Category: Communism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, there is a problem with pure capitalism.

Morality, or more specifically, the lack thereof.

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

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

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

Still better than Goldman Sachs®.

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

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

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

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

Why is it like this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks like Boeing® hired the Wrong Brothers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it will be different this time, right?

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

Who can say?

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

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

Some things never change . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Punishment: It’s The Plan Of The Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But news of the broom really swept the nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics In 2022, A Picture Book

“Stay classy, San Diego!” – Anchorman

I think the Chairman of the Federal Reserve® is required by law to drive a Fiat®.

Recently, part of the revolution has been televised . . . the Dutch government has decided that farming is evil because it keeps people from eating bugs and living in the pods:

Of course, the Dutch have commies there, too:

But who thinks hunger is good, besides the commies at Antifa?  Oh, the United Nations:

Well, we know the UN never comes up with their own ideas, they’re too busy with waste and corruption.  So where did this idea come from?

Oh, yeah, the World Economic Forum.

Thankfully, they’re not at all evil, right?

Karl nods approvingly:

But the World Economic Forum® has plans to help, right?  How it started for Sri Lanka:

How it’s going, I mean they’ve had four years to implement The Plan:

But they’ll help Europe, right?

How it might end:

But the United States is not immune from economic illiteracy:

I’m sure this won’t put 40 million people on edge:

But Joe Biden is coming to the aid of the American people:

And Kamala is planning on how to leave Kabul Washington.

While all of this goes on, there are differing views on the economy:

At least Amazon® will help us:

But in the end, maybe we will come to an ethical conclusion:

Stay classy, America!

Victimhood And Guilt: Tools Of The Left

“Guilt was created for what reason? For man to enslave himself?” – Borgia

You can stop saying Amber Heard wasn’t a victim – her acting school clearly failed her.

What’s the easiest way to defeat a people?

You make them do it themselves.

That’s been the motif for quite a while from the Left.  In reality, this is a playbook that has been used for decades by Leftist groups like the Frankfurt School (I’d look it up for you but I’m lazy), and it’s difficult to explain some of the things that we’re seeing in the world right now without thinking through the tactics that they’ve employed.

The first thing Leftist groups tried was to exploit a class difference in America.  That didn’t work very well, since unlike Europe, we’d rather firmly out the King generations ago without letting it turn into a Leftist bloodbath, like in France (memo to self – the French can win a war, but they have to be fighting other French people).  We were self-governed, and there was sufficient freedom so that (if Homer Q. Citizen worked for someone rather than just doing his own thing) Homer could tell them to take this job and shove it.

I hear in France on Halloween the kids go out Trick or Retreating.

So, class was out.  What was the next lever to pry?

The Leftists thought about it quite a bit, since they were doing nothing but being paid for hating America while working at universities like Columbia® and Harvard™ and attending fancy faculty parties while they plotted to destroy the country.  Their big breakthrough was in understanding the American psyche in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

What was the vulnerability of the nation at that time?

Build a world of Guilt® and Victimhood©.

We’ll take Victimhood© first. The Victimhood© was crucial, because if there isn’t a victim then the scam won’t work.  Don’t have a ready victim?  Manufacture one.  All of the social movements in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were based on attempting to drive a culture into turmoil, and for that, one needed a steady stream of victims.

In the year 2022, what’s more relevant?  Women’s Lib, or Mad Libs®?

I’m not saying that some of the movements didn’t have actual problems and valid concerns at their root.  Regardless of that, there’s no way that I’d ever try to base building the character of one of my kids by telling them, “Oh, Pugsley, you got a bad grade in math (he didn’t) because that teacher had it out for you!”

If I do that, I ruin a kid.  Similarly, when Victimhood™ is assigned to an entire group of people, that group is morally crippled.  Instead of the group taking the issue and working ways to actually solve the issue, those afflicted with Victimhood® simply must perpetuate that Victimhood©.

Microagressions™?  Really?  Cultural Appropriation®?  The length that people have to reach in 2022 to whip up a frenzy is amazing because of the lack of real problems that don’t also involve the behavior of the group.  The war against statues?  Critical Race Theory© is a playbook straight out of the Frankfurt School.

