Category: Coming Dictatorship

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.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Midterms Edition

“$10,000. Is that all it takes to be elected senator these days?” – Used Cars

If you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to vote, but not to drink.  But if an eighteen year old looks at the candidates, they’ll understand why the adults are drinking.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after this election.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Vs. The Deep State – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 730 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.  Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals.  The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part II

The hype machine is up on the Left and in full swing.  I’m actually surprised at the amazing levels of hyperbole that are in swing.  Here are some examples:

Rob Reiner seems frightfully unhinged, like he might hurt himself.  As do the TV talking heads:

Bill Maher disappoints me.  I had thought that he was actually getting to the point where he was not the reflexive Leftist he was back in 2000.  Nope.  He occasionally talks more reasonably, but he’s as committed as any other Leftist.  Aesop (LINK), you were right.

How insane is the Left?  They’re running John Fetterman, a person slightly more capable of holding a conversation than a bologna sandwich for Senate.  When Fetterman was (rightly) attacked for not knowing the difference between a noun and a shoelace, the Left tried to paint Republicans as “able-ist” as in wanting someone who was able to say his own name without drooling.

He also looks like a Goomba® from the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers.

Luckily, he has a growth on his neck so he can appeal to both Eagle® fans as well as Steeler® fans.

At least he helps Biden look good.

Because Biden looks like you know, the thing:

But Biden is all about scaring people, too, and so is his Chief of Staff.

The Left, though, is setting us up for more ballot shenanigans:

If you spend a few moments looking at the picture above, you’ll see that in most states, the independents break a little for the Right, and a little for the Left.  But if you look closely at Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of the independents plus some of the Republicans “voted” for Biden.  This is 100% certainty of the fraud that mail voting brings.  Will they cook the books this election?

Why wouldn’t they.  And, you’ll note, fences are going up in Washington D.C.  You can tell that a country is close to Civil War when the politicians live in abject fear of the citizens.

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, organized political violence has been fairly muted this month.  That’s good.  But the .GOV folks are scared – fences are going up all over Washington, D.C.  Even the FED has been surrounded.

In case there is rioting, Ron Paul has been busy.

Stephen Crowder, who broadcasts from a position on the Right, has been banned from his primary outlet, YouTube™, just in time for the election.  Why?  Don’t know.  YouTube©’s rules are vague, so you don’t know why they banned you even after they banned you.  This has a negative effect on free speech since people have no idea where the boundaries are, they stay as far back as they can.  This, in effect, allows even more speech to be banned.

Another person banned is David Icke.  He, however, is a British citizen that’s banned from visiting Europe.  Why?  He is listed as a terrorist.  What does he talk about?  How the elite are literal lizard people.  From watching him in a few videos, I think he sincerely believes that.  But he won’t be visiting any European countries anytime soon.

Reporter James Gordon Meek had his house raided in April.  He hadn’t been seen for months after resigning from his job.  He even skipped going to get an award for his reporting of the pullout from Afghanistan.  He was seen recently, though.  Why did the FBI raid a reporter and cause him to quit?

And there has been some good (potentially) good news with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter™.  If rumors are correct, it really has twisted a lot of knickers on the Left.  I don’t think Musk is on the Right, but he sure is messing with the Left, which might be enough.

How upset are they?  They want to see if they can keep him from running his toy.

The Usual Suspects are upset.  The “blue check mark” was the sign of an elite.  Now, anyone can have it.  The first price point was $20, but Elon quickly dropped it to $8.  This was hilarious, because people on the Left like, well, like Dick Durbin, who has no self-awareness, Tweeted® the below:

AOC was upset by all this, so much so that she quickly became the butt of jokes:

The ADL®, long known for tolerance of viewpoints they don’t agree with (yes, this is sarcasm), was quick to jump in with the Orwellian idea that, to have diversity of opinions, Twitter™ must ban all speech ADL© doesn’t agree with.

And, represented as a meme:

So, Musk started fact-checking.  The Left was upset that one of the first persons fact-checked was . . . The White House.  The White House was so embarrassed that they deleted the Tweet©.  Official Records Act violation, anyone?

