Category: Communism

The Destruction of the American Education Society – On Purpose

“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.” – Horse Feathers

Remember, if you teach homeschool, you can’t get fired for drinking on the job.

Jimmy Carter doesn’t deserve all of the blame he gets. He handled inflation poorly, energy poorly, lost a lot of helicopters in the desert.  Oh, wait, was I talking about Biden?

Nope.  Carter.  One of the biggest things to blame on Carter was the creation of the Department of Education, which he did in an election year to get more votes.  Of course, Carter didn’t start the rot, that really started with Franklin Roosevelt, who attempted to federalize education, because he wanted to further centralize power.  Roosevelt started a quite lot of rot, but it took longer for some of it to surface than the run time of Avatar 2.

What has happened since education has come under the control of the feds?

How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb?  One, unless he needs help.  Then it’s still one.

Previously each state and local area ran its school system.  The schools themselves were, generally, of excellent quality.  But a bigger bureaucracy led to two things.  The first is the activation of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  Dr. Pournelle’s description of it is below:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Sure there are local school boards that are awful.  I’ve heard horrible things about Los Angeles, and other large cities.  Why?  Because the boards are so large that they have to have massive infrastructure – the idea of the neighborhood school disappears, replaced by massive numbers of administrators in a Soviet-style collective.

I couldn’t answer my daughter’s question, “What does a ballerina wear?”  I couldn’t put tu and tu together.

To make this better, we add in the feds???

Yikes.  That’s like solving an ingrown hair with a flamethrower.  It works, but what’s the cost?

Good teachers, for one.  Teaching has always been an important profession, and with local control, the messages that went out to the kids reflected both American values, and local values.  Even if you didn’t agree with the values of Los Angeles, you could move to a place where the school district mirrored your values, like mine, which has classes in PEZ™ dispenser maintenance.

But with federal control, you get federal rules on what can and can’t be done.  The result was the second problem with federal control:

Indoctrination.

I tried to indoctrinate a hairdresser, but I couldn’t condition her.

Schools used to start with teaching basic skills.  If there was a student who wasn’t getting it, they were flunked.  Try to flunk a kid today?  It can’t happen.  The result in (as I recall) the Baltimore school district is that the parents are suing the schools because, after 13 years of education and a diploma, graduates can’t read.  For the sake of the school district, I hope the plaintiff’s lawyer went to school there.

But why can’t the students read?

The idea was that there was a certain minimum competence in reading, writing and math that was required and expected.  The basics of history and geography were also taught, as well as classic literature.

And that was it.  Bring your own lunch.  Need someone to talk to?  Go talk to your friends.

The basic function of the school was education.  Sometime around 2006, though, the competence level was reset to “breathing”.  Now?  Biden’s Department of Education wants “projects” that increase Critical Race Theory usage in schools.  The same initiative is called “Promoting Informational Literacy Skills” which essentially involves coming up with ways to convince kids that The Current Thing is correct, i.e., not to “do your own research” and to only trust .gov sources.

I guess she was just biden her time.

The bureaucracy was bad enough, but the indoctrination is worse.  The difficulty is that most school districts compete for federal money, and when they accept it, every single rule applies.  Remember, the first rule of government club is that you do whatever the government says.

Back during Obama, the Department of Education even put out a “letter” that indicated they would investigate any school who didn’t discipline students the way the Leftists in Washington wanted.  So, suspensions and detentions essentially ended in many school districts.  The result?  Well, I don’t think anyone is complaining the schools have too much discipline nowadays.

Why would they want that?

We can be assured that the Department of Education never educated a single kid, in fact whoever was responsible for my algebra homework was fired.  But they have been responsible for indoctrination with Leftist values.

If you listen to Pink Floyd and eat ice cream, you become comfortably plump.

The solution starts with saying no.  No to federal rules, no to federal money.  And if anyone wanted to actually improve education in the United States, the first thing to do would be to abolish the Department of Education and every single one of its rules.

After that?

Time to think about that pesky Department of Energy . . .

Biden And The Coming Revolution?

“No, I quite approve of terror, arson, murder, any tool that serves the revolution.” –Nicholas and Alexandra

I wonder if this came as a peasant surprise to the nobility?

