Communism – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone? He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series. Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War. The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
Legalized disco, and
Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact: It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.© Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget: in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional. War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty. His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today. As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready. It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer. It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse. It makes me so mad: if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste. He created power structure after power structure in the country. Social Security. Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only. Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency. And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued. What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator. In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs. The easiest way to do that? Dispersed knowledge. Incentives. Voluntary cooperation. In short, capitalism. The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States. It’s ironic: the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here. They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

Colleges and Universities
The K-12 educational system.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The American Medical Association.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho. How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society. It rots society from within. The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough. The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary. Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®. I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States. We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency. This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing. In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture. Now? Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy? That’s a lot of hungry people. A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope. A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions. The Strong Man.

The response? That’s Friday’s post: The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? This why is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, then, do the people want?

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

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

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

And that’s how you get a Dictator

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

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, feed your mind.

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

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

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

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

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

What about economics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

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

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, say it out loud.

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

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

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

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

What kind of Medicare would Moses have? Part C.

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

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

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

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

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

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

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

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

Civil War 2.0 On Hold: Russia, Russia, Russia

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

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

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

The Clock O’Doom has dropped back. For now. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Clock Retreats – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Hungry Days – Links

Front Matter

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

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

The Clock Retreats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence And Censorship Update

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

See for yourself:

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

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

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

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

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

Illegal Aliens:

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

The Hungry Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Guys

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

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

https://youtu.be/Z0qSqtKcUtQ

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

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

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

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

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

One Guy

https://youtu.be/WOZI59tSv_4

Body Counts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote Counts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil War…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Is Not The Worst That Can Happen…

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

Financial Vulnerability – Who Owns Your Money?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they can shut down your life nearly immediately:

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

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

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

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

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

Nah, no danger in with this, right?

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

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

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

War, You’re Soaking In It

“Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war, This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn’t going to be any war.” – Gone With the Wind

For whatever reason, French players are in “spectator only” mode.

War. It’s one way we find out the difference between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

The traditional way that most people think about war involves troops and uniforms and guns and bombs. That’s why people are focused on Ukraine – it seems like a time when the world might once again see something like in the old war movies. Biden is especially wanting this, because it could distract the world from the economic and cultural ruin that’s spreading in the United States. How else do you explain the free crack pipe initiative?

As I’ve noted before, the United States has spent trillions of dollars to try to make the “old” form of war obsolete. As such, don’t expect the next war to look anything like the last wars. Just like civilization, technology, and economy have evolved, so have the methods of war.

The aim of war is still the same, however: to get your enemy to do something they would otherwise be unwilling to do, like watch The View. You don’t have to use tanks or bombs to do it. This was what the old Soviet Union planned to do with the United States – subvert it from within.

The Cold War really was a war. The United States attempted to subvert the Soviet citizens through exposing them to the wonders of capitalism. Plentiful food, for starters. Blue jeans. Rock and roll. The average citizens could see that something was really, really wrong in their society. At the end, people in the Eastern Bloc walked away from their governments. In some cases, they evicted the former leadership 7.62mm at a time.

The Romanians made sure there wasn’t a next season.

The Soviet subversion of the United States was similar. Just as the United States reviewed the cultural faults of the Soviets and exploited them, the Soviets looked at the problems in the United States and tried to undermine it using those problems.

And the undermining never stopped. If you looked at the institutions under control of the Left in the 1970s, there weren’t that many. The Left controlled:

Many Colleges and Universities.
The psychological establishment.
Lots of mainstream entertainment media.
Most mainstream news media.

This was, of course, the plan. Get the Leftist foothold in academia and use it to indoctrinate the next generation. The Left didn’t control the government schools at the time, because teachers work a long time, and most of the teachers in the 1970s graduated before the colleges fell.

Hippies refused Rolaids™, the last thing they wanted was an anti-acid.

That’s why this war was based on a “long march” through the institutions. Sadly, even though the Soviet Union dissolved, their plan was still in motion. Now, the following are mostly under the control of the Left:

The K-12 educational system.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The American Medical Association.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

Very quickly (within a decade, if nothing changes) the last institution will fall:

The junior officers and enlisted men of the armed services.

As I’ve discussed at length, part of the core of Leftism is hating the United States, the other is a pathological need to be a victim. That’s why Leftist entertainment media always portrays the good guys as “the resistance” – what are they resisting? The remnants of the United States. Why do the statues have to come down?

Al has a molar pulled: it was an inconvenient tooth.