And Kathy Griffin was permanently suspended for pretending to be Elon Musk.  Ha!

I guess we know how some people feel about that . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a looks to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again.  I wonder if his new shipment from ACME will come in soon?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided.   Will November be spicy due to elections?  A cold front is coming through, so I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – will November cause a spike?

Economic:

Economic indicators did a dead cat bounce this month.  Inflation has caught up with the Market.

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.

You vs. The Deep State

You are being lied to and controlled.  Not (only) by Google™ and Twitter© and Facebook®, but by all of those folks at the request of the government.  Yup, the DHS, the child of the drunken meetup between George Bush and every congressman except for Ron Paul, has decided that they will be the group that decides what information you are allowed to hear on the big social media platforms.  This is not me making this up:

This is how this shows up in a meme:

Sure, they’re private companies.  But being leaned on by .GOV to shut you up?  I have felt it.  I can tell you the month that this page was downranked (not a misprint) by Google™ leading to a major dropoff in traffic from search engines.  The biggest months of attack?  On the months I made the most fun of Joe.  But after a while, it no longer looks like a mistake:

It looks like they’ve been planning it. And thanks to Snowden, we know how deeply they’re hooked in with electronic communications:

They want it all:  to spy on anyone, at any time, and to control what information you are allowed to see and hear.  They’re willing to go to great lengths:

And if you wonder what they value, look at who gets sent to jail:

Oddly enough, we are winning.  There is no reason that the DHS would need to enlist the aid of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to have them restrict the flow of information to over hundreds of millions of people if we weren’t winning.  Yeah, I know they own the majority of the institutions in the United States, but they’re proving they know they don’t own our minds.  They’re scared.

Remember, this is in our hands, not theirs.  And that’s what scares them.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Huh.  Pre-Musk Twitter 404ed almost all of my Bad Guy links from private citizens by the end of October…

It’s almost like there’s suddenly a crime wave coverup ahead of an election or something…

These two are still up (for now – because they are from Blue Check TV news reporters?)…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582472383910117377
https://twitter.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1585595820077977600

Good Guys
https://youtu.be/akXJ_yuE-Ek
https://youtu.be/XRkpMhuXmZU
https://twitter.com/BornAKang/status/1584054864178339840

One Guy
Firefighter tries to be a good guy at a convenience store…
https://twitter.com/KcDiscover/status/1582552334994796547
https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-missouri-shooting-kcmo-firefighter-anthony-santi-charges/41693134

Body Count
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/47/95
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/19/daniel-bobinski-interview-embalmer-says-blood-has-changed/
https://icandecide.org/v-safe-data/
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-mortality-rate-is-up-17-across
https://chaosnavigator.substack.com/p/80-young-canadian-doctors-died-suddenly
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-surgeon-general-covid-mrna-vaccine-found-to-cause-84-increase-in-death-for-men-ages-18-39?utm_campaign=64483
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ob-gyn-laments-covid-jabs-massive-unprecedented-side-effects-for-pregnant-women-babies/
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/25-percent-people-received-covid-19-vaccination-missed-work-serious-event-cdc
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fborder%2F2022%2F10%2F12%2Fgraphic-mexican-cartel-gunmen-dump-4-human-heads-near-texas-border%2F
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/glock-switch-epidemic-may-be-rippling-through-americas-inner-cities
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-made-up-60-4-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2021/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-undercounts-number-times-armed-citizens-thwarted-active-shooting-incidents-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

Vote Count
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-trump-election-fraud/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/bxwz-o06.html
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/jawdropping-fraud-systemic-ballot-harvesting-in-orlando-black-neighborhoods/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F10%2Fdemocrats_are_aboard_the_big_data_emtitanicem.html
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/03/mayor-says-milwaukee-election-worker-fired-over-ballot-fraud/69616108007/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mail-in-pennsylvania-ballots-with-incorrect-dates-will-be-saved-not-counted-2022-11-02/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/new-york-has-more-3-million-voters-lacking-proof-identity-analysis
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/bombshell-texts-show-milwaukee-mayor-colluding-with-democrats-to-rig-2022-election/
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-voter-registration-delaware-constitutions-da8ac023e52da4a78c2ccb110750f8aa
https://whowhatwhy.org/deep-state/what-donald-trump-got-right-about-voting-machines/