The worm has turned on Biden.  Pardon me if I say that this is right on schedule.  Trump document frenzy made the Left drool like Amy Schumer when she’s near a cake or AOC when she’s near a new coloring book.  To get Trump, the Left would do anything.  Anything.

In a very real sense, just as the Left views abortion as a sacrament, the destruction of Trump is a religious goal, as he is the manifestation of their supreme Evil being.

This is nothing new.  Remember when George W. Bush was president?  His politics were, essentially, as controversial as lukewarm dishwater.  But the hate flew strong.  Until he started showing up in group hot tub photos with Bill and Hillary and Barack and Mooshell.  Then he was no longer the Prince of Darkness, instead just a fuddy-duddy old man who chose wrong.

I’m really glad I couldn’t find the hot tub photos.

Biden, though, is in as bad a shape politically as he is mentally.  Joe was (s)elected for the job because he has never really stood for anything in particular, so he’ll stand for anything at all.  Even his “memories” are false half the time, talking about things that never happened so that he looks the best to whoever he’s talking to at the moment.

The perfect candidate.

Who is in control then?  One would first point to the Chief of Staff, but that person just quit.  It’s clear that half of his appointees have little to no competence at anything – I’m fairly certain that only one or two of them could pass the probation period making pizzas at Chuck E. Cheese™.

Kamala says her body is a temple.  Everyone is allowed in.

So, I’m not at all sure who is running the show, but we all know it’s not Joe.  And whoever is running the show is done with him.  Will they force him to step down?  Maybe.  It would be chaotic, and risky.  Replacing kneepads as Veep would require a majority vote – of both the House and the Senate.  Since the Republicans hold the House, this would not necessarily be an easy choice.

Even if Joe survives (politically) to 2024, the only reason to have him run again would be for the amusement factor.  It’s also clear that the person who will eventually replace Joe is not Kamala.  Oh, sure, she might do that until the next election if Joe’s forced to resign, but “they” will make sure that she’s not allowed to do anything of particular importance.  Maybe she could do coloring books with AOC.

Someone asked her why the chicken crossed the road.  She said, “It’s because of corporate greed!  Chickens should not be forced to lay eggs – the eggs should lay themselves!”

The danger is the weak leadership combined with the political polarization and the hidden nature of those who are actually running the government.  This seems to me to be very similar to the period before the French Revolution.

  • A weak leader,
  • Massive governmental debt leading to economic crisis,
  • A significant rural/city divide,
  • A significant atheist/religious divide,
  • Political polarization fueled by agitators, and
  • Silly clothing styles.

One of the interesting things to me are those agitators.  They were clearly in place at the time of the French Revolution since the Leftist (the French Revolution is where the name “Leftist” came from) pamphlets that appeared “spontaneously” and the large number of inflammatory newspapers that were designed to fuel the Revolution, primarily in Paris.

I tried to tell a guillotine joke, but I always mess up the execution.

The effort was too large and too well coordinated to be an accident.  Was Marat, the lizard-skinned angry little toad of a man the leader?  Was Robespierre?

In the end, it didn’t matter.

The Revolution gave way to the Terror, where (thankfully) Robespierre and Marat were finally executed.  They had to be executed, since, once any Leftist revolution starts, it keeps moving Left in great gouts of blood until someone has the gumption to kill everyone that’s to the extreme Left.  Stalin learned that lesson, and purged Trotsky along with millions of others.

The end result has almost always been the same as what happened in France.  Tired of the nonsense coming from the anarchy they accepted a new Emperor, this time one named Bonaparte rather than Bourbon.

What position would Quasimoto play at Notre Dame?  Probably halfback.

The playbook is the same, and it seems to follow the same parameters over time.  Understand that as the statues were pulled down from Notre Dame, and as it was transformed from a church into the “Temple of Reason” that we’re seeing the same things today.  The Left removes the past, because nothing can come before – they see this as a cleansing, the ability to return to “Year Zero”.

The future does not repeat, exactly.  The Russian Revolution wasn’t the same as the French, but they certainly rhymed.  As I look to weak leadership, polarization, economic difficulty, and Amy Schumer, I see the same conditions that existed back in 1789.