The United States (as viewed from a common historical lens) cannot be allowed to have its mythology. That mythology must be replaced by the new narrative – a mythology based on victimhood and oppression. Even as they control the levers on every objective means of institutional power, they complain that the system is rigged against them.

Combined with that is the monetary policy of the United States which has been run with all of the discipline of a toddler in a room filled with chocolate birthday cakes. As the bill for this mismanagement comes due, the tensions in the country will skyrocket.

The only thing the Left doesn’t have, are (at least) 80 million Americans who want nothing to do with the brave globalist/socialist future that’s planned. I actually think the number will be substantially higher, because I think that when the center chooses sides, it will come down with the Right.

This situation is, of course, absolutely thrilling to China. When I think about how China must factor in the United States into their plans in, say, the year 2040? I think they assume that the United States will not be a factor on a global scale.

In the US, dogs are K-9. In China, they are E-10.

In addition to the Soviet plan coming to final fruition, the United States is amazingly vulnerable to other things we don’t traditionally think of as war. As mentioned above, we have an amazing mess in our monetary policy – and we have debt. Think inflation is high now? What happens when China starts dumping currency in the international market, and starts paying for oil with the Yuan?

Warfare in our current time starts to look like what someone did to the Iranians: drop in a virus that makes their centrifuges that they were using to process nuclear material break. Imagine the electrical grid being as reliable as Venezuela’s grid. Sure, it could be enemy action. But with current trends, it could also be our own ineptitude at running things in a world where hiring by merit seems to be a thing of the past.

What happens if every tenth financial transaction in our electronic payment system is “missed”? How many days until the payment infrastructure is shut down and the entire country is in chaos? What happens if Walmart™ experiences failure in the logistics and tracking system for the billions of dollars worth of goods that it handles? How many people does Walmart© feed?

Due to the current emergency, Walmart™ has announced that they’ll open a second register.

These are all warfare, and don’t require a single soldier or a panzer division. Moreover, this is exactly the type of warfare that has already been planned and prepared for in Moscow and Beijing.

I’d love to blame China, but the Chinese are mainly just looking out for the Chinese. If the United States is in the way, the Chinese are going to pick the Chinese every time. It’s self-interest.

And Biden and Putin? One is a church-going Christian who loves his nation, who wants to help his people, and wants to secure his border. The other is Joe Biden.

Human Chow: It’s What’s For Dinner

“Bachelor Chow™ . . . now with flavor.” – Futurama

I heard that it was projected that the next Muslim country to have nukes is going to be France.

It’s no surprise to anyone that the biggest health problem in 2022 isn’t the ‘Rona, it’s people who are overweight. I’d imagine that most of you have seen the .gif that shows state after state with an increasing Body Mass Index (BMI) over time. I just checked my BMI, and according to the chart I have to grow at least five more inches.

Part of my question as I’ve seen this epidemic unfold has been, why? It’s not like the people in the United States suddenly lost willpower started consuming crap for no reason, though that would explain the popularity of Friends. Although I think there are several other significant causes I think one of the biggest has been the rise of ultraprocessed foods.

Most foods (for all of my life) have been processed to some degree. Ma Wilder didn’t feed us raw wheat – nope. She used white flour in cooking and baking bread since mass-produced flour was cheap and lasted in the cabinet forever. Ma Wilder told me that, since I was adopted, I would have to eat bread only from self-raising flour.

What’s the difference between Nic Cage and someone allergic to wheat? Nic would never turn down a roll.

Processing of flour from wheat changes not only the nutrient profile – it pulled out the parts of the wheat kernel that don’t store well as flour – but it also changed how it acts when eaten. An example: wheat flour is made into the familiar powder that we’re used to. This makes it easier to store and ship. It also makes it pretty tasty.

The final thing I want to mention about flour is that mashing wheat up into a powder changes how quickly I’ll get to use the nutrients of the flour when I eat it.

Let me explain:

If I ate just a plain wheat kernel, I’d be able to digest most of it, but it would take hours of time and energy. If I eat a piece of tasty, tasty bread, it’s available for use nearly immediately.

Especially the carbs. I’ll save insulin discussion for a later post, but ultraprocessed foods have an amazing impact on insulin production.

And the physical form of the food can also make people fatter. When rats were given (I assume) Rat Chow®, some bored grad student came up with the idea of feeding some rats plain Rat Chow©. The other rats, however, they smashed up the Rat Chow™ into a powder.

Like I said, bored grad students. Possibly drunk.

What’s the difference between rat poison and Diet Coke®? Diet Coke™ has better advertising.