No matter who wins a race in Bangkok, it’s still a Thai.

Similar things happened with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s.  The result of turning a little over 50% of the population in the country into a group of victims was astonishing and horribly negative.  The divorce rate in the United States spiked along with the Women’s Liberation movement, removing social cohesion, and creating yet another victim class, and now it’s waaaay harder for some guys just to get a sandwich.

But creating the victim is only half the equation, and perhaps less powerful than the other weapon:  Guilt®.

Let’s return to the American psyche in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.  The American psyche was long built on openness and fair play.  Why don’t we cut in line?  It’s been shown in study after study that Americans from that time period would go out of their way to not allow free riders – people who don’t contribute to the system.  Line cutters are just one example.

Studies have shown that this level of dislike for free riders and those who treat others unfairly is so ingrained that individual Americans will work to stop that unfairness.  Individuals will work to stop free riders even if it requires them to do something uncomfortable, or if it causes them financial loss.

“What if,” thought the Frankfurt School, “we could convince the American people that they were immoral?  That their system is awful?”

“Well,” I imagine they responded, “now you’ve got something.”

What happened when John Galt took too many sleeping pills?  Atlas Drugged.

The Frankfurt School was collectivist, and believed in collective, not individual punishment.  They hated the individual ideas and nature of Western Civilization, and the United States in particular.  To put this in perspective, it is exactly the burning hatred for these ideas that spurred the Frankfurt School on.  These ideas live on in exactly the hatred that every Leftist (and many “conservatives”) hold for the “flyover” states and the “red states”.

And those Leftists that have bought into the Guilt™ portion of the Victimhood© and Guilt®?

They are the Americans who say things like, “I’ll never have a child,” and “I hate America,” and “I can’t stand the sight of the American flag,” and pick any and every opportunity that they can to tear down the country.  Sadly, people who say that are at the heads of infotainment companies, the executive and legislative portions of government, the military, and are all over in the academic world.

They hate those that they are supposed to lead and govern.

To put it simply, this Guilt® has turned a large portion of the people who are at the levers of power into people that hate America.  And these people suffering from Guilt, are people that also hate you because you are getting in the way of their planned suicide of our country.

So, if one way to defeat a people is to have them defeat themselves, then that must mean that the Left is very, very afraid.  They’re afraid of you and the power that Americans inherently possess.  That’s why they hate you, and that’s why they want to tear down everything that you love and leave a smoking crater.

I feel like we should talk about the aliens.

The great news is that in the midst of the economic and social crisis that has been engineered to create more control, people are waking up.  The Guilt® is lessening as people push back against the vilification of people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington while granting sainthood to the designated felon high on lethal amounts of fentanyl victim of George Floyd.  The Guilt© will, I think, begin to fall apart as the crisis continues.

Will we be the same America as in the past?  No.  But I do believe we will win, because independence and truth usually triumph over Victimhood® and Guilt™.

Plus, you know, it’s not like they’re fighting the French.

Thoughts On Independence Day, 2022

“My friend here is trying to convince me that any independent contractors who were working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when it was destroyed by the Rebels.” – Clerks

Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?  At the bottom, silly.

Independence Day is just around the corner, and I’ve got the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report scheduled for that day, so I thought I’d give a few thoughts about one of the most cherished ideas in our history:  Independence.

Independence was the life blood of our new nation.  I think people were genetically (and sometimes judicially) selected for it.  The people that came here looked around Britain and said, “You know what, I’d much rather be in a wilderness surrounded by hostile natives.  Oh, and I’ll gladly cross an ocean in a dangerous journey that will take forever, and I’ll never see the land of my birth again.”

It’s one thing to do that yourself, but these dudes convinced their wives to come, too.

Leaving everything you know and love is not normal, but Duncan McWilder left Scotland before the Revolutionary War was over to come on over here.  I don’t know his story, but as I trace his children across generations, not a one of them settled in a place where life was easy – in fact every one of them headed for the frontier (as it existed in their time) and pushed outwards.

