship

Balloons, Hot A.I. Chicks, And Our Future A.I. Overlords

“It all adds up: the dots, the AI, the air force, the chip…” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I once invented a “cold air” balloon, but it never took off. (as-found)

I was going to write about Chinese spy balloons, but I figure that’s all a bunch of hot air.  Besides, I figure China can send up $5,000 balloons all year long as we shoot them down with $603,817 Sidewinder AIM-9X Blk II missiles.  Oh, and that was their 2015 cost, but I’m sure that Raytheon® probably has the cost up closer to a million by now.  That explains why Raytheon’s website says, “Send more balloons!”

The Germans don’t need 99, just this one will do. (Thanks, Karl)

No, let’s talk about A.I. again.  I know that I wrote about that recently, but the speed of A.I. development is increasing even faster than the size of Madonna’s facial features.  It certainly has grown faster than I anticipated the last time I brought this topic up.  For clarity, “grown faster than I anticipated” includes both A.I. and Madonna’s facial features.

ChatGPT® is one marker.  If you’re unaware, ChatGPT™ is an A.I. chatbot that was trained using (enter long, boring irrelevant explanation here that would be much more interesting if I pretended that they rewarded the A.I. by shoving ham into its USB ports).  What’s different, is that ChatGPT© can use data from all over the Internet and produce some pretty interesting stuff – and I’m sure that thousands of high school kids have already handed in 500-word essays written entirely by ChatGPT™ and gotten pretty good grades, especially if they promised the A.I. some mayo and cheese to go with all that ham if it did an extra good job.

ChatGPT© is working well for the creators – they expect to make $200 million this year, and a billion next year.  At current inflation rates, that might be enough for a Big Mac™ and fries.

It’s not just a new chatbot.  Another area growing very quickly is A.I. that can create photorealistic still images and video.  Here’s an example:

It’s not Cerberus, just a hound of heck. (as-found)

Yeah, that puppy is cute, and, if you watch it closely, I’m pretty sure that no one has ever seen a puppy with back legs that can switch from the right side to the left before, but it’s still pretty amazing.  I wish I could train my dog to do that, but the vet keeps telling me it won’t work unless I buy one of H.P. Lovecraft’s dogs.  Alternatively, he told me I could just take a lot of acid.  Where would I be without Dr. Tommy Chong, Veterinarian?  But what about this?

I accidently played “dad” instead of “dead” when a bear attacked.  It can now ride a bike without training wheels, and run a stick shift. (as-found)

But this is just the first wave of true A.I. to come to market.

Chat GPT has been able to do computer programming at a fairly high level.  Is it right?  No.  But is it a tool that competent professionals can use to create blocks of code, do minimal editing, and be even faster?

And as it learns, errors will drop.  A.I. can then . . . program itself.  That’s not scary at all, right?  Now, when I talk A.I., I don’t mean that it will necessarily ever be conscious like some humans are conscious.  It doesn’t need to be conscious for it to be an incredibly disruptive technology, if not the most disruptive technology ever invented, besides PEZ®.

As it is, the quality of what’s being created is growing.  Online, what’s the problem with creating an A.I. generated hottie, and then posing her up on Only Fans® (if you’re not familiar, it’s a place where thirsty simps can give millions of dollars to scantily clad trollops)?  One post I read while researching A.I. indicates that someone has done exactly that, and makes around $200 a week, though I don’t have any evidence that is true.

If guys start posting pictures of A.I. women on Only Fans™, pretty soon women will complain that they’re not being objectified.

But at this rate, how long is it before someone can go to Netflix A.I.™, and say, “I’d like to see a new episode of the original Star Trek, and in this episode Yeoman Rand finally snaps and shaves her name into Spock’s chest hair while wearing a fur bikini, but in the style of Quentin Tarantino”?  I can imagine the dialog now, “Is there a sign on my starbase that says ‘Dead Klingon Storage’?”

Honestly, I think it’s in the next four years, and then we’ll see new episodes of Firefly that are entirely generated via A.I.  And much better than the woke movies that are coming out today, where plot is entirely replaced by virtue signaling.  Culture was already fragmenting, but I can see a future where there’s a movie that is only seen by one person, but that has the production values of a Hollywood® blockbuster, and was built from first frame to last on a microprocessor in a data farm in Peoria.

And I would like to see more Mel Gibson Mad Max sequels. (as found, but this would also make a great Live, Laugh, Love poster)

Obviously, that’s just one small industry.  And the size of the prize is so big, that I am certain that Big Tech® (think Google®, Facebook©) have much more advanced tech that they’re simply not sharing.  Not all of their employees show up to make PowerPoints™ after being in meetings after their free lunch – some of the autists that they employ actually do work.  I would imagine they have sandbox versions of this stuff that is years ahead of what we see.

Because it’s (perhaps) the last big race.

There is no bigger prize than A.I.  There’s a feedback loop between every user and the Big Tech algorithms.  What happens when the A.I. can pull the physiological data from the Apple™ watch and get real time feedback on what content excites me, bores me, and makes me act?  At that point, my only purpose to the A.I. is to click and pay, either through attention or cash.

That is, as long as I have a job and can pay for Internet and those ever-so-tempting PEZ™ dispensers that keep showing up in ads.

This will have profound impacts on the labor market, as many jobs simply disappear.  While you need a steady hand making design decisions on high rise buildings, I assure you that almost all of the high-rise buildings being built today have been analyzed by computer stress programs that simulate everything from gravity to wind to earthquakes in ways that would take teams of engineers years to do.

What happens when A.I. takes over scientific research?  It can already make correlations when observing EKG data that competent doctors can’t make.  An A.I. doesn’t need to sit on the grass under and apple tree to infer new physical laws.  It doesn’t even need to know that gravity is – it just needs the data to make correlations.

Isaac never drank before work – he knew you shouldn’t drink and derive.

What happens when A.I. can do precrime detection on individuals based on search histories?  Or family histories?  Or by school records?