I’m still interested in who is going to benefit . . . if there’s less Amy Schumer, then everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Just Transition that probably wouldn’t surprise Canada.

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

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

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

Maybe it will work this time?

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

Looks like Justin’s dad had the same idea.

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

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

I’m not making this up:

And this a consistent Leftist theme:

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

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, we will practice food restriction.”

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

What We Can Learn From The French Revolution: The Vendée

“There was nothing spooky about the French Revolution. People lopped off with the heads of thousands of aristocrats and carted them away in straw baskets, then turned the blades on themselves and killed thousands more. Just another segment of Western History.” – Kolchak, The Night Stalker

The French Revolution was a pain in the neck.

The French Revolution was the first major Leftist revolution in the world.  The ideology of the Revolution was stunning in its scope.  Not only was every single structure of the country to be changed, but even its history.  Nothing was sacred – especially the churches and clergy.  Notre Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason, though recently it was a really hot tourist attraction.

Additionally, something as simple as the calendar wasn’t exempt.  1792 was proclaimed as year one.  Each day was 10 hours long.  Each hour was 100 minutes long.  And each minute was 100 seconds long.  Of course, the week wasn’t spared – each month consisted of three 10 day weeks.  Yeah, they renamed the days of the week, too, and managed to eliminate both Friday and Saturday.  Bogus.

The names of the months were changed, too.  There were still 12, since the French could not figure out how to change the amount of time it took for the world to revolve around the Sun.  My favorite French month?  Ventôse, or the “month of wind” which lasted between February 19 to March 20.  The Ventôse Decrees (I assume issued during this “month”) legalized confiscation of everything counterrevolutionaries owned and redistribution to “needy” people.  One would assume that the leadership was just as “needy” as the Biden family.

What’s the best way to kill lots of communists?  Communism.

This was also the time when the Republic decided that the old way of measuring things needed to be chucked, too.  So out went feet and gallons and pounds and in came meters and liters and kilograms.  So, if you ever hear me talk about communist units, well, here’s the reason.  The metric system was just another part of the Leftists attempting to subvert all of history.

Oh, and they pulled down statues, too.

It’s as if there’s something familiar with what I’m seeing with the woke crowd in the United States.  Hmm.  Whatever could it be?

Regardless, there are some other events that happened during the French Revolution that are less known.  The item that’s the subject of today’s post?

The Vendée.

The Vendée is an area of France.  The French have lots of names for these areas, many of which sound like Joe Biden clearing his throat before a speech.  Let’s just stick with area or region, that’s close enough.

Why is the French flag blue, white, and red?  So that they can rip off the sides and surrender.

Not long after the French Revolution, the people running France realized that they were surrounded by hostile countries that were headed by Kings.  When King Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793, the people who ran the French Republic were pretty freaked out and worried that they were going to be invaded by groups of Kings that weren’t fond of the whole, “kill your leader because it’s Tuesday” concept.

That’s when they decided to have a general draft to build a French army with 300,000 new additional recruits. Many areas fought back against this draft, since, outside of Paris, the whole, “kill the King, destroy religion, and start a war” policy of the Commies in charge of Paris wasn’t especially popular.

One area, though, was really good at fighting back.  The Vendée.  It’s on the western shore of France, and is notable for making that invisible rope that French mimes use as the primary regional product.  Like I said, they fought back well – they wanted to be left alone and to reopen their churches.  The army that was formed, the “Catholic and Royal Army” was initially very successful for several months in spring and summer of 1793.

The Popemobile is cool, but let me see you try to fly in a Papal airplane.

From a military viewpoint, they were very successful, at first.  Early in may they captured over 5,000 Republican troops.  They asked them to leave and promise not to fight against them anymore.

And then released the Republican troops.

This may have been a mistake.

Again, through May and June they kept winning, capturing lots of Republican cannons, powder and supplies.  Until they lost.  The Republicans captured quite a few folks from the Vendée Army.  And shot them or put them in boats and drowned them.

By October of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety in Paris decided that the solution to the Vendée was complete physical destruction.  After the defeat of the Vendée army in December, the revenge started.  The Republicans were not shy about what they wanted.