Civil War
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1588262127105703936
https://resavager.substack.com/p/are-americans-still-a-people
https://unherd.com/2022/10/how-turbo-wokism-broke-america/
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/no-the-usa-is-not-headed-towards
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jordan-klepper-civil-war_n_63574553e4b051268c57fda3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/civil-war-mar-a-lago-violent-extremism/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/civil-wars-are-too-easy-to-start-just-ask-the-spaniards
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/10/14/donie-osullivan-civil-war-threats-extremism-zw-orig-contd.cnn-business
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-paul-pelosi-attack-latest-cold-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/podcasts/civil-war-belle-sebastian-narrated-articles.html
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/is-another-american-civil-war-possible/
https://currentpub.com/2022/10/31/how-to-avert-a-partisan-civil-war/
https://www.niskanencenter.org/americas-unfinished-civil-war-with-jeremi-suri/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1278293.shtml
https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2022/10/23/a-chronic-civil-war-is-raging-on-in-us
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/politics/jan-6-civil-war-violence-what-matters/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/13/no-we-arent-headed-to-civil-war-00061696
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/civil-war-isnt-on-the-horizon-the-original-battle-never-ended/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/dixon-democrats-destroying-america-in-revenge-for-civil-war.html
https://americanmind.org/salvo/become-undraftable/

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me.  That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat.  He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK).  So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced.  Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts.  I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring.  There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature.  That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010.  The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini?  It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day.  I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months.  In 2022, those stories are coming out every week.  Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter?  Check.  Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem?  People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war?  Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way.  The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction.  I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival.  He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant.  On (spins wheel) vodka.  “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess.  Why, people had to have actual gold to back money.  And if a bank got sideways?  It failed.  Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though.  Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin.  If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah.  But that pesky gold remained.  So, FDR confiscated it.  All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control?  His personality.

Why?  So he could immediately make the dollar worth less.  It was a con.  But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea.  Seriously.  Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then.  If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971.  There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm.  Why are we saving the beer?  Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold.  That was because the French had figured out the game:  they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars.  Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this:  France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed.  Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or  . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed.  Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency.  That was built in.  Social Security and Medicare

Hang on.  Need more vodka for this.  Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy.  They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits.  But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto:  No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more.  But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls:  printing money, and interest rates.  Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates.  When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary.  I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out.  So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there.  In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it.  There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet.  I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession.  The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates.  Poof.  Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it.  That’s the Great Recession.  So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked.  Sort of.  When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way.  You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail.  But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked.  Sort of.  The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger.  We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID.  Solution?  Print money.  Now, we’re back to inflation.  The solution is simple:  raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump.  But we can’t!  Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world.  It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide.  Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already.  We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade.  Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point.  But, I still have you, vodka.

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes.  Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself.  So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible.  For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works.  To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing.  But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him.  Every.  Single.  Point.  He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected.  “Show the whole thing,” was his response.  Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others.  His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years.  Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony?  I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems.  I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper.  It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper.  But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too.  One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet.  To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that.  Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it.  This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel.  Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that.  In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t.  The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions.  He thinks this is the same.  The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense.  “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.”  This is true.  One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse.  He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge.  What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults.  When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child.  This is the result of parental dereliction of duty.  Sure, there are some kids that are just bad.  Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him.  But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6th gets a Congressional investigation.  Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village.  It takes parents.  It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools.  Kid failing?  They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry.  The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings.  But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace.  Is this intentional?  The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks?  Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and 17th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.

Civil War Weather Report: The Last Election?

“Messy thing, elections.” – Rome

If Democrats get their way, we’ll never have a long, protracted election count to learn who won again.  We’ll know before the election.  Besides, I’ve been told that if your election lasts more than 24 hours, you should call a physician.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions are certainly increasing.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – How It Starts:  Canada – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 720 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.  Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals.  The crop was really good this month.

