Category: Communism

Life: We Spend It Every Second

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club

In life, don’t burn your bridges.  They’re all made of steel and concrete now.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day, and asked him what exactly it was that he wanted out of life.  I know that sounds weird.  But I like to understand people, so I ask them weird questions.  The really odd part of that is if you ask someone a question (especially an odd one), most of the time they won’t lie.

I have no idea why.  It’s the same reason that when you ask Joe Biden a question he says, “Umm, er, ahhh, blonde leg hairs, wanna touch ‘em?”  See, not all politicians lie.  Just the ones who don’t have dementia.

Back to my acquaintance.  “What do you want out of life?”  He paused.  It was a longer pause, so I was expecting something profound.

“You know, I think I’m looking forward to being old enough to retire.”

This particular gentleman is in his thirties, and plans to retire at 65.

Rowan Atkinson is now a has-Bean.

First, retirement at 65 might be a dream for most people in their thirties today.  I have no idea what the future economy will look like.  It may involve Bitcoin® and jetpacks, or it might involve cannibalism and burning old VHS tapes of Who’s The Boss? so Tony Danza can keep us all warm with family-friendly humor and the thermal energy from burning plastic.  In 2021 I’m betting on Tony Danza.

Second, I can recall being in my thirties pretty well.  The one thing I certainly wasn’t thinking about was retirement.  I was thinking of ways to have fun, and ways to contribute to humanity.  Heck, back then I thought I might even start writing at some point in my life to both contribute and have fun.

At some point.

Here, among people I know, is an example of a person who is actively sleepwalking his way to being 65.  My acquaintance is wishing his life away.  Now, I have a lot of faults and have done things that would have made the Portrait of Dorian Gray melt like the reactor at Chernobyl, but wishing my life away isn’t one of those sins.  (I do apologize for green chili flavored-PEZ™, which was sort-of my fault.)

Yes, there have been times that I couldn’t wait for something to finish, especially when it was the end of a seemingly endless stream of 84 hour work weeks.  Yeah, I was glad when that was over.  But I’m also glad I did it.  Nothing tells you what you can do until you’ve done more that you thought you ever could.

What’s Joe Biden’s favorite gum flavor?  Retire-mint.

Ben Franklin said it best, in a quote that I’ve used multiple times:  “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”  He was right.  And Franklin was not known for wasting time, especially when it came to the ladies.  The man was a beast on Tinderâ„¢.  Here is his message to Mistress Fancy Pantaloons 1769:

“If thou desire many things, many things will seem but a few.  A few compared to my most magnificent biceps and firmly corrugated abdominal musculature.”

I have become convinced that a significant number of people in society have not only started squandering time, but are intentionally doing so.  They are stuck shuffling their feet, mark time, until some future event when “things will be better.”  What future event?

There are many:

I was ready to go home after a few days on a sleepover, and called my Mom.  “Mom, I’m ready to go home.”  Her response?

Ma Wilder just said, “John, you’re married.”  Yeah, my first marriage was pretty bad.

So, I object to wishing your life away.  I mean, unless I’m at the dentist.  I just want that stuff over with.  But each and every moment of my life has one thing in common – it is a minute of my life that is forever lost.

Died in 1973:  Still releasing books on a more regular pace than George R.R. Martin.

Certainly, there are minutes that I cherish more than others.  But as I get older, I find that I have fewer minutes that I want to spend on bad movies.  If I’m going to spend some time in someone else’s dream, it had better be a damn good dream, and not the ones I have when I’m sleeping about forgetting to wear my pants to the White House and finding that Joe liked that idea.

(shudder)

As I get older, I find that I certainly think differently than I did when I was just a kid.  Fluid intelligence, that innovative creative rush that allows physicists to intuitively feel their way to ever more accurate and complex models of reality at both the subatomic and galactic levels seems to peak at around thirty.  I still wonder why my “the Universe is actually a melty plate of cheesy spaghetti with meat sauce” theory never got the attention it deserved.  I guess that the other physicists thought I was an impasta.

Thankfully, for older folks, there’s more than one dimension of intelligence.  Crystallized intelligence, which consists of the increasing ability to connect ideas and increasing ability to communicate them seems to be dominant later in life.  This may explain while an older professor might not be doing world-shaking innovation, but might still have much to add to science, and would almost always be a better teacher.

Regardless, whatever I end up doing, I know that for me to make the most of life I actually have to live it in the here and now.  Sure, I have to reminisce about the past – that’s how I learn.  And I have to plan for the future – that’s how I avoid criminal charges for tax evasion and fines for my grass being too long.

Communism is like tax fraud.  Both seem great at first, but both end with government agents knocking at your door.

Dwelling in the past is a recipe to live with regret.  Dwelling in the future is a way to live in the false opiate of the dream.  To make the past worth the scars you earned and the future possible, you have to live and take action in the present.

Action.

Action is what men do.

If the action is worth taking?  It requires courage.  Courage, because failure is always a possibility.  Courage, because a future worth taking action for isn’t an easy decision.  And courage is required to stand up to the school bully, even though it’s been quite a few decades since I’ve beaten up a seventh-grader.

I’m not saying it didn’t feel good, but when I had my lawyer sue her?  That was the best.

The good thing about the past is, at least, that it’s over.  The bad thing is that if the scar tissue is too deep, it can cause me to hesitate.  There are tons of different ways that things can go bad, and in my life, I’ve explored more than one of them.  Heck, when I told The Mrs. she should embrace her mistakes, she hugged me.

There is hope, however.  A friend of mine once told me when I was down:  “John, if you had a line of troubles in front of you, half that you’d lived through, and have that you hadn’t you’d always pick the ones that you have already conquered.”

Most problems (not all) that make me the most apprehensive are the problems I haven’t faced.  Is that a lack of faith in me, or a fear of the unknown?

I’m not sure.  And I’m not sure that it matters.

Why did PETA send cats to Mars?  They heard about the Curiosity rover.

But I do know this:  each and every day I have a choice whether to phone it in, or to give it everything I have.  I won’t lie, there are days I phone it in.  And there are days when I get in the car to come home and say, “Yeah, that was utterly worth it.  Nobody could have done that better.”

Those days normally run like a breeze – I walk in the door and can’t believe it’s time to walk out.

Sadly, by doing more and being more, subjectively, I’ll burn through my time much faster than my acquaintance.  That’s okay.  I’m living for something, not just passing the time.

And when I type these words, I’m doing everything.  I’m living in the moment.  I’m using my past.  And I’m doing whatever little bit I can to help the future.

Don’t just exist.  Mean something.  Be significant.

Welcome To The Unravelling

“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread. See what it unravels.” – The X-Files

I imagine the guy who decided to use Velcro™ on shoes said, “Why knot?”

Well, that struck a nerve.

I’m never sure when I hit “post” how what I’ve written will be taken.  Some of the things I’ve written that I’ve felt were really good don’t have much of an impact.  I’m not complaining – when I’ve finished writing a post it feels like my soul is a bit lighter – like I’ve accomplished something more than turn oxygen into carbon dioxide for the day.