What happened? The rats with the powdered food got fat and the rats that ate the “plain” food didn’t, even though both groups of rats were eating the same amount of calories. The change in form changed the way the food acted in the rats – it made the nutrients available more quickly, which (again, because of insulin) made the rats fat.

Heck, it’s not even just the flour and powdered rat food.

An even bigger bomb to the body is sugar. Sugar was once very uncommon as human food. Our ancestors got it from berries (not a lot, but some) and, when they could fight the bees back, from honey.

If I get diabetes, will that make me a sugar daddy?

Domestication and widespread production of sugar didn’t occur until the folks in India figured it out in the early Anno Domini centuries (note to Zoomers, this was before the Internet). They figured out how to take the juices from sugar cane (which can’t be stored or shipped well) and turned it into granulated sugar, which could be saved forever, and shipped across continents.

But for most of human history, sugar was wickedly expensive, and only the wealthy could afford to have it regularly. Now? I can buy granulated sugar for $0.50 per pound. Sugar prices are going up, sure, but I can buy a wholesale ton of sugar for less than $500.

The next category of foods that just weren’t available to humans were vegetable oils. I’m not talking about olive oil which is pressed and can be used just as it comes off the press – I’m talking about corn oils, canola oils, soybean oils. As produced in modern times, these are really chemical products that depend on chemical processes to make them usable.

Their history has been slippery. Transfats – or fats that were unsaturated after being subjected to chemical processing, were supposed to be healthier than butter. We were told so. Now it turns out that they increased the risk of heart attacks. Oops. Now, instead of being promoted by the government, they’re illegal to put in food. And butter is now good for you.

The main thing about these processed foods is that they are cheap to make. Some combination of flours oils, sugars, and . . . well, let’s take a look at the Totino’s® Pizza Roll ingredient list:

What’s the difference between a bag of pizza rolls and a musician? A bag of pizza rolls can feed a family.

It’s an amazing list of chemicals. I just really hesitate to call it food, however. It’s what the word ultraprocessed was made to describe. I was watching a video by Dr. Pradip Jamnadas (cardiologist, and I do recommend his YouTube® vidyas) and he had a word that was even more descriptive for foods like this: pre-digested.

A lot of the work that our wonderfully designed digestive system goes through to get energy out of food is simply not necessary with Totino’s© Human Chow Pizza Rolls. In large part the food is designed to hit the digestive system, and flood the body with calories, ringing the dopamine bell in the brain.

I really do think they’re tasty. I don’t plan on eating them except on very rare occasions, because when I look at the label now, I don’t see what looks like . . . food. It looks like Elon Musk’s shopping list for when he’s trying to create artificial life.

But the real purpose of this is to sell as many Totino’s® Pizza Rolls as possible and make the greatest profit. This leads to one question that illustrates an overlap between libertarianism and communism: “How much sawdust can I put in the food?”

On my diet I can have a libertarian salad: lettuce alone.

To a certain extent, these ultraprocessed foods have succeeded admirably. They’ve allowed cheap ingredients (often made from low-value byproducts) to feed millions of people at a reasonable cost. The problem, though, are the consequences that we see now: the calories taken in impact the human system in vastly different ways than the food that we were designed to consume.

So, my plan is to eat as close to real food as possible – meat, fish, eggs, and whole veggies.

And, yes, an occasional pizza roll, too.

Ignoring Reality Catches Up With All Of Us

“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.” – Star Trek (The Cage)

After creating the Nile, God became a podcaster, “Check out my stream!”

Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

It’s a pretty simple definition, and it mostly works unless you have really persistent hallucinations. Persistent hallucinations just like Philip K. Dick probably had. This may explain a lot of his fiction and his fascination with reality. And as for 2021, I’d say reality has great graphics, but horrible gameplay.

In 2022, though, we live in a world where reality seems to be split, and split along ideological lines. One generally reliably Left member of the media (but I repeat myself), Bill Maher, just gave up on the fiction: “It’s just gone on too long, nobody cares anymore. I don’t want to live in your mask paranoid world anymore. You go out, it’s silly now. You have to have a mask, you have a booster, they scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas. I’m not bananas, you are.”

Still not on your side.

With that, the cracks of reality on where we’re at with COVID have swung wide open. There is the fiction that has the single, double, triple, and mega-vaxxed living in constant fear. The Mrs. was reading the comments to me from some Lefties on a website she frequents. One particular set of comments was of Lefties looking for test kits like they were looking for crack. One commenter had consumed at least four instant kits (without a positive result) because they were certain that they had . . . the Rona.