Election 2022

Since I’ve been a kid, each election has been framed as, “the most important in American history”.  As of now, the Left is looking to spike the ball and end any challenge to their power now and into the future:  they want to change the rules.

Well, at least we know who Hunter votes for. 

Right now, the Senate is the only roadblock to federalizing all state elections, by putting forward a slate of rules that make election fraud trivial.  Why wouldn’t the people on the Right cheat?  Well, first off, we’re not that organized.  It’s true.  I think it was Charles Péguy who said it:  “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom,” which makes sense.  And don’t think that the Left doesn’t make use of that fact.

WWWT?  (What Would Watterston Think?).

The result of this is that fair elections will cease to exist.  Me?  I want elections to be harder.  I’d love it if people had to graph an equation and name four consecutive presidents from the 1800s to vote.  As such, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require an identification card to vote, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask someone to vote on a specific day and to have registered thirty days before.

Oh, and the legislation?  Apparently, it makes it illegal for states to remove dead people from the voter list automatically.  But what it does give them is control.  And the Senate leadership is willing to go all-out on this one, eliminate the filibuster, and ram this down.

Why not?  It gives the Left control, forever.

Always remember the stakes.

Violence And Censorship Update

Measuring violence in 2020 was pretty easy – a riot here, a murder there, and adding in the numbers was pretty straightforward.  Violence hasn’t dropped, it’s just become, well, boring.  There are thousands more murders, but they just look like normal crimes.  As cops don’t want to risk life in jail for stopping a drugged-out banana-buyer, many district attorneys have been bought and paid for by Soros to enact just the street violence we’re seeing today.  So, measuring direct political violence is hard.  I’m not giving up, just noting that the violence is still there, but just not as easy to track.

Russian Gas

A Russian Twitch® streamer had his account censored.  His transgression?  He had a live stream going from his house showing his gas burners on his stove on, continually.  I guess that made some people pretty hot.

Kiwi Farms

I’m not going into the really weird history of this website.  I’ve been there a couple of times, and it wasn’t for me.  That being said, it has been the subject of a full-court press by trans activists that want to have it shut down, and have been doing a pretty good job of getting it deplatformed again and again.  On balance, it was probably less dangerous than Twitter®, but it didn’t agree with the current norm.

New Zealand

I’d prefer Kiwi Farms to what’s going on with the Kiwis in New Zealand.  New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Ratty McRatface, er, Jacinda Ardern, has come out against freedom and free speech.  Her takeaway quote:  “How do you tackle climate change if people don’t believe it exists?”  Also, I believe that she is now looking for a block of cheese to gnaw on.

Facebook®

I missed this one last month – Facebook© has banned the hashtag #diedsuddenly because, well, it is forbidden to question the safety of a “vaccine” developed in a few hours and delivered in an experimental manner using technology never before implemented on a wide scale.  I mean, what could go wrong?

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again.  And I wonder when Biden will determine that begging isn’t a strategy?

 

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided.   Will October be spicy due to elections?  I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it dropped a bit more – wait until October – it might be big.

Economic:

Economic indicators shot down this month.  Inflation has caught up with the Market.  Not good.

Illegal Aliens:

For the first time in the last year, I can’t say that It set a new record for this time of year.  But it was close.  Must still be hot out.

How It Starts:  Canada

In my opinion, the real reason that we haven’t been in a Civil War yet is we lack a unifying reason.  Canada might just have found one:  guns.  In the United States, I’m not going to say that we’re fond of guns, but it really is built into the national DNA.  From Lexington and Concord to last weekend, Americans love shooting guns.  Why?

Freedom, I guess.  And I’d also toss out that the founding stock that are ancestors of a majority of the people in the country were a bit wild.  This selected for people who sought freedom.  If that was the case, and if attitudes are genetically handed down, people who came here to be free passed that down genetically.

