Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time.  I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons:  don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday.  It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night.  As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year.  Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject.  Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special:  memes that are on sale.  They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another.  So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale.  Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

 

Elon Musk: “This one weird trick drives Leftists nuts!”

“Can we stop twittering like fishwives?” – The Death of Stalin

Where did Sauron take his driver’s test? The department of Mordor vehicles.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter® finally went through. It’s almost as if he’s bored running a car company, a space exploration company, and managing his hair implants.

His purchase of Twitter©, though, is different. It’s made all of the Leftist intelligentsia as crazy as evening visitors to the Pelosi house.

Of course, Elon Tweeted® about that:

But when he was challenged, clarified:

Hillary Clinton responded that she was outraged:

And members of her party were puzzled:

The reason Leftists are upset is simple: Twitter™, though it’s never been horribly profitable, has an outsized grasp on public attention. We’re no longer in the world where the Lincoln-Douglas debates where each candidate would speak for a total of ninety minutes in a three-hour debate. Nope. Twitter™ is a platform that allows no more than 280 characters in a Tweet©.

It does match the attention span of the audience, and it has a format that’s very simple for amplifying very short ideas. It’s like taking an idea or an emotion and distilling it down to the smallest bite. If the Declaration of Independence would have been a Tweet®, it would have been, “No way, dude. Make me.” It seems to lose a bit of the majesty that way, but Franklin would ReTweet™ it to King George with a woodcut picture of Washington’s wife’s butt.

Twitter™, then, is important to the Left. The primary reason it’s important is that, until Musk bought it, it was entirely owned by the Left. For a while, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter©, maintained it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” and most content that wasn’t illegal was a go.

Gradually, though, the Left began to hate that. No matter what Trump may or may not have done in office, he was the master of the Tweet©. He could, in a few short words, eviscerate an opponent in such a way that they could never recover. And it was an unfettered way to reach millions.

And the Left hated that. Since they had captured the media, both print and broadcast, they hated anyone who could escape their gatekeeping. Someone like Rush Limbaugh or a group like Fox News™ had to be co-opted, tamed, and turned into a loyal opposition. Rush Limbaugh of 2002 was just a shadow of Rush Limbaugh 1992. And Fox News© never veers too far off of the mainstream.

But Twitter©? It could go to any topic, and ideas could spread at the speed of the Internet across the globe. Any idea could spread this fast, and it could be amplified by tens of thousands. It was important enough that bot nets were created to retweet and comment to give oxygen to topics that certain people liked, while attempting to bury content that certain people didn’t like. How bad are the bot nets? Elon now has the receipts:

On one hand, this was a massive amount of intelligence that I’m sure made the CIA and NSA and FBI very, very happy. Not since Facebook™ had such information been available to them: names, places, private conversations, email addresses, locations, and beliefs.

I stopped using Twitter® and just started yelling my views in public. I have three followers now, but I think two are FBI.

Trump, though, showed the danger in this system. The wrong ideas, unapproved ideas, could begin to spread. The result was that banning for ideas started. Alex Jones in 2018 was the first, and his accounts had over six million followers. Why? Because his accounts had over six million followers.

Steve Bannon was banned. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for not liking an actress. British politician Katie Hopkins was banned for badthink. Marjorie Taylor Greene (a sitting member of Congress) was banned for daring to share her belief that the 2020 election was hacked.

Those are obvious – but dozens of people have been banned for opinions about the COVID-19 “vaxx” that have been proven, over time, to be 100% true. But they’re banned.

70,000 accounts were purged in January, 2021, for sharing QAnon stuff.

There have been Leftists banned, sure. But Twitter© had become the official mouthpiece of the Leftist oligarchy. Have an opinion that drifted too far from the accepted window of opinions? Banned. And the Left loves it. Check out a list of their demands:

I demand to be recognized, too. I identify as non-Bidenary.

This illustrates the mode of operation of the Left – free speech is their stated goal, right until the minute when they have power. Then? Speech must be controlled, in ever smaller boxes, until the only opinions one is free to share are the official and accepted opinions of the Left. To be clear, this is nothing new. Freedom of speech was officially part of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, but actually attempting to use it would nearly certainly result in voluntary visits to the GULAG if not just a single accidental 9x18mm Makarov shot to the head.