One clue that a post will be popular is when the post appears to write itself.  That was the case with my last post.  When I finished, I was in bed two hours earlier than normal.  I normally go to sleep when the cows wander back into the field, because that’s pasture bedtime.

The reason, I think, that post was so popular is because I just had the good fortune to write what many other people were thinking.

This is because we’re unravelling.  We just don’t have words for it.  It’s not just as a nation, it appears to be all of Western Civilization.

What the media would have people believe is that there is a great, monolithic consensus.  Prior to the Internet, that might have been achievable.  There was only One Acceptable Opinion, and it was presented to you live, in living color on three networks.  The local paper (generally) also had some version or other of the One Acceptable Opinion.

Elvis Presley’s last big hit?  The bathroom floor.

That meant that stories could disappear from the public view fairly easily.  Ruby Ridge?  I heard of that story on a local talk radio station.  The person who was telling the story, honestly, sounded crazy.  Here they were talking about this crazy story of a man being framed and then Federal agents killing his family.

The guy really did sound crazy.  Here he was, telling a story that I hadn’t heard of.

Crazy.  It sounded like a conspiracy theory.

The government used to be considered a trustworthy source by, well, everyone.  Looking back, I’m pretty certain the government never did tell us the Truth.  But the important thing was everyone believed the One Acceptable Opinion.

After her boyfriend went missing in the forest, what conspiracy did Barbie® believe in?  Kentrails.

Oh, sure, there were failures now and then.  When Tail Gunner Joe pointed out, rightly, that the State Department and Hollywood® were filled with commies, people were upset.

Leftism was generally viewed as bad.  It was so obvious that Stalin was a bad guy that even the New York Times® couldn’t hide it, as they had swept the human cost of the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver Medals) under the rug two decades earlier.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

The way the Left did that is they went to their normal playbook.  How do you trump logic and facts?  A plain appeal to emotion:

“Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” was how they went after Senator Joe McCarthy.  They tried to make his dogged pursuit of Leftism appear to be an unhinged attack against ghosts.

But McCarthy was . . . right.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was shown that Joe was right about the scope and scale of Soviet infiltration.  Where?  Everywhere Joe had said.  McCarthyism was just what you and I would call, “Telling the truth.”

Again, McCarthy was right.  Leftism had infiltrated the Federal government.  Stalin had better progress reports on the atomic bomb than those that were given to Truman.  There’s a reason we celebrate Juneteenth around my house.

Why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cross the road?  Because they were never on your side.  (meme: not original)

Leftism has burrowed inside of our country.  For decades.  When Reagan was shot we couldn’t watch it on TV.  There were no televisions in our classrooms.  But some teachers had radios and instead of listening to a lecture on social studies, we sat and listened to the news on a tinny AM radio.

Would President Reagan live?  No one knew.  All we knew was that he was in the hospital.

One kid, whose parents were Leftist professors at the local college, said, simply, “I hope he dies.  Maybe then the Senate will choose Ted Kennedy as Vice President.”

The split we see now isn’t new.  It’s been festering in our country for decades.

I could come up with example after example.  But if I were to try to create a scenario where people would be on each other like Karens on a manager, I couldn’t create a better scenario than what I see today:

  • Multiple cultures forced together in small spaces.
  • Actual propaganda presented as nightly news.
  • Dogs and cats, living together.
  • An Internet where people can check facts for themselves.
  • A demonization of the Culture that created the place.

My fat parrot just died after a long illness.  It’s a huge weight off my shoulder.

I actively don’t believe anything I hear anymore.  For months, Google®, Facebook™ and Twitter© would ban anyone who said that the ‘Rona came from a lab in China.

Ban.

Now, that’s the current One Acceptable Opinion.  The previous version has been tossed by a Winston Smith-type person into the memory hole.  But we remember.

And now we know that the entire “conspiracy theory” smear tactic was created, explicitly, so people wouldn’t ask questions.  Wonder what really happened to JFK?  Dunno.  There are still nearly 500,000 pages yet to be released.

Not words.  Pages.

I guess everyone knows how Kennedy died.  That one is a no-brainer. 

But does that really matter?  Kennedy is dead.  What really matters is that the Feds created the entire idea of mocking people who believed in anything other than the One Acceptable Opinion.  Think the COVID-19 mRNA treatment is as sketchy as sharing a needle with Johnny Depp?

You’re a conspiracy theorist.  You must not believe in sCiEncE!  There is One Acceptable Theory.  Anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil.

But now in 2021, we have the Internet.  In 1982, or in 1952 this might have worked.  The sheep would go back to grazing.

Now?

It’s just more energy to help the country unravel as the One Acceptable Theory is just like the famed Emperor Who Had No Clothes.

Is there anything left to unravel?

The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden

“It’s perfect. We traded one nuked civilization for another.” – Battlestar Galactica.

Bill Murray wasn’t cast as Thor by Marvel®.  They figured that no one likes an electricity Bill.

I had an utterly different post planned.  It was so funny that the laughing that it would induce would have caused your ribs to exit your body.  It was a post so funny, it was dangerous.  Comedy, as they say, is not always pretty.  I try to do those posts on Fridays.  Why?

I had a boss that gave sage advice:  never give your boss bad news on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning.  I figure that people need a palate cleanser going into the weekend, and try to provide a bit of fun.  And this post that I had planned?  It would have been banned by the Geneva Convention as a Weapon of Mass Hilarity.

Sadly, that post might now be lost to history, since I have to replace it with this one.  Normally, my posts are created weeks in advance and focus tested against a cross-section of laboratory badgers who have no spleens.  Why no spleens?  They tell me that’s important, something about we don’t need no spleenin’ badgers.

But no, the Occupant-in-Chief decided to make the single most irresponsible statement ever made by someone who was sworn in as President since Richard Nixon said, “What’s the worst that they can do to me?”

I don’t want to be accused of taking Biden out of context (not that there’s much of a chance of that) but here’s his quote, to the most accurate degree I can find:

“Those who say the blood of patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government, if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

First, Biden is as articulate as a fourth-grader with fetal alcohol syndrome who’s just smoked a bowl of Hunter Biden’s crack.  And, yes, his Fraudulency has a son who smokes crack with hookers and takes videos of it.  This is a thing that really happens.  Of course, the response from the Left is to say Putin is corrupt.

Sorry.  I’ll try to stick to the topic.

Second, that’s also the same logic as a fourth-grader with an extra chromosome or three who’s just huffed a can of sparkly gold spray paint.  Abraham Lincoln made the obvious response fairly well:

“All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Lincoln was wrong about a lot of things.  He was right about a lot of things, too.  He is correct about this:

“As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Joe Biden could have the armies of the united States get him a drink by force from any river in this land.  But Joe Biden and all the armies of the united States couldn’t hold the length of the Missouri or the Mississippi for a single day by force.