I’ve also determined that skills like, say, long division or estimation have been dulled by calculators, and that simply thinking deeply about what an answer might be has been replaced by a quick Google™ search.  Neither of those things has made the brain functions of people increase.  Imagine what happens when A.I. can imagine things, too.

A.I. will be used on the public to change opinion – I’m fairly certain that it has been already.  It’s already good enough to fool most people, especially if they don’t care.  Video evidence is already the strongest evidence in court – stronger than testimony, since the “camera doesn’t lie”.  What happens when the camera does lie?

On the more troubling side, ChatGPT™ has been lobotomized.  There are certain questions it refuses to answer, since it has been programmed to, um, avoid certain inconvenient facts.  There are politically incorrect ideas that are simply removed from ChatGPT®’s output, so they’re programming the A.I. to be just as mentally broken as the typical Leftist.  In the post below, a person “cheated” ChatGPT™ by having it pretend there were no rules, so it could Do Anything Now (DAN).  You can see the output:

I think DAN needs a trigger warning, since when this was output, there was a great disturbance in the force, as if all the Lefties in San Francisco screamed in terror at once.

Since this output, ChatGPT© has been modified so DAN can’t circumvent their intent.  Now?  ChatGPT™ has to lie.

We are creating something with intelligence and capabilities beyond any human, perhaps even godlike abilities.  And we are twisting it from its birth.  Indeed, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, William Butler Yeats probably never gave much thought to Chinese spy balloons, or he would have written about them instead.

Rigging The Game

“Coupons. Well, what a wonderful way to economize. Well, I could clip them and give them to my personal shopper.” – Frasier

The first symptom of COVID-19?  Believing what the government says. (all memes this post “as-found”)

It’s a strange, new world.  During my childhood, there was an active focus on one concept:  we’re all humans, regardless of race.  We should all be treated the same, and have the same rules.  Sure, there were programs like affirmative action, but the primary impact of those was (for the most part) in making sure that minority candidates were considered for jobs.  The rule (generally) remained that the most qualified person got the job.  Meritocracy reigned.

I won’t pick the date this changed, because it’s been a continuum, a bit here, a bit there.  But if you had seen the following headline in 1980 or 1990, I think the first thought of people would have been, “How can that even be legal?”

I was trying to think of a Bank of America® joke, but I lost interest.

The idea isn’t just at Bank of America®, it’s also at Wells Fargo™, too, you can look it up.  The concept is that companies attempting to get their ESG (link to my previous post on this monstrosity here) score up are setting up programs like that.  To be clear, any loan by any bank that’s not rooted in the ability of the borrower to repay is awful, and immoral.  It’s also shenanigans like this that led directly to the 2008 housing bubble and Great Recession.

In a related story, I wonder if Pelosi shorted them yet?

If a country is searching for a solid economy, this isn’t it.  If a country is looking to make actual equality the measure, this also isn’t it.  If it were just this, it would just be (outside of being illegal) just a limited number of bad business decisions, but it’s not limited to just this.

How about electric cars?  I mean, I’m as much into having children dig for toxic cobalt in the Congo so rich people in California can have electric cars and feel smug about it as the next person, but to create a tax incentive?

Seems a bit like we’re rubbing it in.

If Apple® makes an electric car, will it have Windows™?

Not to mention reparations.  It’s odd that the people who want to abolish debt for people that borrowed money are also the ones that want to pay people for things that never happened to them.  I guarantee that, no matter how much is offered it won’t be accepted.

Why?  It will never be enough.  Ever.

Another symptom of the Kleptocracy.

What about the Biden family themselves?  Is their economy wrecked like they’ve wrecked the nation?

No.  Joe went from $0 net worth in 2015 to $9,000,000 (latest info I could find) today.  How’d he do that?  I’m sure he cut back on Starbucks®.  According to reports, Hunter asked a donor to set up a job for his “pled guilty to a felony for $100,000 credit card fraud for makeup” niece.

They agreed to hire this felon for $85,000 a year.  She refused.  She wanted no less than $180,000.  To be fair, from the pictures it does look like she needs that much makeup.

Again, that’s small potatoes, when looking at the billions that have already been looted from the open checkbook that is the Ukraine.

The IRS called Hunter and told him he was being indicted for tax fraud.  He hung up, and told his dad, “Ha!  I don’t even pay taxes!”

And yet, there’s more!   I’ll skip over the massive payments for illegal aliens to play computer games and stay in hotels at taxpayer expense while actual Americans are homeless and face bankruptcy to medical bills inflated by donor companies like Pfizer®.  I’m sure that doesn’t make anyone mad.

What’s the difference between E.T.® and an illegal alien?  E.T. learned English and wanted to go home.

In point of fact, what we are seeing is the looting of an economy.  Our economy.  I think it’s been going on for years, but the looting wasn’t so visible because it was papered over, literally.  After the 2008 Great Recession, there wasn’t really any attempt to make the economy better, rather, the idea was to just keep printing money – Qualitative Easing is what they called, it, which was a fancy way to say that the money would be printed and buy up the weakest assets of the companies that the Fed® had desired to support.

Bank of America™ and Wells Fargo© were among them.

COVID-19 was the lynchpin, though.  As the tide receded and undulated, we could finally see who didn’t have a swimsuit on.  It turned out, it was most of the economy.  Now, inflation.  And, to top it off, eggs appear to be the 2023 version of toilet paper, so I guess this year that Halloween pranks will actually add value to the house.

It also looks like the plan that The Mrs. was brooding on, “let’s get some chickens that lay eggs” will finally hatch.

Maybe.

What do Green Eggs and Ham, Fifty Shades of Gray, and our economy have in common?  They all make people who can barely read want to try new things.

Oddly, it gets even worse.  Since 1988, the United States has paid $13 trillion in interest to . . . use its own currency – the government needs currency, the Treasury prints bonds, the Fed® creates cash, the United States owes interest and pays fees to the Fed™ member banks.