That is the way the Left likes their free speech. But Elon messed up their plan.

To be clear, I don’t think Elon is a savior. He’s just, like Trump, a wildcard that the Left didn’t anticipate. He’s been willing to play their games. Tesla™ made money early because of tax incentives. SpaceX® makes billions a year from government contracts. And Elon’s hair was developed in a secret government lab, like COVID-19. And like COVID, it’s growing wild.

In the end, I think it’s another iteration of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – if there are two possible outcomes, the most amusing outcome will be the thing that happens. I mean, if Jimmy Kimmel is mad at you, you know you’re doing something right.

How Did We Get Here?

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

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

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

How did we get here?

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

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

So, how did we get here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One Where I Prove Electric Cars Are A Lie

“For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized.” – THX1138

Patton never colored his hair, because my heroes never dye.

Electric cars are a scam.  A really, really big one, and in ways that most people aren’t talking about.  My original sentence that I typed said, “in ways that moist people aren’t talking about” but I feel moist today, so that didn’t fit.  Let me explain.  About the cars.  Not why I’m moist – this is supposed to be a family-friendly blog.

Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™.  Why?  The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson.  It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.

So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years.  It’s still an infant technology.  Oh, wait.

How can you say it’s not an infant technology?  It sucks.

But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035.  Hurray, California!  You’re geniuses beyond imagination!  You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.

Or . . . will that pesky math get in the way?

Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline.  We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline.  I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”

Let’s do the math.

15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight).  California produces in electricity, in total . . . drumroll please, 277 TW-h.  So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.

All I can say is that’s shocking!

To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces.  If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times.  And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.

And if they tried to make those cars run on PEZ® (normal PEZ©, not PEZ™ made of anti-matter) it would require 278 quadrillion PEZ™, if you assumed that you could burn PEZ™ at the same efficiency that you could burn gasoline.  And that would be 278 quadrillion PEZ© a year.  Every year.

Hey, if this PEZ™ idea works out I could mint money.

To quote Monty Python on a related matter, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate?  In a box?”, we’ve reached a point where politics cease in any reasonable fashion to correlate to reality.  As I’ve seen in recent years, California’s electrical grid is in a shambles, so much so that, rather than be blamed for creating the periodic apocalypse-level fires, the various utilities have been hiring homeless people to burn forests so they don’t get blamed for all of the fires.

In reality, it’s not their fault.  Californians keep using electricity, but the process for building reliable infrastructure is so Sovietized that to upgrade their transmission lines requires more paperwork than conductor wire, by weight, and takes longer than Biden does to remember that John McCain died half a decade ago.  And this is a state that’s going to quintuple energy production?

Using what?

Seriously, where do they think energy comes from?  Oh, I forgot.  Outlets.  “Why do we need more power plants?” I can hear President Kamala asking, “There’s always power when I plug something into an outlet.  Besides, if we lost electricity we could watch television by candlelight.”  The answer is that the energy has to come from someplace, like the dams they’ve been destroying, the nuclear power plants they’ve been shutting down, or the coal plants that they won’t allow to be built.

Perhaps they could use the power of the Void?

If it were just that level of stupid, it’s survivable.  But it’s more than stupid, it’s greedy stupid, and here’s the rub:  they’re doing this to soak the folks buying cars.

Let’s take, me.  My newest car is (I think) a 2016.  It was paid for in . . . 2016.  My daily driver is a 2010.  It’s got a 130,000 miles on it, and I replaced the engine in it at 115,000 miles, and it cost $5,400.  At 5,000-10,000 miles a year?  It might last another decade, easily.  It’s not complicated, the air conditioner works, and it’s comfortable.

Try that with an electric car, I dare you.  My 2010 had the engine blow up.  $5,400, plus tax, and I was back to happy motoring.  A Chevy® Volt™ had a bad battery.  $29,842.  Snopes™ even confirmed it was the real deal.  But they tried to put a good spin on it.  “It was an antique car” that was two years younger than mine, “and the battery technology was old.”

I hope the car bought her a drink first.