They raised heaven knows what in Virginia and Alabama.  They tamed Texas.  They built the railroads.  The homesteaded in New Mexico.  Portions of the family were west of the Rockies in 1860.  Not a single day was spent in a life in on easy mode.  They built this country with their sweat, their tears, and over the bones of their wives who died in childbirth and their sons who died of fever and war.

None of it was easy.  The hard choice was something else:

Independence.

But they had one thing in their mind – they bowed to no man.  I feel safe in saying that should my forefathers have met any king or potentate that walked this Earth that not a single one of them would have bowed.  They would have stood straight up, looked him in the eye, and thought to themselves, “You’re nothing but a man like me.  And no Wilder bows to any man.”

When people mention to me that I am the beneficiary of “white privilege” or any other such nonsense, I laugh.  My ancestors fought in Europe, twice, in the last century.  They fought here at places like Shiloh and Manassas Junction.  They fought at places like Valley Forge when the dark winter nearly doomed a nation yet unborn.  I stand at the end of a line of brave men and women who looked on a new and fresh continent, not with fear, but with determination.  They wouldn’t bend their knees even to their countrymen.  Why?

Independence.

Life was never easy.  But I look back onto that line of my ancestors and know – they made the hard choice, the choice to be free.  They gave up comfort and, likely, material success to have control of their own destiny.  Rather than submit, they pushed farther out – into danger.  Wolves aren’t a problem now.  Why not?

My ancestors (along with many others) killed them.  Grizzly bears used to be in nearly every State.  Not now.  Why?  My ancestors (along many others) killed them.  They braved the cold, the heat, the snakes, the (now dead) bears, and the (now dead) wolves.  Why?

Independence.

I’m not alone here, either.  If you’re reading this, there’s a near certainty that you came from a long line of Big Damn Heroes® yourself.  They carved a nation out of their heroism, their success, and, yes, their failure, all chasing the same dream.

Independence.

I’ve met billionaires, movie stars, sports stars, and rock stars.  I hold none of them in contempt.  And I hold none of them as my better.  I had several times that I could have sworn fealty and abandoned my integrity and had greater success.

I never would.  To do so would have been shameful to the memories of those that came before me.  So, I never will.  Why?

Independence.

I am not alone.  The United States was a magnet for hard-headed men of principle that were looking for nothing but that chance to be free, to be independent, to live their own lives.

In 1900, my ancestors would interact with the Federal government whenever they got their mail.  That might have been infrequent, at best, out on the frontier, out in the places where they might be lucky to see mail once in a month.

From once a month, we’ve moved to all the time.  When my alarm goes off in the morning, it’s driven by electricity that comes from power plants regulated by the EPA.  I go to the bathroom where I brush my teeth with toothpaste approved by the FDA, and then into the shower where the valve is regulated by the Consumer Protection Agency and water regulated by several government agencies.  I then get in the car (approved in different aspects by several government agencies) fueled by gasoline . . . and the number of agencies in that chain just to get gasoline is amazing.

The biggest difference between then and now are the massive cities.  Our cities are huge and complex and anonymous.  Here in the country, you can configure your life to deal only with the people you see at work and the people that you see at the store, in the city there are people everywhere.

And the chances you’ll see a random individual again in a context so that you’d recognize them?

Nearly zero.

Thus, cities are an environment where people are anonymous.  Anonymous people aren’t responsible for their actions – they exist outside of the constraint of society.  Be rude to someone because your day isn’t going well?  Whatever.  You’ll never see them again.  They’re not a part of your group, your tribe.

That anonymity might sound like Independence, but it’s not – it actually leads to the worst of tyranny – rule after rule because poor manners in an anonymous setting lead to rules about how tall a lawn can be.  And if you don’t follow that rule, and don’t pay the fines associated with breaking it?

People with guns will take you to a concrete box and keep you there.  So, cities don’t sound very free to someone like me.

On the other side of the equation, small towns provide accountability without resorting to the law.

A city slicker moved to Modern Mayberry and didn’t pay a plumber because of a disagreement.  What are the odds any other plumber will even return his calls when something goes wrong?  Or any contractor?  Heck, even I know the story, so I’m giggling thinking about them making phone calls when they need to get their septic tank pumped.