The armies of the united States number some 1.3 million men oh, wait people oh, wait, xim/xers.  Add in the Reserves?  Let’s round WAY UP and call it three million.  Total.

There are three million males in Missouri.  I pick Missouri only because they recently decided they’re going to tell the Feds to attempt to compact a very large object into a very small space when it comes to firearm laws.

Go, Missouri.

Not all of the three million males in Missouri would be on the side of freedom, since there are always some disgusting gelatinous slugs of humanity that will side with Evil over Truth.  But there are enough.  And don’t tell me that neighboring states wouldn’t flow in.

No, Mr. Biden.  The only one who needs F-15s and nuclear weapons for control is you, you disgusting pile of fake hair, fake teeth, Alzheimer’s degraded brain, who gets his only Father’s Day card encrusted in cocaine dust and whore DNA.

The united States governs only, let me make this clear, only by consent of the governed.  As citizens, we’re generally pretty good.  But we are horrible, horrible at taking instruction from tyrants.  It’s in our DNA.

No, literally.  This is not an exaggeration.  My family line came across an ocean to tame a continent.  That was their resume.  That was their job description as they rocked back and forth on little wooden boats in the midst of Atlantic storms.  We didn’t come here because we were weak.  We came here to fight and die and bleed and make this land our own.

We came here because we were strong.

We came here because we yearned for freedom.

Mr. Biden, your butt-sniffing and shoe-licking parents and your degenerate sons and personal weaknesses are abhorrent to every fiber of my body.  Mr. Biden, you are disgusting.  Mr. Biden, your forefathers were horrible.  Mr. Biden, you and your weaknesses represent everything wrong with this country, and everything that has led to where we are today.

How dare you threaten me?

  • To threaten me is to threaten Duncan MacWilder of the Clan MacWilder, who came here before this was a country.
  • It is to threaten Hans Wilder, who came here to leave tyrants behind in Europe before World War I.
  • It is to threaten my forefathers who died hewing a civilization out of this continent with their blood and sweat and toil and dead babies so lazy writers like me could exist.

The deal we made in 1776 is the same one we have today, Bucko.  We are here because we have certain inalienable rights.

Mr. Biden, you want to threaten me with jet fighters?  Mr. Biden, you want to threaten to use nuclear weapons against your own citizens?

We didn’t come here for that.  We didn’t die here for that.  We didn’t bury our sons and daughters on dusty plains and hills and hallows across this country, building it with our blood for that.

Reparations?  We paid for that in blood in places you have long forgotten, like Manassas Junction.  Everyone I’ve ever been able to research on any part of my family has been someone who made the united States better.

Every.

Single.

One.

We taught Eisenhower (really).  We built farms.  We built bridges 150 years ago that still exist today.  We built infrastructure that serves tens of millions of people – this is not an exaggeration.  We built railroads across mountains that mountain goats couldn’t cross.  We took trains up those mountains when the snow was 20 feet deep.  With our kids.

Just for fun.

We raised and nurtured children and taught them freedom.

Our blood is in this soil.  Our children are buried here as payment from sea to sea.

My blood is in this soil.  My forefathers weren’t evil.  They were Big Damn Heroes.  Odin and Thor and Jesus would be proud of them for their courage.

Did other people build this land as well?  Sure.  But Wilder blood is spread here from the Mayflower to today.

  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Duncan MacWilder would have said:
  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Patrick Henry would have said (distant relative, according to an aunt):
  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Hans Wilder would have said:

No.

And, to mark the first time I have ever used this word on this blog?  Each and every one of them would have added:

Fuck you, Mr. Biden.

Bring your jets.  Bring your nukes.  The only way you have to dislodge us off this continent we conquered with our blood and sweat and buried kin is to kill us all.  We will never give up.  We will never surrender.  This will not die with me.  Or my children.

You will never defeat us.  Never.  Our blood is here.  Here we make our stand.  We can go to no other country for freedom.  We can go no further to a distant frontier.  Despite what you will try to do with us, despite the injustices you will visit on us, we will win.  We will mock you, and your grave will be pulled up and your bones used by our children for their amusement.

We will smile, and nod.

We did not choose this.  We do not want this.

You spiked the ball too soon.  Maybe two generations into the future, they would go gentle onto that goodnight.

Too soon, Bucko.

Fuck you.

The 1819 Project: Restoring America

“Restoration may be possible, in two days. By the book, Admiral.” – Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan

We can finally predict the platform that George Bush’s kids will run on.

The United States is in a bad place.  Monetarily.  Philosophically.  Morally.  It even has bad manners.

Ultimately, the systems that led us to this situation won’t lead us out.   Voting won’t save us.  The Supreme Court won’t save us.  Conservatism?

Conservatism© certainly won’t save us.  It certainly didn’t save itself, and it becomes increasingly quaint as Conservatism 2021® quietly ignores nearly every position of Conservatism 1965™, if not right out taking the exact opposite position from even a decade ago.

Conservatism® has led us to where we are today.  It’s just last year’s Leftist platform, but dressed up in a suit with a useful idiot explaining the Conservative Case for Sex Change Surgery for Toddlers.  Oh, and this should be done even if the parents disagree.  For the good of the child, you know, which they will all nod and agree, is a Conservative™ value.

Imagine if we called the Left intolerant!  That would show them!

The reason for this is the Conservatism™ is inherently a negative philosophy.  It doesn’t stand for anything, merely against (mainly) Leftist ideas.  Once those Leftist ideas gain a mainstream following?  They become a part of Conservatism®, and Conservative™ shills pretend those ideas were always part of their philosophy.

Conservatives® were always in favor of sending troops to Uganda to secure the rights of Ugandans to have gay marriage.

But Conservatism™ in 2021 is now as dead as whatever it is that lives on top of Sean Hannity’s head.  There is zero actual Conservative™ philosophy, merely a money and influence game where politicians sell their influence to the largest corporation for thirty pieces of bacon-wrapped shrimp monthly.

So conservative!

All is not lost.  Look at, for instance, gun rights.  Gun rights were presented not as, “what the Left wants, but more slowly” but instead as, “from our cold, dead hands.”  It was that level of determination that led to the “assault weapon” ban lapsing.  What started with a concealed carry movement has now led to Constitutional carry (i.e., concealed carry without a permit) in state after state.

In the year 2000, one state had Constitutional carry.  In 2021 (by my count) the number is over 21.  And gun rights is where the Right has had a similar victory recently.  In Missouri, the governor signed into law a bill that bars the police from enforcing Federal gun laws.

All of them.

Of course, the Leftist Justice Department was quick to sperg out and say, “Missouri, you can’t do that” but Missouri just kept hitting “ignore” and sending them straight to voicemail when they called again and again.  In truth, the Feds will never be able to enforce Federal law in Missouri unless they unleash the might of the American military against the people of Missouri.

The chances of that happening aren’t particularly high, plus Missouri seems entirely justified.

Amazing what a little light will show you.