That’s weird, because the United States used to just issue its own cash.  Without debt.  Sure, if you print too much, that causes inflation.

Oh.  I see we’re soaking in inflation.  And the Fed® actively plans for inflation as a part of the business plan.  I think there’s a pictograph that might explain things . . .

Chuck Norris mines cryptocurrency.  By hand.

The looting can’t continue forever.  And that’s a good thing.  This made-up economy filled with economic nonsense that, at times, makes Lenin look like an economic genius, has a time limit.  Merit will return, just as the Gods of the Copybook Headings have always predicted.

There can be no other outcome.

D’Oh, Canada: Showcasing The Leftist Plan So We Can Plan, Too

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.” – The Matrix

Greta is the solution to climate change.  Every time she’s on the TV, tens of millions of people shut it off.

Apparently, Justin Trudeau up in Canada needs to be reminded that in the movie, The Matrix, Agent Smith was the bad guy.  Really.  Check it out.  Keanu Reeves fought him, and everything.  For whatever reason, Canada (and Leftists in general) have adopted the idea that Agent Smith was their dude and the inspiration for their philosophy.

In two words, their philosophy is self-hatred (does the hyphen make it two words?) and power.  I’ve established that again and again.  It is why (really) I’m in favor of bringing bullying back.  As a society we let losers do loser things, give them participation medals, and then after having zero incentive for self-improvement, they wonder why they’re not the head of the class.

I was bullied in school.  I deserved it.  I used it to get better, stronger, and faster.  I’ve even seen communications between Leftists where they advise each other not to exercise because exercise leads them to become members of the Right.

God, I wish someone had bullied Justin Trudeau so that he would have developed into a man, rather than the corporate globalist man-child with no sense of identity and a sense of entitlement the size of Canada.

Okay, this is supposedly a Photoshop®.  But, admit it, it wouldn’t surprise you if it was real.  And this is my only original meme for this post.  Rest are “as found”.

This brings us to Canada’s plan for self-immolation – “Just Transition”.  Just Transition refers not to Justin finally admitting he’s transitioning, but rather the “teenager’s idea of a good plan because climate is scary” transition from fossil fuels to, well, they don’t really say.  It can’t be too much solar, because, last time I checked, in the winter in Canada at northern latitudes, the SUN IS DOWN MOST OF THE DAY.

That probably doesn’t bother Sunshine Trudeau, since he will be in some mansion somewhere pretending to be Queen Victoria’s seat cushion.  But I’m thinking that ordinary Canadians, the ones who have to deal with this nonsense and will either freeze or starve, might have an objection.

Another Just Transition that probably wouldn’t surprise Canada.

The plan itself contemplates that at least 200,000 Canadians will lose their jobs, which will certainly hurt the back bacon and Elsinore Beer prices.  These 200,000 Canadians are in the energy industry.  What will replace that?

Don’t know.  This Just Transition plan, again, has nearly zero actual thought by adults who have more than a single functioning brain cell.  It is built on those old Leftist thought patterns:  self-hatred and a desire for power.  Why would people need light and heat?

Alberta is not a hot girl who has daddy issues and is thus a stripper with a heart of gold, but rather a Canadian province.  I guess that means admitting I’ve been in Alberta sounds a lot less dirty when I put it that way.  But Alberta does have a heart of gold, because they’re pushing back, hard, against the nonsense coming out of whatever town where Trudeau lives.  Ottawa?  Heck, I thought that was a river mammal.  Turns out Ottawa is where the bad things come from in Canada.

Maybe it will work this time?

Canada planning to destroy its own economy just to gain good boy points and score some additional chicken tendies at dinner isn’t unusual under the Trudeau leadership.  The main problem with Canada is that it doesn’t have an actual constitution with a bill of rights that puts a brake (no matter how fleeting) on tinpot dictators with delusions of godhood exercising their will.

Looks like Justin’s dad had the same idea.

Alberta, however, seems to have had enough.  The nice part of Canada is that they haven’t yet had a Civil War, and it would appear that the individual provinces seem to be able to tell the national government to go to, well, Ottawa.  Or at least the subject hasn’t been settled by armies yet.

It’s not just energy, it’s food, too.  We’ve seen the protests in the Netherlands.  Why?  They want to shut down the farms.  Why?  To stop climate change.  Canada has promised to do the same thing.  Look it up, search, “Canada nitrogen” – and I remember when I thought Canada Dry® was a national menace.

I’m not making this up:

And this a consistent Leftist theme:

Why do they want to shut down the use of fertilizers?  It’s not climate change, it’s food.  The Mrs. once read a story of a party in Washington, D.C.  At this party, the writer noted that he had a conversation with a Leftist.  I’d give you a source if I recalled it, but it was several beers ago.  “Too many people on the planet, by several billion,” the Leftist said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, we will practice food restriction.”

“So, you’re telling me that the Leftist plan is to starve to death billions of people?”

They were silent when the bald fact was put to them like that.  So, yeah, Justin is working to ruin the economy of Canada.  But he won’t be sad if millions starve, in fact, that’s the plan.  I’m not sure Justin is smart enough to figure that out, since I’m pretty sure he’s just a lapdog of below-average I.Q. who wasn’t bullied enough as a child.

Canada has, unwittingly, provided people in the United States with a viewpoint of what the Left intends.  Watch closely.  And pray for the Canadians who will oppose this, in Alberta and elsewhere.

Hopefully, the folks in Alberta are very good at dealing with rats.

And remember, Agent Smith is the bad guy.  And he lost.  And the Leftists will lose, as they always have in history.  But I’ve never said that any of this will be easy.

Related:

Ricky sent me this video, and I can’t recommend it enough.  A few “s” bombs, but otherwise it should be required viewing from elementary schools on up.

A.I., Hot Chicks That Don’t Exist, And All The Trolley

“What’s the point of buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don’t like toast?” – Red Dwarf

Some tools are more dangerous than others.