Without anonymity, there is responsibility.  It will be a tough lesson for the city slicker to learn.  I remember that lesson every time I go to dinner and see the same waitress for the twentieth time.  They are responsible to me as a waitress, and I am responsibility to them as a customer.

In my small town, I have responsibility.  My forefathers had independence, but they also had responsibility.  If they succeeded, they succeeded.  If they failed, they failed.  If they died because of their foolishness?  They died.

The lesson is simple:  independence isn’t freedom from consequences.  Independence is being free to choose.  Living with those consequences is the result.

We sit here at the edge of a new world that is struggling to be born out of the old world that we lived in.  Will we choose independence and responsibility?

I know what my ancestors would choose.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Special Rural Edition

“He’s that distinguished-looking gentleman with the casual wardrobe and darling rural accent.” – The Beverly Hillbillies

Modern Mayberry just got a factory that makes television accessories.  I guess that makes us a remote village.

This isn’t a main Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – that will be next Monday, on schedule.  Consider this one a “special edition” since I’m sure we already have plenty of fodder for the regular weather report.

So, back to the opening snippet that u/humble_na_miner described as “Lol how to get shot, a thread.”

I’ll reproduce u/ripitthrowaway’s amazing strategy that he came up with in case it’s too hard to read in the post above.  I normally try to inject humor, but since his (I’m guessing) words are funny enough, I’ll just quote him verbatim:

The radical Christians are found in the rural areas.  Their towns are defenseless, they have almost no cops and their firemen are volunteers.  They have to borrow cops and firemen from neighboring jurisdictions miles away in order to handle anything big.  And they think they’re safe out there.  Forget burning cities, cities are on our sides.  It’s time for the rural areas to feel the heat.

You show up 100 deep in every rural town in a 50 mile radius intent on revolution, you’ll crash their system and make them pay.

And if you think I’m kidding, I’m dead serious.  This was caused by backward ass rural conservatives operating out of a Christianized worldview (even if they’re not Christian, they’re heavily influenced by it), they were the ones who voted for Trump in ’16; those disillusioned redneck/white trash/blue collar (to quote a country song) types who flipped massively for the GOP.  Punish them.  Punish their towns.  They say “BLM burned the cities to the ground,” I say, “let them see firsthand what I’s like when a community is truly burned to the ground.  They want a civil war?  They should have been careful what they asked and voted for.”

I’m not the organizing type.  But maybe someone who is can organize that.  Start in a certain state in the Midwest often called “the south’s middle finger to America.”  It’s literally what the south would’ve looked like if it wasn’t reconstructed.

First, wow.  I know it’s just one idiot, but I’m sure that there are others who share the sentiment.  What is the message, exactly?  “Let’s form a band of roving marauders to burn down their barns and property and shoot anyone we feel like.  That will show those rural folk what savages they are.”

Not my meme, but, well, accurate.

Second, this is a threat to destroy the lives, property, and community of people whose only crime is not being an idiot Leftist.  To be clear, Modern Mayberry has values that are closer to 1982 than 2022, mostly.  People still go to church.  Kids behave themselves at parks.  We’re not shooting each other because (spins wheel) it’s Saturday.  In fact, people aren’t shooting each other at all except for the once a twenty-year domestic dispute gone really bad.

Why aren’t we shooting each other?  Because thieves know that if they try to do much more than nick a bike or a lawnmower things will go very, very bad.  Why?  That’s the next point.

Third, I’ll let Skeletor® answer:

Not my meme, but, I think they have no idea how rural people would react to being burned and shot at.

  • They have zero idea what rural America is like. Not every house is armed, but I’ll bet that most houses have a lot of guns – I am certain that there are more guns than people, and the cops?  They live here, too.  There’s also a lot of ammo.  And more food than they can imagine, because we grow it here.
  • Grandpa, who you have to help up to the range because he was wounded in ‘Nam? He can shoot a 2-inch group at 400 yards.  When he practices his long-range shooting, he can reliably hit man-size targets at 1000 yards.  Grandma, who makes a great macaroni salad for the church social, would regret doming a pink-haired Leftist with her husband’s wheel gun, but she wouldn’t hesitate.
  • Also, we know and help each other. That’s why we don’t need a lot of cops.  If you’ve only been here a decade, you’re still the new kid in town.  Many families have gone to the same high school for three generations – and that’s because that’s when they built the “new” high school building.
  • There aren’t choke points – I can think of dozens of ways that I could flank, surprise, or otherwise ruin the day of someone who set up a roadblock – because I know all the ways around the roadblocks.
  • It gets very dark here. We know where everything is.  They don’t.