Missouri is just following the pattern we’ve been seeing from States for years.  Want to sell marijuana in violation of Federal law at the State level?  Sure.  Multimillion-dollar industries can be set up in a year.  Want to exclude police from helping enforce immigration laws?  Sure.

This is just the next, logical step.

And it gave me a crazy idea.

The 1819 Project.

In 1819, the Federal government didn’t have these regulations and laws.  In 1819, the average citizen’s interaction with the Federal government would have been voting for a Representative and voting for President.  We weren’t THE United States, we were the united States.

Until the Civil War, that was fairly clear – States were sovereign entities – they didn’t gain their existence from the Federal government, the Federal government got its existence from them.

The Federal government didn’t tax individuals.  The Federal government didn’t place arbitrary restrictions on what you could do with your business, your hiring, and your land.  These simply were not Federal issues.

Could the States regulate these things?  Certainly, that’s what the Constitution said.  Did they?  I imagine they did, some of them.  Were the states free to pick and choose who voted and how and why?  Yes., they were, and without resorting to appeal to the nine black-robed justices in Washington, D.C.

It’s funny that I can write the speeches the governor of Oregon will give in the future.

Could Oregon turn itself into a communist paradise?  Sure.  But it couldn’t turn its people into serfs, and it couldn’t put up walls to keep them in.  It might be able to keep people it didn’t want out, as would any State.

Sure.  That’s freedom.  But the Commie Rot would be stuck in Oregon.  And people could leave it.  Senators wouldn’t be elected, but appointed by State legislatures.  This improves the ability of the States to fight against silly things from larger States, and makes the ratification of a treaty a real event, not a popularity contest.

Corporations?  Well, like people, they’d have a finite purpose and a finite lifetime.  If corporations have the same rights as a person, they have to die, too.  70 years might be too long.

How about 40?  Regardless, in 1819, corporations had a charter, and existed for a specific purpose and had a specific lifetime.  That changed with a Supreme Court decision (not looking it up, it’s late) in the 1880s that gave corporations an infinite lifespan.

Sounds good to me.  Every corporation should have an end date.

But the point is that we don’t fight to conserve anything.  The time has now come for a Restoration.  What do we restore?  A culture filled with freedom; a culture where the Federal government was a tiny, distant force that had the responsibility of national defense and regulation of interstate commerce.

No, not the creeping interstate commerce regulations we have today (where having a phone number constitutes evidence of participating in “interstate commerce”) but a very limited scope so Texas can’t put tariffs on goods from Oklahoma.  This leaves room for the FAA, but very little room for the FBI since 99% of Federal crimes disappear overnight because they no longer exist.  And the ATF?  Only to enforce taxes and not kill women and children with fire.

Hey, it’s not easy to brutally enforce arbitrary regulations on law-abiding citizens.

Politics is downstream of Culture.  What’s needed is a Restoration of Culture.

If it sounds like I’m making up a movement, I assure you I’m not.  The 1819 Project is well underway and has been for years.  Parents are, especially in the Leftist parts of the world, pulling their kids from government schools and putting them in religious schools or homeschooling.  Why?

The 1819 Project has already started, at best, I’m giving it a name.  It’s well underway in places like Modern Mayberry, where a kid can grow up (more or less) free.  The Feds seem to have forgotten that rural places exist, and hardcore Leftists don’t seem to want to live here unless they can get ganja and free stuff.

That can be tough to take in.  Next week we’ll start in on how he’s born to treat women badly.

Places like Missouri are going to become the norm.  I anticipate that, with the coming Troubles I see, the Federal government will become weaker and weaker.  The hallmark of a failing government is more tyranny, but the people of the united States have seen their share of what happens when they give up their guns.  Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have provided a clear example that gun confiscation precedes life confiscation.

Will we get back to 1819 in values?  I have no idea.

But I do know we need to be headed towards something, and not just reacting.  1819 is a good start.

The plan.

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic?  Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929.  According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends.  I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose:  it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too.  When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin.  The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well.  Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up:  whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization.  Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife?  Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape.  A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them.  If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke.  If you want to destroy a civilization?  Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said:  “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”  Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011.  That initial post I read back then is here (LINK).  Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement.  Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse.  Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh.  People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change.  During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light.  My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system.  People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have.  This rarely makes things better.  Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

  • They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
  • They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems.  And so on.  It’s a chain reaction.  To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
  • The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock?  Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

  • The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
  • The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
  • The First World War. The Russian Revolution.  The Second World War.
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France. 

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant.  The French Revolution started in 1789.  If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end.  That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then.  She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then.  When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen.  True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry?  Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short.  Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy.  What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.

With The Left, Their First Enemy Is Truth

“I’ve heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.” – The X Files

My favorite conspiracy theory: everything is going to be okay.

One feature of the Soviet Union was the constant propaganda that was used against the Soviet citizens, they called it PTSD – Post-Tsarism Socialism Disorder. Of course, they used propaganda externally, but most of their efforts in controlling reality were focused internally. Everyone was expected to sing the praises of the government when they knew that they were nothing but lies. This wasn’t a bug, but a feature.

Imagine: being required to deny the very truth of a matter, just so one could continue to live in society. Imagine: having to parrot the lines of official government in order to maintain what little income you had to make it from day to day. It’s almost a bad as working at CNN®.

I often blog about Truth. I believe that there isn’t “your truth” and “my truth” but there is an objective, verifiable Truth in almost every case. Physics (except for some weird quantum events) demands it. For instance, if I put my left foot in a sock, no matter where in the universe it exists, the other sock becomes the right sock.

Bears don’t wear socks. They prefer bear foot.

But Leftism demands that you reject Truth. Leftism demands, on the most basic premise, that Truth be the very first thing sacrificed. Compliance with this is required on a daily basis. Otherwise? You weren’t Politically Correct. They even had Politically Correct comedians – no matter if they were funny or not you were supposed to laugh.

That’s the origin of the phrase Politically Correct: the Soviets. They’d use that to remind each other that truth belonged to the state. Truth that didn’t follow the state’s dictates? Politically Incorrect, and those people didn’t last very long.

Why was Political Correctness important?

Every day, citizens had to be reminded that they were controlled. Not only controlled, the citizens had to be humiliated. This is the course of history: conquerors had to remove the will to fight of the vanquished. How better than to break their will than to remind them every day of their humiliation?

Break the primacy of the family. Take children from the family and raise them with the values of the state. Let everyone know that, at any minute, they could be made an enemy of the state. It’s so bad in that the football team in D.C. had to change their name out of shame. Now they just go by “the Redskins” so their name is less offensive.

But Italians don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s not religious. They just don’t like any witnesses.

But when the Soviets took over, that’s what the Soviets did. They lied. They encouraged children to betray their family. They came in the middle of the night with armed secret police to enforce arbitrary laws with (more or less) impunity.