When one commander asked what he should do about women and children, the response was simple, “if it was necessary, to pass them all by the sword”.  The women were of particular interest, since they would be carrying anti-revolutionary babies.

Yeah.  Dark.

The invention of the shovel was groundbreaking, but it was the broom that really swept the nation.

The Vendée folks paroled their prisoners.  The Leftists?  Murdered them.  For the people in the Vendée, it got worse.  Some people from the Vendée got together with the British and the British funded and supplied a really lame invasion of France.  It failed.  Spectacularly.  The French might not like each other, but one thing was for certain – the French, I mean, all the French, hate the British.

This didn’t help the Vendée with the rest of the French.  Public relations level?  Disaster.

The Vendée had about 800,000 folks living in it prior to the French Revolution.  The Leftists killed, for the sake of ideological reasons, between (best sources I can find) 250,000 to 400,000.  This is about 1.5% of the population of France at that time.  That’s proportionately like losing half the population of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, or Virginia.

This proves, once again, that the only people that the French can beat in a war is the French.  It also proves, once again, that when Leftists run a country, the first priority of business is to kill their own people who aren’t on board with the Left.

Regardless, this didn’t stop the people from the Vendée.  They kept fighting, and were even a thorn in the side of Napoleon in 1814.

I asked my friend how things were going in Moscow.  He said, “I can’t complain.”

The Vendée made me think of the United States today.  It is easy to see the parallels – the full attack on every value.  The attempt to destroy everything from the past is in full force now.  The removal of the statues is part of the playbook.  The vilification of the values and heritage people?  Also part of the playbook.

Where is the Vendée in the United States?  Oklahoma?  Ohio?  Missouri?  It is clear that the values of the Left do not match values of many.

What happens when a line is crossed?  When the gun confiscation comes in?  If the Vendée acts alone, it fails.  If it’s not alone?  It wins.

You are not alone.  Nor is Oklahoma, or Missouri, or Ohio, or Texas, or Idaho.

This isn’t 1793, and we don’t cotton to the metric system.  Me?  I’ll never accept the metric system because I don’t want a foreign ruler.

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

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

Some tools are more dangerous than others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And some solutions are more difficult than life, itself.

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

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

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

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

In other cases, the results will be relatively incomprehensible:

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

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

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

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

Exactly Who Is The Enemy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s in it?

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

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

I hear janitors keep their houses at broom temperature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Elections And Narratives

“False Narrative!” – The Death of Stalin

When he was four, Pugsley asked, “Daddy, why do people make up things that their children have said for social media?  Isn’t it just inherently dishonest and indicative of inability to construct a compelling narrative themselves? “

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Election 2022, Part III – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Anything In Defense Of The Narrative – 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 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.  Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals.  The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part III

The entire premise of a society with elections is that the ballots are fairly cast, and fairly counted.  It is not that every vote should count, it is that every valid vote should be counted.

Votes should be rejected.  If the election was on Tuesday and the votes shows up on Wednesday?  Nope.  Dead on election day?  No vote for you.

This is why I’m against early votes.

  • Each vote should be in person.
  • Each vote should be on election day (with provisions for absentee votes for military and those that cannot be in the state with a written excuse).
  • Votes should be on paper.
  • Ballots should be equipped with security so that I can’t take them to the copier and make dozens more.
  • The ballot casting and watching places should be open for anyone to observe.
  • Counting should be done by midnight on election day, at the latest.
  • Any vote not counted before midnight is void.
  • Identification required for a valid vote, along with proper registration.

Sort of simple, and implied.  But for whatever reason, every point above is controversial.  But only by the Left, because, historically, they have cheated.  Sure, the Right has cheated, but the Right typically is less organized and has way better jobs than counting ballots.

The result?

2022 was certainly tampered with.  “Dr. Oz” was a horrible candidate, but didn’t look like a mentally-challenged fictional murderer, Slingblade.  And Dr. Oz could speak in complete sentences.

If this stands, the Left is slowly going to take over all the mechanisms that make a free and fair election possible.

Everyone welcome Senator Fetterblade.

However.

The Supreme Court is potentially taking a case with huge ramifications:  the idea is that the Constitution means what it says, that the responsibility for setting up elections is with the legislatures of the several states.  Not courts.  Not the governor.  The legislatures, and it’s not reviewable.