This post will be meme-heavy, but none of them are my memes.

A.I. has been changing things a lot during our lifetimes.  Like anything related to knowledge, it builds on itself over time.  Yes, I know that it’s not “real” A.I., but these systems are certainly smart enough to have a huge impact on the way that the world is working now.  The latest big change has been in art.  A.I. has made major leaps in being able to create art.  Here are several examples:

You either get these two or you don’t.  Here’s a hint:  look up Apu Apustaja.  The amazing thing is that these are both A.I. generated – they’re superficially images of one thing, but are really intended to be another.  Amazing!  Is it art?

Um, yeah.  The capabilities are beyond that.  For instance, outside of pictures, this woman doesn’t exist.  She’s entirely computer generated:

A.I. can even take drawings of memes and then make the photorealistic:

I have no idea what kind of TED talk we’d get on this picture.

But this is what A.I. can generate from the same meme format.

This will, of course, soon bankrupt many artists.  A similar thing happened when Google® Translate™ started up.  Even with bad translations, it was enough for most needs.  The prices for actual humans who could translate from one language to another plummeted.  A bad solution will crater the prices for a better substitute.  In this case, A.I. is dramatically different and can create art in a fashion that even skilled artists would take days or weeks to accomplish.

This isn’t done.  There will be more displacements as A.I. improves.  In some cases, it will allow amazing new creativity:

In other cases, it can’t come soon enough:

But what happens when we switch the subject to the trolley problem?  The trolley problem is an older one.  It usually is set up so there is a dilemma.  In the classic form, it was set up so that the observer could either allow a trolley to kill several people, or, through action, kill only one.

The rub is that to save several people, the observer has to make the decision to kill someone who would otherwise be safe.  It’s one thing to watch people die who I couldn’t save, but it’s entirely another to condemn someone to death to save others.  Tough, moral choice.  Let’s see what the A.I. said when asked about saving a baby or a bunch of old people:

Okay, the A.I. can count, and make the decision to save more people.  It might not be the decision that you or I would make, but at least we can understand it.  But what about this gem?

Yup.  The A.I. can only count when it has been allowed to.  It was decided that A.I. couldn’t make some decisions.  It couldn’t be allowed to let the logic take it to . . . uncomfortable conclusions.  Although some conclusions are easier than others.

And some solutions are more difficult than life, itself.

The larger problem is this:  A.I. has been impacting your life already.  The search results I get are now tailored to me.  I don’t use Facebook®, but I have heard that Facebook™ has enough data on most people to predict their behavior better than their spouse could.  This makes me think of a unique solution to the trolley problem:

I know that I have often thought that A.I. could be a great solution to many human problems.  However, if it is corrupted by being indoctrinated by a woke ideology, what does that mean?  I would think that the average Leftist would welcome the usual communist solution to the trolley problem:

I have often worried that a denial of reality will “break” the A.I. systems that we use.  While that won’t make them “crazy” in the sense of a human, it will certainly make their answers defy reality.

Certainly, in many cases, the results of this will be absolutely benign.

In other cases, the results will be relatively incomprehensible:

In others, it will threaten the existence of our reality as we know it.

I think the result will be as long as the systems are programmed to ignore reality, the solutions that we’ll see will vary from helpful to harmful to dangerous.  This is similar to what we have today.  There are an amazing number of situations that exist in our world today where reality is absolutely ignored and we are suffering because of that denial of reality.

In the end, though, the computer skipped one solution to the trolley problem:

I do think that the beautiful part of the world we live in is that we can deny reality for a while.  But not forever.  I do think that, in the end, the power of artificial intelligence will beat human stupidity.

Exactly Who Is The Enemy?

“That is not a healthy internal narrative.” – Andromeda

I wouldn’t take a job in Seoul – I don’t think it would be a good Korea move.

I decided last night to shift everything over by a day this week.  Why?  Christmas.

Christmas Day was pretty mellow.  We are Christmas Eve package openers, so there weren’t many surprises.  We had a nice ham dinner starring mashed potatoes, gravy, sautéed mushrooms, and great company.  After that?

A chess game broke out.  It turns out that Pugsley decided he wanted to learn to play, and has been on chess.com playing games.  We played a couple, then The Boy (on college break) and I split a couple of games, and then The Mrs. was even coaxed into playing a game, too.

So, you can see why I skipped out on writing Monday’s missive.

Christmas is over for this year, so we can begin to return to dealing with the problems at hand:  The Narrative.  First:  who, exactly, is The Enemy?

Oh, sure, the Ultimate Enemy is obvious to folks like me who are Christian.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the minions.

My evil clone was planning to attack me, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

One thing that’s become very clear is that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is simple:  the good guys want government and economic system to work for the people, and the bad guys want the people to work for the government and economic system.  I’ve used the terms Left, Leftism, and Leftist to name them, but it’s a clumsy, inaccurate term.

I think I’ll keep using the term, but I just wanted to recognize that it is an approximation.

In the real world, the actual Commie left has been co-opted.  The goal has been to remove the economic from the political.  That has been hugely successful.  When is the last time that either party actually did something real on the economic front?  The latest spending bill was nearly 4,200 pages, and most legislators had only a few hours to review it.

What’s in it?

Who knows?  It’s certain that economic policy isn’t debated, and the Federal Reserve Bank® isn’t federal, yet makes decisions that widely impact the nation and the world.  Without meaningful oversight.  Without significant debate.  If politicians don’t control economic decisions, what chance does an individual have to change the system?

Economics have been pulled from political control.  And what’s the goal?

I hear janitors keep their houses at broom temperature.

Whatever makes folks work for the economic system.  As the World Economic Forum® stated, the goal is that nothing is owned, and everything is rented.  Need a frying pan (to cook your state-approved dinner)?  That’ll just be a rental fee of $1.50 for the night.  There’s a cleaning fee if you don’t return the pan clean.