Many Soviet citizens were fine with this. I (personally) can’t imagine why, but I think there’s some fraction of the population who has as their primary operating mode, “go along and get along.” They’d be fine with whoever was in charge, as long as they told them what to do. They’d rather lick a boot than complain about their entire culture being destroyed, value by value.

Guess who isn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas this year? Hunter Biden.

What are we seeing today?

A similar victory lap from the Left in the United States is taking place right now:

  • LGBTQRSTUV positivity. It’s June, which used to be known as, “June.” But now it’s known as Pride Month. Pride used to be a sin. Now? Pride has been used as an excuse to cram children too young to read as “Trans” kids.
  • An “election” that had more anomalies than Joe Biden’s latest Alzheimer’s test is demanded to be taken seriously. Why? That’s why.
  • “Laws” and a “border” that are, at best theoretical constructs. As in Alice in Wonderland, laws are what the rulers say they are. And laws can change from day to day, and person to person. Borders? We don’t need no steenking borders.
  • A definition of being “American” that includes all people living in the world right now, and probably any intergalactic beings as well, as long as they can be counted on to vote for the Leftist candidate. I’m sure the Arcturans need to be treated as refugees, too.
  • The primary prerequisite to being in the military isn’t that you’d have honor, duty, and service to country as goals. Can you put the current policy of the current administration at the top of your agenda?

Every day this is what people see. The news articles are filled with one humiliation after another.

The idea is simple. Values must be turned on their head, especially the most cherished ones. In our society, what has come to be regarded as the highest value is our children. Therefore, the values we had built up the most have to be destroyed.

When the Greeks sacked Troy, the children of the leader, Priam, were all killed. All of them. That’s what conquerors do to the conquered. One thing is certain in this world – not a trace of Priam’s DNA survives. The Greeks made sure of that. The Greeks devastated everything that was Troy, and left it a burning hulk that was lost to history except in the songs of the Greeks for thousands of years until a weird German found them while searching for the Indiana Jones set.

My body is like a temple. One that the Romans destroyed 2,500 years ago.

That’s what the winners do. They pull down the statues of those they beat. They eradicate their history, or make the losers out to be the bad guys. And, finally, they have the children of those they beat forget the faces of their fathers and emulate the values of the winners.

This century has been unusual, in that the Revolution has been (more or less) a bloodless one. The idea of actual warfare has been replace by the subversion of culture and the inversion of values.

I had hoped for a long time that the idea of a cultural swing back to the Right would show up. It has not. Trump was one attempt at such a swing, and the lasting value of his administration approaches, well, zero. “Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims Left.” Almost – not all – but almost all of the changes in values during my lifetime have been a ratchet, and a Leftward ratchet. *Click* – a Leftist point has been won.

No, we can’t turn that clock back, because, (for instance) Rowe Vs. Wade is now settled law. The ratchet has clicked. According to the Left, it simply can’t turn back.

If H.P. Lovecraft got rid of cable, would he sign up for Cthulhu?

But we have examples of societies that have explicitly rejected the Leftist ratchet by pulling so hard that the gears stripped, and have turned back. The best examples are Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If you ever want to find people that hate Leftism, wander off to Poland or Hungary.

The reason that I’m not a pessimist is that we, humanity, have beaten the horrors of Leftism every time it has arisen. The battles haven’t been short, and they have numbered in decades of oppression and hundreds of millions of lives.

The propaganda is strong out there. It’s in television. It’s in the news media. It’s in the schools.

Don’t give up.

Keep the fire of Truth alive.

Blogger Versus Evil

Jack Burton:  “Great.  Walls are probably three feet thick, welded shut from the outside, and covered with brick by now.”

Wang Chi:  “Don’t give up, Jack.”

Jack Burton:  “Okay, I won’t Wang.  Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Never make a deal to buy a guitar from the Devil.  There are always strings attached.

The Exorcist is a feel-good movie.  Well, at least it is for me.

I wanted to watch it when I was an especially wee Wilder, but for whatever reason, Ma and Pa Wilder felt that exposing a first grader to that particular film would be considered a war crime.  I don’t remember how old I was when I finally saw it, but as I recall it was rented on a VHS tape.

By the time I’d seen it, I’d already been exposed to much more brutal horror:  Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Norman Lear sitcoms.  I’ll say this about reading horror – the things I conjured in my mind while tearing through the pages of The Stand were far scarier than anything I’d ever seen in a movie.

But I made a pretty bold statement:  The Exorcist is a feel-good movie, so I guess you’re gonna make me back it up.  Thankfully, I have that not only on my authority, but on the authority of the author of The Exorcist.  William Peter Blatty summed up the reason I like horror films with this very simple quote:

“My logic was simple:  if demons are real, why not angels? If angels are real, why not souls? And if souls are real, what about your own soul?”

Blatty even described The Exorcist as his ministry – it seems he’s religious.  Who would have expected that?

What don’t demons wear hairpieces?  Because there would be Hell toupee. 

Much of what we see in the world we explain through simple materialism.  But when I read novels where the demons are mere humans, well, (with the exception of Hannibal Lechter) I’m generally let down when the Scooby Doo® ending explains away the supernatural mystery at the heart of the story.  Mr. Blatty’s quote describes exactly why.

“If demons are real, why not angels.”

Now I know that several readers are atheists.  As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is sort-of a litmus test.  People that are the kind of atheist that just hates God will generally not opt-in to reading this blog for any length of time.  I have no idea why, but they just don’t.  Actual, rational atheists that don’t turn rabid when the supernatural is discussed don’t seem to mind.

Maybe they look at it like I look at the WWE®:  they can watch it and be amused, even though they’re certain it’s not real.  They especially like it when Hulk Hogan® hits me in the head with a chair.

Where did Randy “Macho Man” Savage™ work out?  The Slim-Jim©.

Regardless, I think most readers here share the same view of Evil (or even evil) in this world.  It’s visible in the raw naked lust for power that we have seen repeated again and again from the Left.  It’s also visible in their unbridled joy at the destruction of Truth, Beauty, and Society.

The Left revels in the Lie, the inversion of Truth, the inversion of Beauty:

  • Billions of dollars in damage in Minneapolis is a “peaceful protest” while a march on the Capitol is, according to President* Biden: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
  • They demand, using free speech, to restrict the free speech of those that offend them.
  • The Left demands you look at what is obviously a man, and claim it to be a woman.

It’s simple, really:  everything that’s Bad is presented as good.  And everything Good?  Well, it’s Bad.  How dare you think self-restraint and hard work is virtuous?

Sniff.  “Smells like fraud.”

Let’s look at how a simple Good thing like a married man and woman having a baby is turned on its head:

  • What about the woman’s career?
  • Why not live the childfree life?
  • Why have the baby at all?
  • There are too many people on the planet already.

The last argument is especially Evil, because when the propaganda works, the headlines then sing out:  “since we’re not having enough babies, we need to import multitudes to grow our economy.”  “Meet the New Americans.”

It’s fun to use this technique on Leftists.  I can recall a Twitter® exchange with a Leftist where I Tweeted™ that I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.