I have one car that is now 20 years old.  How many batteries would it have had to go through?  And you can be certain that the latest bill to replace it would have made the entire car worthless.  Period.

This is an odd game.  Cars had become very, very reliable, some lasting 300,000 or more miles with only routine maintenance.  There’s a reason that, aside from the AK-47, the Toyota® HiLux© is the brand of choice of insurgent armies everywhere.  They last forever, and you can mount multiple heavy weapons on them.

That just won’t do.  As a consumer, you have to be made to consuuuuume.  Me?  With my old car, I’ve more than offset the “carbon debt” caused by making it, so replacing it will actually be damaging to the climate (if you believe in that sort of thing).  And electricity will have to involve tossing more carbon into the atmosphere and will cost a lot more, so it’s not that, either.

Joe Biden is making helping stop energy usage – every time he’s on TV people turn it off.

No, the root cause is that cars are too reliable and people are using them far too long.  If you have a paid-off car, you’re not paying interest.  You’re not paying for new car plants.  You become an economic black hole and the powers that be will do anything (and I mean anything) to force you to consuuuuume.  Remember digital TV?  I saw several articles where economists were calculating the economic uplift from forcing everyone to junk their old televisions for new ones.

Let’s consuuuuume!  And with electric cars, use ‘em or not, they rot away so you’ll have to pay $29,000 for a new battery or consuuuuume a new car.  Emissions?  Who cares?  We’ve got to keep people slaving away, paying interest, and buying the new thing.  Insane?  Certainly.

What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles?  Electricity.

Thankfully we have television and commercials.  I’m sure that they will be used for good and not to convince everyone that the point of their life is consumption.

Well, I guess now you know why I’m moist.  Too much time consuuuuuming.

Civil War Weather Report: The Last Election?

“Messy thing, elections.” – Rome

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

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

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

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

Front Matter

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

Election 2022

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

Well, at least we know who Hunter votes for. 

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

WWWT?  (What Would Watterston Think?).

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

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

Why not?  It gives the Left control, forever.

Always remember the stakes.

Violence And Censorship Update

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

Russian Gas

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

Kiwi Farms

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

New Zealand

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

Facebook®

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

Biden’s Misery Index

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

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

 

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

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

Illegal Aliens:

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

How It Starts:  Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like a winner.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/VWCTlcczmOo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Guys

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/gNARbEgwkkI

 

One Guy

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

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

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

 

Body Count

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/MoP0V

Vote Count

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

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

https://youtu.be/bqBnp2AdH7Y

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economic End Of Europe

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

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

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

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

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

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

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

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

Where are we now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How high?

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

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

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

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

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

Huh.  I guess my dog just quit.

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

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

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

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

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

Deception: The Media Is Soaking In It

“Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a good start.” – Batman Begins

Thankfully he wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m certain that few had any idea of how the Internet would change the world.  Oh, sure, some did.  In one of the zillion versions of Ender’s Game (or the never ending stream of sequels) Orson Scott Card wrote about the Internet, in the 1980s, I think.  In his version, people could make carefully reasoned arguments and other people would listen to them and be swayed.

Ha!  Instead we have Twitter® with its 280 character limit, and meme warfare.

I actually don’t mind meme warfare being the place where ideas are injected into society, primarily because the Right memes pretty well, and the Left can’t meme at all.

That is, of course, what the Left is worried about.  When the Internet began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s, it was a Wild West.  It was first created, page by page, by people who were passionate about something.  The programming was easy, and the hardest thing was to get noticed, since the search engines and directories were rudimentary.  I used at least three, depending on what I was searching for, because one was good for technical stuff, one was good for “normie” stuff, and the last one, as I recall, wasn’t good for much at all.

On the Internet, you can be whatever you want to be, so why do so many people pick “stupid”?

Then came the Media®.  At first, they didn’t really know how to use it, so they’d just put their written stuff out there, since video would swamp most dial-up connections.  But everyone knew it was going to be big, which is why AOL© merged with Time-Warner™ even though all AOL® presented was just a single way to get to the Internet.