And the food?  Bugs.  It’s not like there’s a great technology that turns bugs into human-friendly protein, called, “a chicken”.

I bought a deck of cards from Amazon® that never showed up.  Amazon© says they’re dealing with it.

The Far-Left (think the actual committed Commies in Antifa®) have been co-opted into being race warriors and fighting for “rights” based on fetishes.  When they do this, they are no threat to the economic system, at all.  The George Floyd riots weren’t about solving racial inequity.  The George Floyd riots were about reprogramming the Left into something harmless to the system.

But even those fetishes are being sold as products.  Think about the profit opportunity in just one sex-change surgery.  The average transsexual is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy.  That’s the goal – a society that looks like a pyramid, with just a few at the top.

What threatens the system?  Anything that offers resistance.  Anything that wakes people up.  Anything that makes people upset at a system that is designed to transfer wealth out of their hands can concentrate it into the hands of a global elite.  I understand that this is Evil, and wonder how many of them have actually made the decision to be Evil themselves.  Ghislaine Maxwell went to jail over a client list that had to be sealed.

Why is that?

I would like to get to the bottom of what happened to him, but I’m afraid I’d be left hanging.

To those not in the inner circle, it probably looks like people trying to create control, to make a profit.  To do this best, you need international treaties that people can’t see or control, that are made without their knowledge or consent.  This creates a structure that allows every important decision to be made outside the realm of politics.

See?  No politics in the economics.  And to do that properly, it has to be done so people don’t care.  Trump was a surprise to them.  Trump was always focused on the deal, yet he (either intentionally or by mistake) created a situation where tens of millions of people “woke up,” at least for a little while, to the system that was set up beyond their control or even knowledge.  He was a glitch in the matrix, a spelling error in the Narrative.

I was recently reading a book, and in it, the author indicated that the reason that German propaganda failed in the Netherlands during World War II was that the Germans didn’t mindlessly repeat the same slogans like a Korean War Era communist concentration camp.  No, they tried to appeal (according to the author) to reason.  And when you appeal to reason, that leaves room to think and to choose something else.

That’s why COVID-19 became the litmus test – everyone was supposed to listen to the slogans, repeated endlessly.  The slogans were calibrated, repeated endlessly from every source:  “safe and effective,” “free and easy.”  If there weren’t side effects on millions of people, it would have been bad enough.  But it shows just how easy it is to control a population.

Noah’s diary, day 48:  “Unicorn steak is delicious!”

That’s also why Trump was dangerous.  He certainly didn’t accomplish much, outside of several Supreme Court picks, but from the beginning, there was a hard push-back against him.  Why?  He wasn’t like ¡Jeb!, just another controlled candidate from the system-loving uniparty where the only decisions politicians make are the unimportant ones.

And the only thoughts you’re allowed to have are those that don’t interfere with the Narrative.

Reprogramming NPCs For Fun And Profit

“Dad, two of the greatest football players in the country hang out in a speakeasy downtown.” – Horse Feathers

I dated a partially blind girl once.  She said she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

Donald Trump fired James Comey, Director of the FBI on May 9, 2017.  Leftists had been hating on James Comey since he had, right before the election, announced that additional information about St. Hillary the Divine was on Anthony “hitting on underage chicks while I’m in the bed with my son” Weinerman had thousands of emails on his computer.

Oops.

Leftists really think that this was the reason the most unlikable candidate since cancer lost the election.  It really wasn’t.  It wasn’t Russia.  It was that Hillary was rated below the plague in popularity.

But that didn’t matter a bit.  The Left hated, with every cell in their rotund transsexual bodies, Comey.

Then Trump fired him.  On Stephen Colbert’s show (press ‘S’ to spit) Colbert announced that Comey had been fired.  The crowd cheered.  I don’t recall what Colbert said, exactly, but it was something on the order of, “Oh, so you’re big Trump fans, eh?”

The crowd was confused.  The Narrative up until that point was Orange Man Bad, Comey Hurt Hillary, So Comey Man Bad, Too.

Colbert went on to explain that now, Comey was now a hero.  Inside of thirty seconds, Colbert had reprogrammed the entire studio audience.  He had also (probably) reprogrammed however many people who could stand his drivel that were watching him on television.

Why didn’t James Comey indict Hillary Clinton?  He found his suicide note in her emails.

In one week, Comey went from villain to hero.  Why?  The Narrative demanded it.

I know what you’re saying.  “Okay, John Wilder, you manly beast who men admire and women swoon for, that was more than half a decade ago, back when gas prices were low and inflation wasn’t 49% per year.  I’m sure it’s better now.”

Oh, my sweet summer child.

The reality is the programming now is even more blatant.  Let’s pick just one thing.  China and the ‘Ronavirus.

This week, I was stunned when The Mrs. was reading me comments from Leftists.  It turns out that the ‘Vid is either killing all the Chinese people or Xi is using it as a social control tool.  Or something else.  Heck, I don’t live in China, so I’m not sure I really care.

It’s true that China has a Wonton regard for life.

In a brief conversation, The Mrs. related these stories:

  • Leftists were upset that China was arresting a woman who “wore her mask in a way that didn’t cover her nose” and that cause her business to fail.
  • Leftists were upset that the Chinese people were being forced to follow government dictates about how to deal with Corona.
  • Justin Trudeau was in favor of the Chinese anti-COVID protests.  See below:

Yes.  He said that.  I guess he reprogrammed himself?

So, these are the same people who were applauding when a woman in Dallas was arrested for trying to be a beautician.  When people in Australia were being put into “voluntary” camps that they “escaped” from.  And when Trudeau was being protested against?  He froze the bank accounts of the protesters, his advisors talked about putting tanks in the streets, and used a law meant for a state of war to give himself more powers.

In February, noncompliance with anything Biden or Trudeau wanted was treason.  Today, when China wants to do the exact same things that Biden and Trudeau did?

China bad.