If so, this is big – it keeps the federal hand out of the cookie jar of state elections and the states just have to deal with bribery, fraud, and corruption.  We’ll see.

Violence And Censorship Update

As usual, censorship has been the biggest front.  In most of Civil War 2.0 Weather Reports, the trend has been that censorship has been on the increase from multiple fronts.  November has seen a small victory as Elon has rustled jimmies all through the Left.

How much?  They want him dead:

And if they don’t want him dead, they want him hauled up before a Senate committee to answer stupid questions from geriatric windbags who had their feelings hurt:

But Elon has made journalists seethe.  How?  He’s taking away their beloved Blue Checkmark© because it turns out, there might have been some shenanigans about how some of them got the Mark©.

I guess they’ll have to check their blue (check) privilege:

In serious news, it appears that several tax preparation software packages sent back email, income, and refund information straight to Facebook®.

Oh, and your phone?  The FBI issued “a general warrant” for data on anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Never happened before.  Justified based on (seriously) COVID.

The Left will stop at nothing to turn data against you.  Remember, your phone is a tracking and listening device, and if it sees something, it says something.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  Thanks, Brandon.  It sucks that there are so many Kamalas.

 

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly upward this month.  Unless there are more blackouts, I’m betting it stays down until March-April at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – November didn’t cause a spike, and I’m not seeing a lot in the next two months to cause increased instability.

Economic:

Amazingly, I think people have become used to the inflation.  Wonder what a rail strike would do?

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.  This is a repeat comment, because the border is wide open.

Anything In The Defense Of The Narrative

I’ve been aware of Graham Hancock for decades.  He’s a journalist/writer who has been focused on history for quite a while.  Initially, his work was pretty normal – writing about hunger and AIDS and poverty.  But then?  After a three-year hiatus, he published Fingerprints of the Gods, about the evidence that supported a civilization that predates all of recorded history.

Oddly, at least at one place, he was correct.  Göbekli Tepe is a site in Turkey that predates the “first civilizations” in Mesopotamia (about 5,000 years ago) and ancient Ur (6,000 years ago) and even your momma (8,000 years old).  Göbekli Tepe is about 11,500 years old.

Hancock was at least partially right.  Here, after his book was published, was the evidence of a civilization older than the oldest one we knew of.  By nearly 6,000 years.  They were moving big stones, and getting together.  There is pretty significant evidence that they were making beer, too, so they can’t be all bad.  Hancock even has a Netflix© special about his work.

Sure, you say, “That’s interesting, John, but this is the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report not a Netflix® special.”

And that’s the point.  The entire reaction from the Left has been silly over this.  Despite being proven correct on some of his conjectures, Hancock has been attacked ferociously in the media.

Why?

I have only one guess:  there is a single narrative on anything.  An attack on any “established fact” can’t be tolerated.  At all.  So, if “science” says something, it simply cannot be disputed.  I think this is, at least partially, a reaction to the COVID nonsense where Leftists pulled in the virtue signaling idea that “This House Believes In Science” when the truth is science isn’t a belief – it’s a system for discovering truth.

Nothing is off limits in real science, but the Left has to censor any idea that challenges the mainstream.  Evidence?  How about Canada?

Well, Justin Trudeau has put himself fully in favor of protests, except when it comes to protests against him.

Strangely, there are rumors that the people who carried a flag very popular in Germany in the 1930s during the recent Trucker’s Protest was a government agent.

Here’s the person in question, carrying the freshly purchased, just unfolded out of the sack flag.  Not at all suspicious.

The idea is to paint absolutely everyone who disagrees with The Narrative as evil.  No matter what part of The Narrative that’s questioned.  And they don’t see the irony.

Thankfully, Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to be the “disinformation Czar” earlier this year has a new job.  Working for foreigners.

Since this doesn’t challenge The Narrative, this is fine.  In fact, noticing things that challenge The Narrative is Badthink.  I’ll just leave this here:

And we wonder why the nation is falling apart . . . .