But the problem for the Media™ and .GOV was that the Internet had shattered their ability to carefully script a single narrative.  It had also destroyed their ability to memory hole or gloss over big stories.  Now those passionate people could chronicle entire events that the .GOV would rather you forget, or, better yet, never even know about.  The carefully crafted defamation of everyone who believed in something outside of the Approved Narrative as a Conspiracy Theorist began to crumble.

People say it’s a small world, but I know I certainly wouldn’t want to paint it.  And in that small world where communication had drastically lowered the time for information to come out, and also made it harder for the information to be erased.  The Genie of information, once out of the bottle, couldn’t be put back in.

Does anyone know what an ink blot test is?  I Googled® it, but only found pictures of my parents yelling at me.

The Wild West continued.  Google® had a corporate slogan of Don’t be Evil® and Amazon™ would sell most any book that was it was legal to sell.  And the established Media© and .GOV still had no real understanding of how to control what people see and hear and remember.  The Internet was built to be decentralized, and hard to control.

I think, from what I see so far that the strategy has been to do at least five things:

Throw Lots of Content Out

Oddly, even though the major news sources keep firing journalists, they keep making more stuff.  What kind of stuff?  Clickbait, really.  Stories with little informational content, stories about celebrities, top 10 lists of best/worst/etc. (fill in the blank).  These aren’t news – they’re entertainment.  Heck, one browser I have on my phone has (it looks like) computer-generated compilations of posts from Reddit®.  The idea is to distract.  And if the algorithm is good enough, heck, maybe that person will forget what they were looking for in the first place.

Marginalize and Trivialize

This is one that’s carried on from the past.  If I had written a post about MK-Ultra (where the CIA essentially acted like the worst possible mixture of Jeffrey Dahmer and the DMV) in the 1960s, it would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” at best.  The idea isn’t to contradict, it’s to hit the person making the accusation with personal attacks, and make it sound like they’re a nutcase.  And when the facts come out?  Minimize them – make them sound unimportant, “Oh, that tear gas we used at Waco?  Well it may be flammable, but only in super-high concentrations.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

So, Alex Jones was right again, eh?

Control Discussion

How many people that you interact with are . . . real?

I’ve recently gotten robocalls that are very sophisticated, so much so that they nearly get through the uncanny valley of sounding right.  But what if the sound wasn’t an issue?  In a Twitter® comment it isn’t.  It is known that a significant percentage of Twitter® users are bots – programmed to interact.  Why would anyone go to that level of trouble?  Because they want to sell you something – an ideology, a candidate, or PEZ™.  They’re also useful to make it seem like there’s a consensus.

People are wired as pack animals, and generally want to be a part of the group, to not be left out.  Plus, a group of bots can drown out viewpoints and ideas and bury them in a sea of text.  On a related note, how many conversations are taking place on the Internet that are nothing more than one bot talking to another?

Control Access

Most people come to this website either directly or from other blogs.  The web search traffic I get is amazingly low – most days less than 3% of my traffic.  That’s new.  I used to get more traffic from search engines (20%+) but after July or so of 2020, Google™ shut the valve, and traffic dropped.  Likewise, I know that this site is banned by corporations.  Why?  Maybe my ideas are considered to be . . . dangerous.

A related question is this:  just how many website hits does Google® really have?  I searched for Civil War Weather Report and noted I wasn’t on the first page.  I jumped ahead to page 18.  If you’ll note, on an earlier page, Google© claims that there are 34,800,000 results.  But when you get to page 18, well, there are only 174 results.  I know I’ve written nearly 40 Civil War Weather Reports.  Funny that I didn’t see ‘em all in this list . . .

Note that Amazon®, which for a long time would not ban any legal book, now bans hundreds if not thousands of books merely because Amazon™ disagrees with their ideas.

Just Keep Lying

It seems to work for the FBI, Bill Clinton, and the CIA, so why not expand it to the Media®?  That’s just what they do.  These pictures will help illustrate the problem:

 

So, in the end, it has been established that the Media© wants to control you.  The only remaining question so that we can put the pressure where it needs to be is this:  who controls the Media™?

Unplug Yourself From Things That Drain You. And Kardashians.

Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. – The Matrix

Okay, it’s not great.  The other one was, “What do you get when Keanu Reeves does ‘shrooms?  Neo-sporin.”  See, I saved you from that.

Unplug yourself.

I mean, don’t stop coming here.  That would be silly, because you definitely want to associate yourself with someone who has the amazingly good hygiene and stellar good looks that I do.  I mean, unplug yourself from places that make you mad.

Consciously, most of my posts, while letting you know the unvarnished Truth with a capital T* (*really, as best as I know it), are meant to poke fun at it.  It might make you think about things that you really don’t want to think about.  I understand.  I’m still sorry about that Kardashian meme.

Honestly, dating a Kardashian would be like dating a wookie®.

Well, obviously not that sorry.

Back to the Truth.

Most people that I talk to have an Agent Smith (from The Matrix, not that pesky ATF guy who keeps asking if the stuffed dog I have is filled with Tannerite, because, let’s face it, the only thing that ATF agents love shooting more than kids is dogs) moment.

No, the Agent Smith moment I have with friends goes like this:  I talk about facts.  They nod.  I talk about actual events.  They nod.  Then I bring up a premise that is inescapable:  “So, we agree gravity exists.”  Nod.  “And I’m holding a coffee mug over a 1,000 foot (4.3 Celsius) cliff.”  Nod.  “And if I drop it, it will fall down, and shatter into a million pieces, and it will never be able to be put together again.”

Then Agent Smith takes over the conversation.  “Well, I don’t want to think about that.”  The conversation is over.  There is a step that they cannot take.  It’s like me trying to convince them that a constant diet of candy corn, Twinkies®, fried Snickers® bars, and drinking the fluid from a chocolate fountain that 359 kindergarteners have been putting their booger-soaked fingers into isn’t a good diet.

This is what happens when you follow the USDA food pyramid.

I recall having a conversation several years ago with a guy on the Left.  “Yes, John Wilder, I agree.  Massive immigration is destroying every one of the values in our country.  But strawberries might be more expensive if we didn’t allow them in.”

My response was rather simple, “So, you, a guy on the Left, wants to pay people less so you can have cheaper strawberries?  Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay people more, pay less than 1% of what you make in a month to pay Americans enough to give you strawberries?”

Agent Smith took over his mind.  “Umm, well, I don’t understand those things very well.”

I took him to the ledge, but he refused to look over.

But, hey, he saved $0.35 this week.

That’s the Truth.  And, I assure you, the Truth is your friend.

What is Truth?  Step on a scale.  Look down.  The number is the Truth.  Try to pick up a weight.  If you can, you can.  That is Truth.  The Iron never lies.  The scale never lies.

I was working with a person who noted I had lost some weight.  He asked me, “How can I lose weight?”

My response was simple:  “Weigh yourself.  Every day.  The scale doesn’t lie.”

The look on his face was amazing.  I think he wanted me to tell him, “Believe in aliens, bigfoot (bigfeet?) and the Loch Ness Monster, drink seven shots of Hershey’s® chocolate syrup ever night, and you’ll lose 27 pounds a week.”  When I told him to weigh himself, his face fell.

He didn’t want the Truth.  And I didn’t follow up with, “By the way, I also rarely eat between Saturday night and Friday,” because that would bake the gourd of most people.  They don’t want to know that losing weight sucks, that it requires amazing work and walking into the house at night after work and telling The Mrs., “No dinner for me, I’m fasting.”

I’ve been doing this whole Intermittent Fasting thing.  Bums me out.  I did it at least nine times today.

People want pretty lies.  Yet, the healthiest thing for them is the Truth.  Just before I started writing this, Frequent Commenter Ricky emailed me a story that said that, per FDA guidelines, water could not be labeled as, “healthy”.  So, enjoy all the Gatorade®, Pepsi™, and Coca-Slop© that you want.  It doesn’t have fat in it, so, according to bad science dating back to before I was born, it’s better for you than water.

Nope, the Truth sucks.  People are awful.  Bad guys win – a lot.  People get old.  And then they die.  All of us die.  And, the FDA lies.  But, most of you come here regularly.  Can you handle the Truth?  Yup, you can.  And you seek it.  I think most of you understand that.