I have no idea what induces that level of fear in a healthy person. When one of them pointed out that they were consuming tests that could have been better used by people in nursing homes, this entirely common-sense idea was shouted down by a sea of Leftist fear.

This is a denial of reality. COVID has killed quite a few people, but it’s no Black Death. Everyone in my family has had it, and for us it ranged from two or three days in bed (The Mrs.) to an afternoon of fever (me). I’d go so far as, having had it, to bet that millions of people have had it and don’t even realize it. For two years, these people have managed to live every moment dripping in abject fear.

How a Leftist imagines a trip to COSTCO®.

Beyond the impact of the fear, there’s the impact of the Vax itself. There is more than sufficient anecdotal evidence that the mRNA shots have significantly more complications than any vaccine ever delivered. No one can say what the long-term implications are. With any luck, the negative health impacts are over more quickly than the protections offered by the shot, but there are no guarantees.

Especially not a guarantee from the manufacturer. Hmmm.

The “adverse health impacts”, of course, are being denied as well. But such an overwhelming amount of data leads to even the monolith of “jab good, deniers bad” being breached at an official level. The current shot does nothing against the current strain of COVID, and it appears the current strain of COVID leaves those that get it immune to certain other forms of COVID.

Huh. It’s almost like the virus is attenuating like, oh, every virus, ever and becoming progressively more infectious and less lethal. Even Bill Gates is ready to call this one over.

We know that Bill Gates didn’t invent COVID – none of his other products come up with new versions this frequently.

This isn’t the only reality the Left is denying. It’s not even the most important reality that is being denied.

What’s falling apart, that Leftists say isn’t?

Well, the economy, but I’ve been on and on about that, so I’ll give you a rest. Besides, Wednesday is a better day for bikini economics. For whatever reason, Biden owns the economy now. In this, I’ll give him a pass. He’s like the last player in a game of Jenga® where you know the tower is going to go, but he’s gotta try to make it one peg higher. More on that later.

Our border. The character of a country is in its people, and so is the success. I do believe that the traditions of our great nation led to the great prosperity that we had. That, and having thousands of nuclear warheads. Yeah, having great traditions is nice, but having the ability to obliterate anyone who disagrees with you never hurts.

Regardless, there’s a group that actively says that the United States, “has no culture” which is like a fish wondering what water is. The fact is that the culture of the United States was so successful and pervasive that people didn’t recognize its influence because it is literally everywhere. Is American culture perfect? No. But it certainly has remade the world, in some ways for the good, in others for the not so good.

I killed an Australian spider with my shoe. I’m glad he wasn’t big enough to carry both of them.

But if you replace the people, you’ve replaced the culture, and the Magic Dirt won’t make them prosperous. Just like if you replaced the Japanese with (spins wheel) Argentinians, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore, you can’t replace Americans with (spins wheel) Japanese and expect anything but another Japan.

The Left somehow thinks the thousands of people in the medical professions (doctors, nurses, administrators, etc.) are magically going to be replaced when they refuse the Clotshot®. No. These are skilled positions requiring education and practical training. Replace these professionals with idiots like me, and you’d end up with every solution being amputation. They don’t call me “John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon” for nothing. It did cut down on the owies my kids brought me, though.

Our relationship with each other. At every level this is breaking down. That’s not fair. At every level, people are being pushed apart. On a racial level, everyone is being taught that, even when there’s no intent, one group of people is awful and the other is blameless.

One of the most pernicious things that can be done is to create a victim class. No matter what happens, they are told, they have no responsibility. If they behave badly, well, it couldn’t be helped. Why not? Well, something happened three hundred years ago, you see.

It’s nonsense. I know Scott Adams has been taking a few lumps recently, but a while back he had a thought experiment I felt was interesting: what would happen if you asked an alien about the situation of blacks in the United States and if reparations were owed. If the alien looked over the situation, Scott seemed to think that it might say, “Well, comparing your life span, material goods, and general standard of living compared to if you had stayed in Africa, you probably owe the white people.”

Women drinking coffee. My three favorite things.

Probably not a popular idea to float in 2022, but the constant stream of victimhood replacing any sort of rational assessment will end up doing only one thing: tearing us further apart. Which is just what Leftists want.

We are on the road to many reckonings. From the looks of them, they won’t be delivered sequentially. I tend to think the big trigger will be the economy, but regardless of the trigger, there comes a point where, regardless of what we believe, reality will set in.

I hope it doesn’t have too much Kardashian.