Brain lock ensued when they couldn’t deal with the conflict between their two opposing beliefs.  It’s fun to come up with these couplets to invert the Evil right back at them, though, in the end, there is no conversion for a True Believer outside of a gentle helicopter ride.  They have given in to the Evil.  They’ll avoid the conversation.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:  three ways to dispose of a dead Leftist.

It is especially difficult for parents of children:  what is innocent is sexualized.  A first-grade boy isn’t old enough to decide what he should eat on a regular basis – why would the world think that he should be turned into a she?

It’s all around us, every day.  It’s sold to us in media, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.

And it’s attacking the Values of what we all know, deep inside ourselves, to be True and Good.  That which is Good, True and Beautiful hasn’t changed within the lifetime of mankind on this planet, but when you’re confronted with people trying to sell that which is a Lie as the Truth?

You can be sure those people are Evil.

Not to say that people on the Right are immune to that – far from it.  Eaton Rapids Joe has a great little story to that effect here (LINK).

To be clear, the ultimate aim of the propaganda of Evil is simple:  to make Good people feel despair.

Why despair?  Despair is the opposite of hope.  It is the opposite of Truth.  It is the opposite of Beauty.  Despair is Evil.

And when propaganda wins?  Evil wins.

H.P. Lovecraft was tormented by doubt all of his life.  Imagine if he hadn’t slept in despair bedroom.

But that’s not what happened in The Exorcist.  Father Karras, who had lingering doubts and was on the verge of Despair, conquered it.

Because he conquered Despair, Father Karras conquered Evil.

When you feel Despair, know that’s nothing more than Evil.  And you can conquer it, too.

Yeah, I told you that The Exorcist was a feel-good story.  And I was right.

———————————————

Extra Meme and Tagline, because I made one too many:

In other news, the 2024 election will be postponed until they find the results in Biden’s desk.

Woke Military Kicking Out (More) Officers

“When I use the Constitution a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” – Alice in Wonderland

That’s a (then) Captain Lohmeier teaching a recruit to use solitaire.  Note the clever use of camouflage.

A Lieutenant Colonel, Matthew Lohmeier, in the United States Space Force (“Starfleet”) has recently been relieved of command.  As far as I could tell, his job was being in charge of the people who look at screens all day seeing if there are incoming missiles.

I supposed it is an important job because if there were incoming missiles, well, we would have to shoot missiles back or something.  And, so they don’t mistake a snot fleck on their screen for an incoming Soviet-era RT-2PM Topol strategic missile inbound with up to four MIRV warheads, well, I bet they go through an awful lot of screen cleaner.

What did this particular Lieutenant Colonel do to be relieved of command?

Well, first, he wrote a book:  Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.  It’s doing very well – the print version is sold out on Amazon®.  For the record, I bought it on Kindle® just to put some money into Lohmeier’s pocket.  If I have time to read it between now and then, I’ll do a review next Monday.

To the litterbox, and beyond!

If you buy his book, it won’t do anything but make people crazy who disagree with statements like this, which was from a quote from Lohmeier in a recent podcast:

“Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is and should be. That wasn’t just prolific in social media, or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature.”

Members of the military don’t lose their free speech, but they are prohibited from taking part in “partisan” political activities.  Lohmeier was removed for taking part in partisan political activities, even though he noted in a statement to Military.com:

“My intent never has been to engage in partisan politics. I have written a book about a particular political ideology (Marxism) in the hope that our Defense Department might return to being politically non-partisan in the future as it has honorably done throughout history.”

We’ve all seen this taking place.  All branches of the military have been ideologically swapped out during the last 12 or so years.  The fact that Lt. Colonel Lohmeier was willing to (very likely) give up a job that pays somewhere between $95,000 to $140,000 a year with a guaranteed retirement and medical for life says that he is likely committed to what he says.

There’s probably a kernel of truth to that.

And it’s not like he came from nowhere:  Lohmeier is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and was an F-15C driver.  He calls out “diversity and inclusion training” and “critical race theory” and the New York Times® 1619™ Project©, rightly, as Marxist in nature.  The podcast is where he does that here (LINK), so you can listen to it and decide yourself.

There is no way that I could interpret anything that Lohmeier said as politically partisan, unless critical race theory is partisan.  It clearly is not.  It is ideological, not partisan.  I mean, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an ideology, right?

Lt. Col. Lohmeier took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.  Clearly, Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution as it is currently written.  I would argue that any officer would have the duty to call it out, but some of them must have taken the hypocritical oath.

And to The Mrs.:  I promise I’ll fix the problems around the house.  You don’t have to keep reminding me every other year.  That gets old.

But not many would turn down a career that pays pretty well, and also has a pretty good retirement.  The goal is to not rock the boat until it’s time to become hired to a lucrative job by a defense industrial giant like Boeing or Lockheed and make money based on their connections.

Lohmeier won’t do that, since those doors will close pretty quickly.  If his goal is to be a grafter on the system, he’s not doing a great job of it.  Sure, he’ll make money from this book, but I bet it won’t be a lot of money.  Also, Lohmeier might get hired on by Fox® to be a commentator, but that seems unlikely unless he sells out his convictions.

Time will tell.  Oh, and if you buy this, I’m still not gonna make a dime.

But the scarcity of officers resisting the ideological destruction of the United States military tells us volumes already.  When officers are punished with career-ending sanctions, well, the word will get around.  The next officer will be less likely to speak up.

There weren’t any subtitles for the last 15 minutes of Titanic – that makes sense.  I guess a good caption goes down with the ship.

Lohmeier got sacked from command for the biggest sin of all in a Marxist world:  telling the truth.  Of course the new goal of the military is diversity rather than their old goal of killing people and breaking things.  Recently, a recruiting commercial for the Army had as a focus a young woman whose “parents” were two gay women.

Huh?  Just watching this cartoon commercial, you’d get the idea that the mission of the United States military was to be a hiring program for children of gay people.  As I recall, that’s exactly what the guys who hit Omaha Beach were fighting for, right?

Meanwhile, if you look at militaries around the world that actually have a mission that includes killing people and breaking things, well, they have commercials of muscled men doing hard, difficult training to do nearly impossible missions.  Or of jet fighters and artillery pieces creating massive explosions.

Flannel footed pajamas and warm (not too hot!) cocoa – it’s the new Biden military!

Everyone in the United States can sleep more easily now.  The mean guy who cared about the Constitution and rule of law is gone.  We can have people who were hired for “diversity and inclusion” purposes scanning the heavens for incoming missiles.  I mean, only troops that have been through diversity and inclusion training could do that well, right?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Preparing For The Commissar

“Ottoman, there’ll be no Justice of the Peace for you, just a big piece of justice.” – The Tick

6:30 is the best time.  Hands down.

  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.

April had increased violence.    None that I could see was from the Right, which appears to still be stunned that the Leftists are actually doing all of the things that they promised that they would do.