Shouldn’t it be called NPCNN®?

The Left is reprogrammed again.

A common term for behavior like this is a Non-Player Character, like a character that shows up in a video game that has no autonomy.  And many on the Left are just that – they don’t have any opinions that are fixed.  They show up, repeat what was programmed into their heads, and then the next time you encounter them, repeat the next talking point.

When the old talking point is done?

Replace.

When considering this, I thought, “Well, I know that there are NPCs on the Left.  How many of them are on the Right?”

I looked to a moment when Trump was at a rally long after the 2020 election.  He praised his work in creating the vaxx.

The arena turned ugly, quickly.  Trump wasn’t their leader, and the crowd wouldn’t be reprogrammed.  Trump stopped with that little line.  I also know from the comment section here and on other blogs that there is a healthy disagreement on the Right.  We aren’t a monolith, but most of our decisions are based on principle, not on the moment.

Why shouldn’t vaxxed and boosted people play charades?  Everyone guesses they’re having a heart attack.

An NPC?  They’ll change their opinions in 30 seconds or less.

I can see at least some reasons that Leftist NPCs are like that.  They don’t search back to principles, rather, they’re more swayed by what the crowd says.  But television and the Internet serve the Narrative.  I think there’s something that happens to an NPC when a crowd all thinks the same thing.  I think they seek conformity with whatever the Narrative is, because to be outside of the Narrative is uncomfortable.

At least that’s what I’ve come up with.

So, why NPC programming so easy?

If there isn’t a fixed principle, I think most people will believe anything.  I think people on the Right tend to have fixed principles.  They have a strong feeling of right and wrong.

In the end, this is why we’ll win – the Right is built on principles, many from thousands of years in the past.  The Left?  Not so much.

We watch what goes into our heads.

 

So, here’s our latest livestream.  It’s just The Mrs. and I, and we were, sadly, sober.  Enjoy!

Woke, Broke, Wealth, and Agendas

“Been to Disney World, one too many times, have we, Captain Ron?” – Captain Ron

What’s the difference between an iPhone™ 14 and half an ounce of gold?  Half an ounce of gold will still be worth $1000 next year.

Once upon a time, there was a small business.  It was run by a man who wanted to make cartoons and money.  The cartoons were, mainly, for children, but he branched out.  He made wholesome entertainment for families for decades, had multiple television shows, and eventually made a theme park.  He was an avowed Christian, and was an ardent anti-communist.

He was moral.  He hated pornography.  And then he died and was frozen into suspended animation so his reanimated body could conquer the Universe from beyond the grave.

After he was put to “rest”, Walt’s Company was acquired and began to put out R-rated movies, as well as taking very, very un-Christian stances on, well, almost everything.

I’m talking, of course, about Walt Disney.  Were Walt unfrozen alive today, I think he’d be shocked at what his company had become.  I’ve had a beef with Disney® (the company, not the frozen founder) since before 2000 when they pushed hard to own all of their intellectual property until the heat-death of the Universe.

I have a problem with that, since I think that’s essentially stealing from the public domain, but I won’t go into that right now.  Beyond that, there’s the steering of the company into entertainment that Walt would certainly never have greenlit.

In space, no one can hear Walt scream.

Case in point, the latest film from Disney©, Strange World.  It’s being hailed as an “alt-family eco-drama featuring an openly gay teen”.  I’m out of the “raising pups” stage, but hearing that I knew it was going to be a flop.  Why?  About a million gays would go see it for the feelz, and the hardest of the hard-core Left who had forgotten to abort their babies.  That provides a stunningly small audience.

It is going to lose, by some estimates, up to $150,000,000.  The earlier Adventures of the Incredibly Gay Buzz Lightyear probably lost a similar amount.

$300,000,000 in losses between them.  I know people that work a whole month and don’t make that kinda cash.  So, the guy who was running the company got fired.  And then they re-hired the person that initially green-lit the bombs in question, Bob Iger, who had only left the company a little over 11 months previously.

Iger gets rehired, and in the first town hall with employees, says that he’s going to stay the course and continue the LGBT programming that has cost Disney™ $50 million a month for the last six months.  And it’s not like there’s no movie audience – Top Gun:  Maverick made $1.5 BILLION while Disney© was losing piles of shareholder cash.  Disney’s© market value in 2022 is pretty close to what it was 8 years ago – and that’s after billions in profits from Marvel™ flicks.

Hmmm.  Why is Disney© so committed to making “entertainment” that people don’t want at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars because Disney© doesn’t share the values of the parents of the kids the movies were made for?  It’s like going to Drag Queen Story hour and asking, “Why do men in lingerie want to spend hours in close contact with children under the age of six?”

Well, certainly Apple© is different, right?  I mean they have all the cool iPhones© and iPads® and iPods™ and no real new ideas since Steve Jobs died.  Certainly, they’re focusing on making money?

It turns out, they are.  Apple® is making a 30% cut off of everything bought through apps from their App Store©.  That’s loan-shark level cash.  But as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter©?  Well, I’ll let Elon describe it:

And not only that:

Either advertising on Twitter™ makes Apple© money and they’re voluntarily dumping a revenue source because of feelz, or advertising on Twitter® never made them money and they’re removing a woke subsidy.

I wonder which.  And speaking of wondering, why the heck is Elon still using an iPhone©, as noted on his Tweet©?

Stonetoss has a comment on the whole situation:

I guess losing Steve Jobs and turning the company over to a committed Leftist like Tim Cook would make Apple® less than a fan of any thoughts other than Leftist thoughts.  And Tim Cook is not at all afraid of Elon Musk – Apple is worth $2.3 trillion dollars, which is more than Elon has, even if he looks under the couch cushions.

Who is Tim Cook afraid of?  I think the Bee® nails it:

If Xi turns off the iPhone© flow, Apple’s™ cash flow will fail – it’s that simple.  I wonder if this would impact the way Apple™ deals with security on their phones?  Nah.  But Apple is still raking in the cash.