But there is a group of people who are trying to demoralize you.  The easiest way to win a battle, per George S. Patton, Jr., is to make the enemy afraid of you.  Yet, they wouldn’t have to do any of this if they had won.

They haven’t won.  They are desperate to win, yet you and I remain, stubborn, like islands in the middle of a hurricane.  We live.  We persist.  And we will win.  That’s what scares them the most.

Why am I so stubborn?  I’m not telling you.

So, when you see something that makes you feel like all is lost, remember, that’s them whispering in your ear.  The want you to think that you can’t win, even though everything that is right, beautiful, and True is on your side.  When you see this sort of demoralization?

Turn it off.

Don’t go back.  Not because you’re afraid of opposing viewpoints, but because you refuse to have your emotions manipulated.  Never, ever, let Agent Smith inside.  Seek the Truth.  It’s there.  Unless it’s a Kardashian that isn’t hairy.

That’s a lie.

Yes, Your Leftist Friends Are Mentally Ill. You’re Not. Share This Post With Them To Trigger Them.

“Snap out of it! You’re Krusty the Clown! One of Look Magazine’s Hundred Most Promising Clowns of 1958!” – The Simpsons

I told Pugsley that Aristotle taught us that, “We are what we repeatedly do.”  So I told him I was his mother.

A Dutch dude named Erasmus of Rotterdam (who died in 1536) made a famous quote that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, namely, “In regione caecorum rex est luscus.”  Presumably, Erasmus said this before he died.  I was going to follow this up with a joke about the Dutch, but then I looked at my site statistics, and found that the Netherlands is number 5 on the countries that come to visit here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise.

So, my conclusion is this:  people of the Netherlands are amazing people who have impeccable taste in fine writing and I’d be glad to give them all a free bikini wax, but I’m pretty sure that they’re so tall, blonde, disciplined and perfectly proportioned that they’ve trained their bodies to not grow hair where they don’t want it.  Go Netherlands!

I’m pretty sure they have flying cars in the Netherlands now.

Anyway, what Erasmus was saying was originally in Latin, but Latin isn’t a dead language – it’s still Roman around.  My initial translation was, “Near the gas station in the skanky part of town, never pick up women after 3am.”  These are wise words, but what Erasmus really meant was, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

That’s one of those phrases that sounds really cool.  In fact, I imagined being able to see in a country full of blind people.  I mean, the only actor that would be able to play Batman would be Christian Braille.  And, using my crazy superpower of sight, I’d be able to break into their houses at night and steal all of their PEZ®.

But that’s not the way it would work.

I would probably try to explain to them that I could see – a sense that they didn’t have at all.  The concept of photons and colors and would sound crazy to them.  In fact, they’d probably think I was crazy and come at night while I was sleeping and give me blanket parties or worse until I shut up or left.

In the modern world, it’s similar, but it’s what’s commonly referred to as “Clown World” where everything is inverted.  Things that are beautiful are corrupted, and people are expected to applaud the bravery inherent in people reveling in the corruption.  I’ll let Stonetoss lead the introduction of the topic at hand.

If you’re not familiar with what Stonetoss is writing about, there is a “teacher” in Canada who decided, apparently, to wear comically large and obscene fake breasts to shop class.  How do we know they’re obscene?  YouTube® banned them.

But, yet, these Z-cups are allowed because a “teacher” showed up to work wearing them, and the school board is apparently afraid to confront the dude.  When a parent tried to bring the subject up, the local school board shut down the meeting rather than confront the amazing amounts of silicone (or foam rubber??) being paraded in their classrooms.  In fact, they say it’s illegal to criticize the “teacher”.

In my assessment of the situation, there are two possibilities.  The first is that the “teacher” is so mentally insane that allowing him to dress like this is similar to allowing him to claim that he’s made of string cheese and now has a mouse phobia.  That’s the first possibility.

The second is that the “teacher” is gaming the system and seeing how far he can push things so he can get mental disability payments and not have to show up to work, or not be graded based on his job performance.  I actually consider this more likely, but, hey, it’s 2022 so he just might be bonkers.