Fourth, these are the people who are planning this:

You may not be able to see it, but his guns have little orange caps on the end – at most they’re airsoft guns.  I don’t even think that rates a “he’ll put an eye out”.

My level of fear at Leftists invading Modern Mayberry:

But what caused this rage?  I call it:

The Tennis Shoe of Sadness was caused by Roe versus Wade being overturned.  We mined a lot of salt out of the gun ruling by SCOTUS, so why not mine some salt out of this, too?

I’ll start with an A.I. generated picture:

If you can’t read it, it was generated based on the prompt:  “Clarence Thomas breaking into an abortion clinic at night to use their toilet and not flush.

So, Count Dankula is a Scottish comedian.  And there are a lot of dumb people on the Internet.  That vote.

Now we know who is responsible for January 6 . . . though it’s odd the same people that are investigating January 6 are also vowing to resist the Supreme Court.

I was certain that they taught math in Europe . . .

People are even thinking of leaving Texas . . .

I’m sure the Texans are very, very upset.

Maybe this is why the Lefty girls like The Handmaid’s Tale so much?

Always remember, the Left eats their own, too.

Remember, never be afraid of Big Brother – that’s where all of their power comes from.

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter.  That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently.  What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do.  The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy.  You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development.  Huh.  Nope, none of that matters.  A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it.  The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car.  It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.  This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth?  It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game?  The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point.  A.I. exists.  A.I. is real.  Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence?  Nope.  And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I.  Why?  I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge.  What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy?  This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine.  It would be worth billions.  And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be.  Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function.  What would A.I. value?

  • Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
  • Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
  • Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter.  Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I.  And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop.  Favorite artist?  M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier.  Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system?  Easy.  Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system?  No problem.  An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water.  It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself.  While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe.  How quick?  500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is.  That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®.  And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan?  Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting.  If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.?  What would I program them to do?

Yup.  You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age.  It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse.  We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history.  Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement.  Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen.  It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good.  It doesn’t mean beneficial.  The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy.  Comedy is when something unexpected happens.  So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen.  And I have evidence.  And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence.  Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue.  I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed?  Amusing as can be.  Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID.  Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China?  Yeah.  People fell for that.  In the end, it became a meme.  Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.”  Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener?  He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing.  Even more amusing?  If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice.  Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing.  What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy.  Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough.  When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term.  And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be.  Mike Pence was boring, mostly.  Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials.  Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so.  To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine.  The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over!  We have World War III!”  The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk.  Pretty much everything he does is amusing.  Twitter® is hilarious.  Beating NASA with 1/1,000th of their budget even more.  And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing!  He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination.  It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See?  Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating.  And that “men” can have abortions.  Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah.  Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History.  He called it the Crazy Years.  The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down.  Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings.  He didn’t.  Why?  After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good.  The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark.  It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years.  We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay.  We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only.  In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral.  Be virtuous.  Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed.  Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why?  It’s right.  And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless:  it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something:  that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate.  Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal.  This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense.  If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer.  To make it clear:  The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource.  Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs:  “Cocaine use?  I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™.  That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line.  As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons.  You might want to soap up when you get out.  Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example:  back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive.  The CPU was the pivot point.  In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast.  Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too.  But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap.  There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up.  I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized.  Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers.  If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month.  Unless you’re in a Boeing®.  Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff.  What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!”  Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup.  And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend.  What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity.  It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies.  It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small.  It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive.  But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances.  I think it was Baltimore.  Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved.  We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup.  Totally solved.  More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©.  Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares.  Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry.  But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes.  Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food.  But that world hunger thing?  Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh?  I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon?  Well, no.  Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008.  The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks.  Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did.  And now interest rates are higher.  But who needs money?  The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy.  The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup.  Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up.  And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance.  Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.