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/CPD1617Scanner/status/1590858149162274816

https://youtu.be/h_cvFEfpU3g

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1597808974295728128

https://twitter.com/i/status/1591160541829300224

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596490454245089282

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596592437127917568

https://twitter.com/i/status/1591179759228444674

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597196379725914112

https://twitter.com/i/status/1599182109780119554

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596308757151043585

https://twitter.com/TheFilthyTimes/status/1595826090035253248

https://twitter.com/i/status/1590745057224642576

https://twitter.com/i/status/1598109618483625984

https://twitter.com/i/status/1598837217140477955

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1592284803944288256

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597452016305205250

One Guy

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63470

Body Count

https://summit.news/2022/12/02/new-federal-data-shows-73000-illegal-immigrant-gotaways-in-one-month/

https://www.statista.com/chart/28644/rate-of-homicides-that-go-unsolved-in-the-us/

https://www.amren.com/videos/2022/11/latest-interracial-crime-stats/

https://vdare.com/articles/about-28-black-on-white-homicides-including-a-5-man-massacre-suppressed-by-the-new-york-times-october-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america

https://summit.news/2022/11/18/video-thermal-drone-footage-shows-army-of-illegals-entering-u-s/

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/world-premiere-died-suddenly/

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1590083864558727170

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/share-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status-30-jurisdictions-in-the-u.s.-september-2021-to-august-2022-age-18-and-over.png?itok=s40nRW3J

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/covid-deaths-skew-older-reviving-questions-about-e2-80-98acceptable-loss-e2-80-99/ar-AA14DLdb

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

Vote Count

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/SBF%20democrat%20donor_0.jpg?itok=MS58Rkl8

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/120/617/428/playable/9fec9ca3968f76ad.mp4?_=2

https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publications/112322_SocialistWatch2022_3.pdf

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597400282253922305.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/heres_how_they_did_it_realtime_election_fraud.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1590446073213952000.html

https://roloslavskiy.substack.com/p/voting-doesnt-win-you-elections

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fradio%2F2022%2F11%2F14%2Fexclusive-shawn-steel-ballot-harvesting-california-republicans-must-adapt-or-die%2F

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F11%2Fwith_this_obstacle_in_place_republicans_cant_get_the_white_house.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/04/cocktail-parties-that-could-define-democrats-00064560

https://newschannel9.com/news/local/walker-county-man-convicted-of-voter-fraud-sentenced-to-25-years-da-says

Civil War

https://newrepublic.com/article/169141/its-elites-vs-base-coming-republican-civil-war

https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/republican-civil-war-trump-mcconnell-scott

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-civil-war-trump-desantis-midterms-1758558

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-infighting-starts-democrats-also-face-revolt-new-york-midterm-election-1758810

https://hayspost.com/posts/1c6d7c57-df36-4a9a-af45-a4a144702552

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2022%2Fnov%2F06%2Fhow-close-is-the-us-to-civil-war-barbara-f-walter-stephen-march-christopher-parker

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is-a-civil-war-brewing-in-america/ss-AAZBzFn#image=2

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11385903/Ex-CIA-staffer-claims-Christian-white-men-primed-start-civil-war-America.html

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-brink-civil-war-survey-highlights.html

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/has-next-civil-war-already-started-205967

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2022/11/30/how_the_next_civil_war_begins_585926.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/at-protests-across-america-guns-are-doing-the-talking/ar-AA14zpif

Beyond Civil War

https://www.wired.com/story/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-dark-ships/

https://www.newsweek.com/leaked-fsb-letters-russia-putin-nuclear-war-weapons-ukraine-1762695

https://time.com/6228466/nuclear-war-risk-daily-issue-biden/

https://larouchepub.com/other/2022/4947-what_would_happen_if_a_nuclear.html

Reprogramming NPCs For Fun And Profit

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

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

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

Oops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, my sweet summer child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China bad.

Shouldn’t it be called NPCNN®?

The Left is reprogrammed again.

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

When the old talking point is done?

Replace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, why NPC programming so easy?

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

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

We watch what goes into our heads.

 

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

Woke, Broke, Wealth, and Agendas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In space, no one can hear Walt scream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And not only that:

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

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

Stonetoss has a comment on the whole situation:

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

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

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

For now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do they think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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