This was actually the plot to a South Park® episode where a teacher became more aggressively, explicitly gay in front of his students in an attempt (I recall) to get fired.  Instead, the people celebrated his inappropriate behavior because of his bravery.  So, yeah.  Blame Canada.  I’m sure that this is what the Canadian troops were thinking about when they hit the beach at D-Day, the freedom for shop teachers to don Z-cup fake breasts.

Women are, oddly, not at all good with this.  Not all women, of course.  I use The Mrs. as a sounding board for this sort of insanity, and she (more or less) notes that it’s offensive for (at least some) actual women to see men parading around pretending to be women.  But Canada says it’s okay.  And companies will ban you for “hate” if you dare to not say that this is completely normal.

In 2022, it’s now accepted that teachers indoctrinated in Leftist institutions should be allowed free access to your children.  And there’s nothing bad that can come of that.  Because teachers have shown themselves to be so stable.

The problem really does start with Leftism.  I know I drone on and on about this, but it’s true.  Leftism is a mental illness rooted in victimhood.  How can I prove this?  THEY TELL US THIS WHENEVER THEY CAN.  It’s worse than being stuck in a room filled with vegans who do Crossfit®.

I sometimes think it’s a competition on how many mental illnesses that they can have, like they all want to be the Georgy Zhukov of mental illness and be the (she/they/them/it) with the most medals.

Part of the idea is that Leftists are incapable of harboring thoughts that are counter to their programming.  Scott Adams found this out and after this cartoon strip, he was canceled from 77 newspapers.

Here are a few examples of why.

 

 

 

 

Yup.  Martha’s Vineyard.  Importing millions of people across the border is amazing, right?  Well, no.  Not when they show up in near the beach bungalows of the rich and famous.  Obama lives on Martha’s Vineyard, and his house alone could have housed every illegal alien that was transported there.  But, no.

They booted all the illegals in 44 hours.  Who needs a wall when you invade the territories of Leftist lawyers?

But the damage of Leftism is real.  It destroys families.  And it stops families from even being made.

But it leaves some really important questions to be asked.

And it makes you wonder what Biden is really after, when it turns out that “Right Wing Extremism” is actually less deadly than riding lawnmowers.  Really.

Seriously, though, this isn’t the battle the Left should push, because when real Right Wing Extremism hits?  Continents burn.

I guess that works for me.  I’ll continue to be a Right Wing Extremist.

And if they want Clown World, that’s fine.  They can soak in it.

Me?  I think this next picture works better than anything they can come up with.

Erasmus would certainly agree with me.  And?  Go Netherlands!  You guys rock!!!!  (Yes, I know Ariel is Danish, but you Danes have got to get your pageviews up.)

What’s The Meaning Of Life? It’s Right Here.

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – The Meaning of Life

The dinosaur with the cleanest teeth is, of course, the flossiraptor.

What are we here for?  It’s a big question, and one we have to ask now.  Sadly, I think the answer for many people would be, “inexpensive Chinese-made throw pillows, new Marvel® movies, and the next iPhone®.”

For most of my life, it was a clear question that didn’t involve any of those things, except maybe affordable throw pillows, because they wear out so very quickly.  At some point though, I figured it out.  What was it?  The meaning of life, or at least the abridged version.  The existence of my generation, of any generation, was for two reasons:

First, to create the next generation.  It’s the toughest and most fun work in the world.  A family, working together, would do the best job possible at creating the best children possible.

Why do we need those children?  Why do they need to be better?

The “why” is the essence of the second reason.  There are more challenges, literally an infinite set of challenges, that are before us.  There are more horizons for us to conquer – we may have been to the Moon, but we don’t live there.  We have sent robots to Mars, but we haven’t visited.  Humanity has a job, and it has always been clear to me that our job was not yet done, at least not until we have developed a reliable way to make the PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ drive (LINK).

I was at a performance of Hamlet when there was an earthquake.  It was a Shakesperience!

Both of those answers rely on optimism.  I think that optimism is justly earned.  Even though humans have created unimaginable horrors, they have created, time and time again, amazing wonders. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet noted:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!  The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!

What I see today, however, isn’t the wonder of man, it’s the crisis we face with apprehension.  It consists of multiple fronts.