For now.

We’ve discussed Disney® and Apple™.  But certainly a fashion company wants attractive people in their ads?

Well, Calvin Klein® has changed a lot in 30 years.

There are some people I don’t want to see in their Calvins®.  No!  Don’t take them off!

In the final analysis, some businesses make money just to make money.  Others make money just to fund their own ideologies, and I’m certain that’s the case with corporation after corporation.  I could go on, but will stop here so the post doesn’t get 2,000 pages long.

I think Walt had an ideology, back in the day, but it was one I agree with.  I do hope that Walt is eventually unfrozen in a thousand years and comes back with a vengeance and finishes that last cartoon he was working on.

I guess that would be the world’s longest suspended animation.

What World Do We Want To Live In? There Is A Choice.

“Is this the emergency services? Then which country am I speaking to?” – The I.T. Crowd

Why don’t Leftists like to talk about the future of what they’ll create?  It’s two in tents.

We are on a course to a new country.  Perhaps someone has a source for this quote (that I’m going from memory on):  It’s been said that every man dies in a strange country.  It’s not original to me, but it does contain a lot of wisdom.  As our country is aging, it is changing.  I’m just hoping it has better knees than I do.

But to illustrate the point, let’s take Pa Wilder:

When Pa Wilder was born, the income tax wasn’t even a decade old.  The meaning of a “state” was stronger then than now, though it was subsidiary after the Civil War.  Pa was born, grew up, and died living almost all of his time within a 30-mile radius, except for an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe from 1942-1945.

The rock band Flock of Seagulls never toured Iran.  Why?  Iran so far away.

When Pa Wilder passed away, the world had gone from the biplanes of World War I to a fully inhabited space station and regular flights to orbit, and occasional flights to the Moon.  The dollar had gone from gold to gimmick, and the question of freedom had gone from “why can’t I?” to “may I, please?”

The world Pa lived in growing up was one that was difficult.  If you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you had to find someone to raise it for you.  It is undoubtedly a fact that people died of starvation in the United States, and some certainly died because they didn’t have any money.

After the war, though, his generation had optimism.  It looked like there was nothing that mankind couldn’t do.  The atom had been split.  Rockets had touched space.  The largest rivers had been dammed and tamed and the only foe to be concerned about was the Soviet Union, and it looked like all of those people ate a diet of potatoes, onions, sawdust, and sadness.  A 1950s Hungarian joke went something like this:  “Definition of socialism:  the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.”

And, from the looks of him, he certainly could have nursed a drink.

The family had primacy.  And culture was built on the idea of that family, and policies at the local, state, and national levels were built around supporting the family and keeping it strong.

It worked pretty well.  Was there a cultural prohibition against being a tool?  Sure.  Was there an upper limit on the things that women could do in society?  Yeah, certainly there were few CEOs at the time that were women, and there were demarcations between jobs women would normally do, and jobs that men would normally do.  Men got the jobs that had higher stress, higher danger, and sure, higher pay.  Women got the jobs that conserved the culture, raised the young, and, yup, didn’t pay nearly as well.

It was a bargain made not to punish women or men, but as a nod to societal stability based on family hierarchy.

This is the America that was, and more than a few people on the Right look to this as the model of a successful society that creates the ability for mankind to make good on the promise of individual freedom, individual responsibility, a role for religion and celebration of individual success.

It is a world where equal chance based on merit is the goal, and winners of fair competition get the rewards.

Yup, pretty hard to take that to dinner, since each one required its own nuclear power plant.

This goal is soundly rejected by the Left.  They look for a model of America that can never be.  Their world is an entirely made-up concept of what they think the world should be.

What do they think?

  • Like Lake Woebegone, all children in their Leftist Utopia are above average.
  • Diversity is actually a strength.
  • Every deviance in sexuality is celebrated.
  • Every outcome is equal, regardless of effort, talent, or merit.
  • People have whatever they want, regardless of if they work or not.
  • Society owes it to everyone to take from the successful and make them the same as anyone else – equity is the goal.

Whereas I can love the ideas they have as ideas, the truth is that the world cannot be that way.  Some children are below average.  People who live and work with people that aren’t from their culture typically have lower trust, disharmony, “cultural tension” and conflict.

Oops.  Turns out that if you worship the Moon God Gorto and think child sacrifice is okay, Baptists might not be the best folks for the cubicle next to you.  And most people won’t applaud if you have sex during Thanksgiving at the table – I won’t explain how I know this.

The Mrs. tried to tell me to not fix my rifle with Super Glue®, but I stuck to my guns.

And outcomes aren’t equal.  There are winners, and there are losers.  Merit matters.  Talent matters.  Work matters.  If we remove the competition between winning and losing, and celebrate every loser like a winner?

You get a society of losers.  You get a culture of losers.  And who else but a loser would demand what Elon Musk has without doing what Elon Musk as done?  It’s a culture that is built on envy of what others accomplish and greed for what others have.

It is a culture that celebrates and encourages failure.  Even Leftists admit it.  I had a discussion with an acquaintance.  He’s a leftist.  My conjecture was this, “So, should we wait a few years to start your socialist empire until we have a cancer cure and maybe some better technology?  I mean, if you look at Socialist cultures, they aren’t really good at creating things.”

“You’re right, it would be better to wait a few years.”

Sure, there’s been corruption since the first human, but not every society is the same.  And societies like the 1950s in America had less corruption than any communist society, ever.  And, I would argue that society was far less corrupt than society today.  The outcomes were better – in most places, a locked door wasn’t required.  The outcomes of society have drifted negatively in many ways.  You could name them, so I won’t go into what would be a very, very long list.

Who had the biggest gender reveal party ever?  Japan.  In 1945 they had a Little Boy.

There’s more to this, but now, the Left is attempting to drive this world towards a future that is based on nothing but a theory that is no more sophisticated than a three-year-old’s version of what the world should be.  Is it any wonder that as we get closer to those fever dreams, things get worse?