In Canada, however, there is a bill up that would restrict guns immensely – one summary indicated that you could no longer transfer handguns from one owner to anyone else, and that buybacks would “intensify”.

These buybacks are always sold on the basis of “safety” but we all know what the real goal is.

But in Canada, in the Prairie provinces, they’re having Nunavut.  Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are preparing to nullify this gun grab.

There is even talk about them leaving Canada altogether, which would be awesome.  Then you could go from the tip of Alaska down to the toe of Florida and be in a free country the whole way.  I’m pretty sure that we could get along, since they speak the language, like hockey, and make okay beer.  Oh, and combine them with the Red States in America?  We have most of the oil, most of the food, and most of the guns.

Sounds like a winner.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/DionLimTV/status/1574542273773117440

https://youtu.be/ghMb9xHU31s
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1572360002798485504

https://twitter.com/i/status/1566119675758624771

https://twitter.com/i/status/1566815458254376961

https://twitter.com/citizens_sanity/status/1566131407654715394

https://twitter.com/i/status/1569726738355339266

https://twitter.com/eclipsethis2003/status/1568009704877719552

https://twitter.com/ProfanityNewz/status/1567724993412304897
https://youtu.be/YULQKb68FHM

https://youtu.be/VWCTlcczmOo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hET1H6RZVwQ

https://twitter.com/StokingFreedom/status/1570412128200171521

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/09/26/philadelphias-story-worse-than-waah-waah-at-the-wawa-n499096

https://breaking911.com/get-in-the-closet-suspects-in-virginia-home-invasion-caught-on-camera/

https://twitter.com/MemphoNewsLady/status/1567748252992212992

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/memphis-mayor-blasts-facebook-streaming-mass-killers-early-release-4-our-fellow-citizens

https://heavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/305915336_3142177816113006_7925894570550381876_n.mp4?_=1

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1565566842365624320

https://twitter.com/conservmillen/status/1572192397018234888

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1572110371946901506

https://youtu.be/gNARbEgwkkI

 

One Guy

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1566887635217514498

https://www.newsweek.com/texas-teenager-shotgun-takes-down-two-home-invaders-one-escapes-1741782

https://twitter.com/i/status/1567525359352180737

 

Body Count

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

https://gehweb.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/CalVEX-09.06.22.pdf

https://www.unz.com/jtaylor/more-murders/

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2022/09/28/opioids__work_hidden_scourge_sapping_the_economy_855616.html

https://www.sofx.com/these-kids-are-dying-inside-the-overdose-crisis-sweeping-fort-bragg-rolling-stone/

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/09/the-u-s-army-has-a-fentanyl-problem-thanks-to-mexico-and-china/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/09/07/oath-keepers-members-include-hundreds-of-elected-officials-police-and-military-personnel-leaked-list-suggests/?sh=3ee6cb0c5389

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/oath-keepers-data-leak-unmasking-extremism-public-life

https://www.theepochtimes.com/adults-aged-35-44-died-at-twice-the-expected-rate-last-summer-life-insurance-data-suggests_4711510.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

https://www.theepochtimes.com/more-than-half-of-babies-toddlers-surveyed-had-systemic-reaction-after-covid-19-vaccine_4707948.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=cfp

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

https://archive.ph/MoP0V

Vote Count

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoMfIkz7v6s

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1571351490165350402

https://youtu.be/bqBnp2AdH7Y

https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/have-chinese-spies-infiltrated-american

https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/fbi-conceals-chinese-infiltration

 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-demonizes-maga-republicans-dems-spent-million-pro-trump-candidates-win-primaries

https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/05/chris-hedges-lets-stop-pretending-america-is-a-functioning-democracy/

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-class-warfare-eat-the-rich-sentiment-and-what-happens-next/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/delaware-judge-rules-vote-by-mail-law-unconstitutional-cannot-be-used-in-november

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-watchdog-groups-allege-mail-ballot-and-voter-roll-violations-2020-2022

https://www.axios.com/2022/09/08/snap-voter-data-republican-democrats

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-county-sued-over-illegal-ballot-drop-box-usage-captured-camera