Energy:  Even though we are up against physical limits on the energy systems that we use, the idiocy of the Green Energy™ movement feels more like a mutual suicide pact.  The use of energy, primarily since the Industrial Revolution has created the greatest amount of prosperity and well-being the world has ever seen.  It is an absolute certainty that if the Leftists have their way, the amount of misery around the world will make World War II seem like a carnival ride.  I mean, not a good carnival ride, but at least it would have Patton.

How did Patton celebrate November?  He gave tanks.

Family:  One of the primary reasons for civilization in the first place is that it creates the basis for making itself better, and that basis is the family.  Children are not easy to raise.  Any single parent working by themselves would have been my victim.  It took both Pa Wilder and Ma Wilder (along with my brother, John Wilder) to make me a better person than Feral John Wilder would have become.  Family is important, and you can’t make good and strong children without one.

Morality:  Morality is crucial.  We have moved away from the moral basics that have created Western Civilization, and inverted them.  We used to celebrate the beautiful, and now celebrate the ugly.  And Pride Festivals®?  Pride was a sin.  And it still is.  Unless it involves lions.

Who are the enemies?

The Globalist Left:  This is a big bunch, but they come in two flavors.

The Globalist Left – The Antifa Gang:  These are people, who, generally despise themselves.  They revel in ugliness, because they feel that they’re ugly inside.  They look at society and hate it.  They want to watch it all burn.  They hate themselves, and want to make the world outside as horrifying as the world they old inside themselves.  This probably describes everyone that works at CNN®.

I had dinner with a journalist, but he pulled the labels off his ketchup and mustard.  He liked to keep his sauces anonymous.

The Globalist Left – The Elite:  They always seem to exist.  They were there at the fall of Rome, they were there when the Library of Alexandria was sacked, when Russia became a killing ground, and when China killed uncountable millions.  They appear to be the parasites that are jealous of real achievement and seek to game society so that they can come to power.  They also appear to gravitate to power for the sake of power, and delight in the destruction of anything as long as it brings them wealth and comfort, even if it kills the host society.

Technology:  I could go on all day, but there are two that jump out – they are the two most destabilizing technologies that exist today.  Technology is difficult, because now it moves so quickly, but humans don’t adapt to it very quickly at all.  I mean, VCRs existed and no one ever figured out how to stop the blinking 12:00.

Technology Itself – The Pill:  To a certain extent, one of the big foes of humanity right now is our state of technological advancement itself.  Multiple technological advances have created stresses that have never been seen before in human history.  The first of these, The Pill, was a disaster.  Some of the oldest rules to make society stable were about marriage and reproduction.  Why?  The stability of the family structure was ripped apart by The Pill, and the divorces started not long afterward.

The most effective method of birth control I ever used was my personality.

Technology Itself – Social Media:  When the printing press was originally invented, it opened a world where the knowledge of the entire history of mankind could be shared.  When the Internet developed, all of that knowledge could be shared freely.  Instead, the Internet has become a dopamine factory that is one of the most insidious narcissism trap in the history of humanity.  What could have united us has, instead, created zombies of people who sit in restaurants staring at their phones rather than talking to each other and having authentic conversations.  This has created a world with artificial closeness between people who have no connection, and artificial barriers between those who should be close.

Obviously, I could keep going.  The enemies of that which is Right, True, and Good are legion.  The methods they use are diverse.

I bet he gets tired in prison explaining he made more than one bomb.

If I were writing a screenplay, I’d be wondering how I write myself out of this predicament.  Thankfully, the answer is that I don’t have to.  Western Civilization has defeated enemies just like these for thousands of years.  We have been at the breaking point again and again.

It is true, we won’t be the same after this crisis.  There’s no guarantee that the crisis won’t last for decades.  And I promise it really will be the most difficult thing that any of us live through.  I mean, those of us that make it.

So, what are we here for?  We’re here to carry the torch forward.  To have wonderful children that exceed us in our capacity, because there are tough horizons, and more work to be done.  We are building the people that will take us into the future.  They are our children.  We build them for the future, so that they can build the future, despite the obstacles and enemies of humanity.

And we’ll win.

We always have.