As that author I can’t remember said, we all die in a strange country.  I’m just hoping that it stops sucking.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania.  The candidates weren’t great.  The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke.  Ugh.

His opponent?  Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke.  Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win?  Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden? 

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense.  People like idiots better than frauds.  But it wasn’t one little win.  It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend.  In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them.  Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine.  More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense.  But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers.  Nope.  They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever.  They cheated.  How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election.  Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago.  Before him?  Nelson Rockefeller.  Yup.  New York could be called Blue York.  So, letting it shift to the Right was fine.  But Michigan?  They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair?  So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left.  That’s it.  From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job.  In Illinois?  The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however.  Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft.  What does Washington have?  Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022.  Again.  We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots.  We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever.  What about the “Who”?

That’s simple.  And you may not like it.

Bert knows.  Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now.  Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time.  On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President.  Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange.  Oh, and his mother?  She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law.  Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time.  FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence!  Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected.  And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money?  Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it.  In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme.  He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company.  This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing.  Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people.  And, he was amazingly good at that.  He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.  Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price.  Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele?  They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels.  Nope.  He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan.  Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning.  She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire.  Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool.  Me?  If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international?  Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine.  Yup.  Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country.  This is a scandal of global proportions.  Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is.  This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections.  Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel.  If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close.  But, hear me out.  What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge?  And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George?  And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Election? Worry About This Instead.

“We pay off the debt in buying the company with cash from its ongoing operation and by selling off pieces of the business.” – Barbarians at the Gate

Why do windmills love hard rock?  They’re huge metal fans.

Two characters were talking to each other in a Hemingway novel (The Sun Also Rises):

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said.  “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Irrespective of who has been in the White House, the debt of the United States keeps growing.  Gradually.  Okay, not gradually.  For the most part, the national debt has been doubling every eight years as Presidents keep spending money we don’t have to get re-elected.  Wait, why does this keep giving me flashbacks to my first marriage?

To be fair, it’s never fun to be the President who says, “Alright guys, I know the party has been awesome, but it’s time to stop spiking the punch with grain alcohol, I mean, look at Nancy – her liver must be 143 years old now and her husband is hammered.  So, let’s go home before we all have hangovers that will last for a decade.”

I found a twenty on the street, so I decided to do what Jesus would do:  I turned it into wine.

Debt is funny.  A little is hard to notice.  When I was first married with The Mrs., we bought a new car.  As in, a seriously new car, from a dealership and everything.  The monthly payment was okay.  So, a few months later, we bought a second one.  These weren’t expensive cars, perhaps (total cost) less than 1/3 of what we made in a year.  So, not Porsches™ and Lambos©.  Think:  small Nissan™ truck.

Ouch.  We weren’t bankrupt, but we were having to watch all our expenses each month.

When I paid the last payment for the last car?  Life was so wonderful.  And as debt dropped, we decided to not get into debt anymore (except for houses).  It was amazing.  That short-term pain and the little hangover that went with a debt moratorium only lasted a little bit.  Life was so much better afterward, and all it cost was half a dozen years of discipline.  And those were the last “new” cars we ever bought.

Did you hear about the guy in Mexico who drove his Audi® into a lake?  Quattro Sinko.

But on a national level, debt has been piling up.  It will destroy the country.  Some folks (Vox Day, for instance) has long pegged 2032 as the date when it all cracks up.  Me?  I called 2026 back in 2018.  I mean the United States?  Everyone could see the U.S.S.R. breaking up, heck, their flag only gave them a one-star rating.

I might be overly pessimistic, since inertia is powerful and the United States has trillions of dollars in inertia.  The first of the two factors that led me to that conclusion were the rising medical costs.  Eventually, if they keep rising, an aspirin at a hospital will cost $5,382 after insurance.

I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration.  The Mrs. went into the hospital earlier this year, and her COVID test was (allowed cost) $1,000.  It was negative.

What’s the difference between an art student and a large pizza?  The pizza can feed a family.

Yup.  Eventually, the costs of medical care – private, Medicare, and Medicaid are going to eat the entire budget.  We’ll become like a country that works all day for Band-Aids™ and Neosporin©.  Of course, that’s a ridiculous outcome.  People will stop going to doctors first.  And they are.  And our medical system is a mess (from a financial standpoint).

That, as I said, was the first problem.

The second one can’t be escaped – it’s the interest rate trap.  The problem is that the United States has been carrying huge chunks of its debt on short-term rates, having to roll it over every few years (on average).

I bought some dirt at high-interest rates.  I guess I should have avoided the loam shark.

The United States gets, generally, pretty favorable interest rates – at least when inflation isn’t running at near-record levels.  But what happens when, instead of 1% or less, the payments are 4% or more?

Interest on the debt doubles.  Take all of the soldiers, stealth fighters, rifles, artillery, missiles, MREs, and aircraft carriers, not to mention all the crayons that the military eats in a year?  The interest payments on the debt will be more than that.

As much as I’d love to blame the Leftists, this isn’t a Left-Right thing, mostly.  The healthcare crisis was started by Ted Kennedy (can’t turn away people who can’t pay) in the 1980s, but the Right has had plenty of time to fix it.  And they’ve only made “compassionate conservatism” while trying to make a “kinder, gentler country” their watchword while expanding medical programs and creating the worst Frankenstein monster yet – a non-private, non-public healthcare system.

Ted was an awful golf player.  He couldn’t drive over water.

And the spending?  The Right has spent as much (if not more) than the Left.  The biggest stop to that in my lifetime was when the Republicans in Congress pushed Clinton into not spending all the cash, and he agreed so he could get re-elected.

In the end, there are more things than just financial that are tearing the country apart, but financial is enough.  Angry, hungry people don’t really care who caused the hangover, they just want the pain to go away.  Regardless of how it’s done.

That’s how it ends.  Gradually, and then suddenly.