I’m holding April at 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.  If I were betting?  July or August will take us to a 10.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) only creeping up at around 700 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Chauvin And Justice – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index –  Leftists Destroy GATE – 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 get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

Chauvin And Justice

Derek Chauvin, a former officer with the Minneapolis Somalia by St. Paul Police Department, was convicted on three counts (at least two of them mutually exclusive) after minimal jury deliberation.  There are many articles that talk about the injustice of the decision.  I wasn’t in the jury room so I can’t say too much about the decision.  I guess my only question is how much fentanyl does one have to consume before it becomes listed as a suicide if three times a fatal dose isn’t enough?

The fate of those two men, Floyd and Chauvin, tells us a tremendous amount about the justice system in the country.  But the Derek Chauvin trial showcases a much bigger agenda involving the justice system.

What is the message that was issued to every police officer in Minnesota and in almost every Leftist-controlled state?

Don’t do your job.  If you do, and you take down the wrong junkie, you’ll be fired.  If you’re lucky.  Instead, just show up.  If you want to arrest someone, just make sure that they’re not people you can get in trouble for policing.

Well, it’s not like the Unitarians believe anything.

The goal is:  cops cease to police.  If cops cease to police, the justice system will simply break down.  I’ve covered multiple times why the justice system is the cornerstone of Western Civilization.  The justice system is a stroke of genius that takes vengeance from the hands of individuals, and puts it into the hands of a “just and impartial” system.

Is the “just and impartial” system flawed?  Certainly.  But the thing that’s required is the faith in the system, even though it has flaws.  If we believe that justice is real, it keeps the scourge of vengeance at bay, even when there are occasional lapses.

Perhaps that’s what the jury was thinking.

Perhaps.

But the message to them was clear.  The demonstrations.  The dead pig’s head on the defense expert witness’s (former) front yard.  Maxine Waters agitating the local community to “keep the pressure on.”

Thus, the verdict.  This is a single case, about two men whose lives intersected.

Long term though, the goal isn’t about this case, the goal to remove the cops.  This will destroy the “just and impartial” system.  That’s clearly the plan now.  Look at recent “protests” in Portland and Plano.  The police are there to protect the protesters and put in jail any who resist the protest.  And if a mob shows up at a house and damages it?  If the mob points weapons at those who protest?

The only crime will be self-defense.

But this removal of police is in the script.  This is act one.  This will:

  • Increase crime, because the police are being pressured to not do their one job: arrest criminals.
  • Increase actions of vengeance, because the criminals aren’t being punished.
  • Vigilantes, of course, will be punished far more harshly than the criminals.

What happens when crime increases and vigilantes increase?

A solution from the Left will arise.  They won’t call them Political Commissars, but they will be.  Social Justice Police?  Equity Enforcement?

I hear that mummys like wrap music.

The “just and impartial” system, then envy of the non-Western world, will soon be gone.

All by plan.

And who will be left to look to?  The Left.

Violence And Censorship Update – Turbo Magnum Edition

Item 1:  Rudy Giuliani is a high-profile political figure in the Untied (yes, that’s intentional) States.  He also looks like he smells like a combination of gin, Vicks-Vap-O-Rub®, hair cream, and mothballs.  But Rudy is also a lawyer, specifically the lawyer for President Trump, representing him in several different matters.  This is important since an attorney’s work is uniquely privileged – an attorney provides guidance through the legal system for people who aren’t familiar with it.  It’s like when The Mrs. explains to me that other people are human beings that have things called “feelings” that I should pay attention to.  Pfft.

The attorney-client privilege isn’t absolute, the privilege doesn’t cover ongoing fraud, attempts to intimidate witnesses, destruction of evidence, et cetera.  But it’s a really big deal.  It’s one of those protections that was put in place so everyone can trust the system, even those the system is attempting to punish.

Recently Rudy’s office was raided, and not by the St. Pauli Girl t-shirt squad to give him an atomic wedgie followed by tequila shooters.  Rudy’s a political figure, but he’s also a lawyer.  That should be an amazingly high hurdle to stop a raid, but in 2021 America, it isn’t.  Just like Chauvin’s conviction – Rudy’s raid was meant to suppress speech and protection that the Left doesn’t agree with.

A truck of Vicks Vap-O-Rub® wrecked during rush hour last month. There was no congestion for a week.

Imagine if it had been Podesta or Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton or even Satan getting raided during the Trump administration?

The howl from the Left would have been deafening.  And, yes, the Church of Satan members voted 99%+ for Biden.

Item 2:  Nick Fuentes is a twentysomething (22) kid that runs something called America First™ which is a political movement focused around views of the Right – he even makes fun of the pure economic conservatism of Turning Point, USA®.  Nick used to be on YouTube®, but they banned him.  And so did most private apps where he could make money or get publicized on.

Libertarians and Leftists will agree:  it’s a private company and the terms of service matter, not the Constitution.  I’ve made my arguments about that, and had some good ones with friends who are as impartial as I can find.

But.

Nick Fuentes was put on the No-Fly list recently by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.  The Federal Government’s No-Fly list.  The worst that I could say about Nick (from what I’ve seen) is that he’s annoyingly smug.

Smug is not a crime.  The sole reason that Nick could be on the No-Fly list?  He says things people in government don’t like.

This is not a “bake my gay cake bigot” moment.  This is the unfettered use of government power to destroy ideas.  Sure, the FBI spied on Martin Luther King.

Think they’re not looking at you and me?  Laugh at the wrong meme?  Hope you can drive.

Item 3:  I track the website traffic and where it comes from to Wilder, Wealthy and Wise©.  Okay, I don’t do it personally.  Some nameless small gnomes that live inside of computer chips count the visitors to this place.  Whatever.  They don’t ask for vacation.

A small (but significant) number of visitors to this site came from Google®.  Millions?  No.  But thousands every month.  By any stretch of the imagination, this site is easily in the top 20 most-linked to site on the Internet about Civil War 2.0.

And these are quality links from pretty popular sites.

But I don’t show up on Google® under that search.  I can understand that.  But what if I look for the entirely novel phrase (my own invention thanks to Cory Hamasaki, R.I.P.) Civil War Weather Report?

I get links about weather during the Civil War.  I once got links to current weather forecasts for Gettysburg, PA from Google™.

If I go to DuckDuckGo®?  With that phrase, I’m number one.  With Civil War 2.0?  I’m still in the top results.  I get more hits from DuckDuckGo™ many weeks than I do from Google™.  DuckDuckGo® has 0.5% market share.  Google® has 92.26%.

All things being equal?  I should get about 180 times the number of hits from Google™ as I do from DuckDuckGo©.  And it used to be about five times the traffic, if not ten times the traffic.  Not now.  Some days, I get more traffic from DuckDuckGo™.

The nosedive started in:  February, 2021, right after a certain person was inaugurated.

Hmmm.  I’m not the first site “de-tuned” by Google® and I won’t be the last.

Now all my devices use DuckDuckGo®.