Predictions On The Supreme Court COVID Decision

“Did having a girl on the team ruin the Supreme Court?” – King of the Hill

Ginsburg used to steal food at diners. They called her Booth Raider Ginsburg.

Normally, Wednesday is for topics related to the economy or money. Given that tomorrow is a big day for the Supreme Court which will announce at least one mandate decision, I thought I’d break from the usual.

Several of the Supreme Court Justices showed that they have all of the cultural awareness of a Hollywood gerbil. They utterly flunked Current Events. Justice Grimace Elena Kagan seemed to think that “jabbed” people couldn’t give the ‘Rona to other people, even though the vax doesn’t stop people from getting COVID, and doesn’t stop people from spreading it. Oops.

But Justice Kagan looked like a genius compared to blithering idiot, Elmer’s Glue® eating Sotomayor. The “Wise Latina” has zero understanding of the difference the powers of a State and the powers of the Federal government. Sotomayor also seemed to think that 100,000 kids were in the hospital with the ‘Rona, “many on ventilators.”

No. Just over 3,000. And that includes kids in the hospital with COVID, not necessarily because of COVID.

Breyer is fast at math. He’s not right, but he’s fast.

Justice Skeletor Breyer, though, invented people to have cases. He said there were 750,000,000 cases, causing our hospitals to fill up. If correct, everyone in the country has at least two cases right now. Some poor people would have to have three cases. Thankfully, Breyer has a driver, or otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find his way home.

Yes. This is the level of basic life competence that you get when you restrain Clarence Thomas from giving them the occasional sleeper hold and throwing Kagan over the top rope. Let’s face it: life would be better if he smashed a chair over Sotomayor’s head once in a while. It wouldn’t increase her stupidity.

What does Clarence Thomas wear to work? A lawsuit.

I tend to think the Supreme Court, especially Chief Justice Roberts, is compromised. Are they told what to rule on every case? No. But on some? Yeah, I think so. But that might mean something different when it comes to the mandate.

Back in September when Biden first announced his mandate, I posted my take on the situation: Biden’s Big Bluff (LINK). I thought then that this was nothing more than a naked ploy to increase his popularity. As Biden has spent the next five months becoming less popular than back acne, he still needs the mandate.

But now he needs it to lose.

I’m not sure that he ever thought it would have gotten this far. I think he was (internally) jubilant when it was struck down and put on hold by the Circuit Court. This is the politician’s best scenario: “I tried to fix the problem but [INSERT GROUP HERE] won’t let me.” The politician gets to show that he cared, “but, gosh darn it, our enemies just want to use baby rabbit tongues to lick envelopes for fascist junk mail.”

Losing on the mandate gives Biden the ultimate out.

At least if you have dementia, all of my jokes sound new.

What happens if the mandate is upheld?

The economy still is a mess.
A group of millions of people are now being forced to choose between having a vaccine that looks more and more to have the effectiveness against COVID of a voodoo spell (except it’s great, apparently, at causing heart inflammation) or to lose a job.
OSHA has been weaponized for future Republican use. Illegal aliens have higher rates of COVID or measles or mumps or the flu? Verify them to make sure they’re legal, because it’s for health and safety.
If the adverse effects from the various “jabs” keep getting worse at the current rate? Biden owns it.

Lots of times politicians are like dogs chasing cars. They love to make noise and run around, but have no idea what they’d do if they caught the car. ANWAR in Alaska and abortion are two of those issues, and Biden has no idea what he’ll do if he catches this particular car.

Joe was in two states today – confusion and disorientation.

But what happens if the mandate is overturned?

The Supreme Court can be blamed, and then threatened with either packing the Court, or not allowing Clarence Thomas to lift weights and maintain his Thor-like physique.
The economy gets better and the labor shortage doesn’t get worse. COVID fizzles into irrelevance when omicron gives everyone immunity and the ‘Rona is “solved”. Biden then claims it was his leadership that did that.
The Republicans can be blamed for being evil. Pressure to end the “undemocratic” filibuster will increase on the Left, so the Lefties can push through voting rights “reforms” that allow individual bacteria to vote.
Lefties run in the midterm election against the “regressive” Republicans. They still lose horrifically, but not quite as badly as the massacre that’s currently in the making.

As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.” And, I didn’t say this was a great outcome for Biden. In less than a year, Biden and his administration has managed to take a bad situation and make it worse in every single way, and this is just about all Biden has.

Of course, Thursday will tell if I’m right or not. Whatever happens, don’t make Justice Thomas mad. You won’t like him when he’s angry.