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-county-sues-dominion-voting-systems-over-severe-anomalies-2020-election

https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-grassroot-election-integrity-movement-sweeps-battleground-states_4740686.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=CFP

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/09/27/jovan-hutton-pulitzer-election-day-ballots-may-have-been-inserted-in-maricopa-county/

https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/facebook-spied-on-private-messages-of-americans-who-questioned-2020-election/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11213581/Congress-age-senate-house.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2022%2F09%2F12%2Fdoj-refuses-to-release-biden-administration-plan-to-intervene-in-2022-midterm-election%2F

https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-arrests-charges-names-2021-1

https://spaceworms.substack.com/p/bribing-voters-is-getting-out-of

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-speech-had-it-all-backward-fascist-democratic-party-trump-ideology-america-jan-6-democracy-11662161065?mod=djemalertNEWS

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/politics/election-workers-officials-harassment-kentucky-texas/index.html

https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-virginia-election-official-indicted-on-corruption-charges

 

Civil War

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1566522380280889347

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63335
https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/is-trump-pushing-civil-war

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124142684/some-compare-todays-political-divide-to-the-civil-war-but-what-about-the-1960s

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/05/why-ive-stopped-fearing-america-is-headed-civil-war/

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/can-we-drop-the-silly-idea-that-america-is-heading-for-a-civil-war

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/08/30/sarah-vowell-one-civil-war-was/

https://dailymontanan.com/2022/09/09/a-maga-led-civil-war-thats-not-going-to-happen/

https://nypost.com/2022/09/07/kathy-griffin-slammed-for-saying-republicans-will-start-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-civil-war-horizon

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/capehart/steve-phillips-on-how-we-win-the-civil-war/

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/greg-gutfeld-melting-pot-together-civil-war-isnt-possible

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/no-doomsday-bunker-not-a-single-gun-if-the-us-really-is-heading-for-civil-war-im-stuffed

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202209/mistrust-misinformation-and-the-possibility-civil-war-in-america

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/09/05/barbara-walter-civil-war-trump-doj-rehtoric-sot-nr-vpx.cnn

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3647063-can-civil-war-happen-again/

https://www.wired.com/story/the-end-of-roe-will-spark-a-digital-civil-war/

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/politics-and-more/the-risk-of-a-new-american-civil-war

https://www.minotdailynews.com/opinion/editorials/2022/09/toward-a-second-american-civil-war/

https://www.msnbc.com/the-mehdi-hasan-show/watch/just-how-close-is-the-u-s-to-a-civil-war-148895813806

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cbs-star-reporter-major-garrett-fears-were-on-the-brink-of-civil-war

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/another-american-civil-war-take-heed-or-take-cover-204583

https://www.newsweek.com/civil-war-may-have-already-begun-msnbc-host-says-citing-maga-violence-1739679

https://macdailynews.com/2022/09/27/bill-gates-were-going-to-have-a-hung-election-and-a-civil-war/

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/25/remembering-hate-speech/

https://roycewhite.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-joe-biden

https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2022/09/04/conservatives-explain-how-i-am-a-threat-to-the-very-soul-of-this-nation-in-powerful-thread-making-biden-look-even-worsea/

https://summit.news/2022/09/07/poll-majority-believe-bidens-maga-extremists-speech-a-dangerous-escalation-in-rhetoric-designed-to-incite-conflict/

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/09/05/f15-vs-ar15-bet-on-the-guys-with-the-guns-n2612609

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail?  They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
  • Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
  • The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19.  The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough.  The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below.  And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes.  The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion.  It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output.  How bad?  Some have said, “Great Depression bad.”  The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know:  religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash.  I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move?  Was it because he like making Papal airplanes?  Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated?  He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail.  They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail.  Why?  When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken.  We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine.  As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™.  Nope.  Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did.  And now the consequences cannot be avoided.  Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops.  But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are?  Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election. 

Oh, he did?  Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh.  Well, I guess that’s really scary.  Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh.  I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war.  Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free.  Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery.  Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history.  This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head).  In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us.  We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.