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 lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is down slightly in April.  I was expecting it to go up, but I was also expecting Chauvin to be found not guilty.  The state-media propaganda of “homegrown terrorism”  drumbeat is ongoing, even as protester violence and inner-city violence is going through the roof.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability dropped this month.  I expect it to increase next month, but the Left keeps pushing for more control.

Economic:

I expected this number to be less positive.  It’s not.  As I predicted, April is the month that we find that inflation moves from a thought to a widely-felt reality.  What’s next?  It won’t be better.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for this time of year.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Leftists Destroy GATE

Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) is a pretty cool program.  The idea is that smart kids can work on material that challenges them.  That’s good.  Really smart kids, when bored, cause a lot of problems.  How else do you explain the Crusades?

But of course, the biggest problems in our country (sorry Aesop) seem to emanate from either D.C. or California.  The newest push is an “equity” focused math program.

The framework draft starts with the biggest lie published in the English language in 2021:

“All students are capable of making these contributions and achieving these abilities at the highest levels,” and, “evidence that shows all fifth graders care capable of eventually learning calculus, or other high-level courses , when provided appropriate messaging teaching and support.”

No.

Not at all.  And what the hell is “messaging teaching”?  Sounds like a crack-addled mail-order diploma-mill Doctor Of Education (looking at you, Jill Biden) theory.

Inequality is rampant in the human condition.  No matter how much I wish that I could be taller, I can’t think myself taller, and no amount of Social Justice Warrior Equity Cheerleading could make me taller.

No amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make me even a millimeter taller.

And no amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make a dumb kid smarter.  You can make a Lamborghini® out of duct tape and cardboard, but the only way it’ll make 50 miles an hour is if you drop it out of an airplane.

My parents told me I was a gifted child.  Turned out they meant that I was left on their doorstep in a box.

What this statement means is simple:  smart kids, according to the educational establishment in California, don’t exist.  They even say that explicitly:  “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”

Guess we’ll have to page Harrison Bergeron (LINK – read it if you haven’t – it’s short).

It’s trivial to prove that some people are talented and some are not – in fact, it’s fairly commonly known now that 60-90% of all of everyone’s attributes and abilities are inherited.  Everyone.  There is no mystical person who has attributes that are Play-Doh® in the hands of the schools or state.  Is it nature or nurture?

It’s nature.  Nurture can mess it up.  Nurture can get the best out of what’s there.  But you can’t get a ribeye steak out of a cat.

This denial of reality is 100% required by the Left, however.  The idea of anything be unequal is an idea they cannot accept, even when it’s real, which is why untrained women have to win fights against Navy Seals in movies, and why Leftists pretend that Caitlyn Jenner ain’t a dude.

LINKS

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

READY ON THE RIGHT

 

 

READY ON THE LEFT

 

 

READY ON THE FIRING LINE

 

 

READY FIRE AIM

 

Culture Wars: The Boy Scouts And Hollywood, Including A Bikini Graph

“Envy the country that has heroes, huh?  I say pity the country that needs them.” – Reign of Fire

My book on the Nordic nations is really difficult to write.  I’m not sure I can Finnish.

There are institutions in this country that are fundamental in shaping it.  Two, in particular, helped define the 20th century in the United States of America:

  • Hollywood®
  • Boy Scouting

Both were a product of the American expansion between 1850 and 1940, and both were forged in the American West.

Boy Scouting?  American?

The official story is that Boy Scouts was brought to the United States from Great Britain.  In the immortal words of Jules, “Please allow me to retort”:  Sir Robert Baden-Powell was the guy who “officially” started Boy Scouting, but given his aristocratic upbringing, Baden-Powell’s idea of camping was spending an afternoon on the patio with only one servant and no ice for his gin.

The truth is much more American:  Baden-Powell based Scouting on Frederick Russell Burnham, who was born in Minnesota and crossed paths with outlaws and thieves as he learned the tricks from old cavalry scouts that served in the Indian Wars.  Once all the Indians were killed or in a reservation, Burnham got bored and hitched a ride to South Africa to kill and conquer that continent, too.

In South Africa, Burnham was eventually made Chief of Scouts of the British South African Army in one of the Boer Wars.  The Boer Wars were that time when the British found out that the Boers were sitting on the biggest gold strike in the world, and decided that all that was required was to get those pesky Boers off of all of that obviously British gold.  I first heard of Burnham while reading this amazing true story (LINK).  It’s long-ish, but amazing because it’s true.

Why do Scoutmasters wear that hat?  This guy.  This picture was taken after he was personally decorated by the King with the second-highest award given by Britain to soldiers, and given a permanent rank in the British Army.  Also given personally by the King.

Why do Boy Scouts wear neckerchiefs?  Because Burnham wore a neckerchief.  In Baden-Powell’s estimation, the goal of Boy Scouts was to turn boys into men like Burnham.

Scouting was built on just that American ideal – individual ruggedness and preparedness.  Baden-Powell said it very well, “A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when something unexpected happens.”

Scouting, in one quote that I read sometimes back, was based in the preparation of an ideal citizen – one that could contribute, one that could learn, and one that was not reliant on the government.  It created capable, rugged boys who in turn became capable, rugged men.

Scouting found very fertile ground in the United States.  Very soon there was a shortage of little old ladies to escort across the street, and they had to take shifts so the Boy Scouts could assist.

I kid.

But there are very few organizations (outside of churches) that have done as much good for the United States as the Boy Scouts.

Sadly, Boy Scouts is essentially dead.  The last decade killed it.

Well, you can’t say the Left isn’t good at something.

It had already been on life support.  The peak number of Boy Scouts was in the early 1970s at about five million boys.  To have a similar number today would mean that there would be ten million Scouts.  There aren’t.  I expect that the number (when it is announced later this month) will certainly be less than two million, and probably closer to one million than two.  The graph I put together (there are many conflicting sources, and I put this together using the most accurate numbers I could find, along with some guesswork and interpolation) shows that the number of Scouts is consistently declining.

I guess that nobody asked the Scouts what their opinion was.

This utter collapse in the number of Scouts is despite the tricks that the national leadership has employed to keep numbers up:  they added kindergarteners, the glue eating set, to a new program called Lions.  Since the name “Boy Scouts of America” wasn’t clear to them, they decided to add girls to the program and rebrand it as Scouts BSA® where BSA™ doesn’t stand for anything really.  It was all an effort to keep the numbers up.

I don’t have high hopes for the girls involved in Scouts BSA™.  One local Scouts BSA© leader took girls out camping.  One of them snuck a spare cell phone, called a boy with a car, and disappeared with him for a week.  Somehow, that didn’t make the local papers.

If you look at the graph, the Boy Scouts had been in trouble before.  In the 1980s they realized the program had deviated from what made it popular:  being rugged.  They reintroduced the old-school methods, and popularity surged.

In 2014, they admitted homosexuals as youth.  In 2015, they admitted open homosexuals as leaders.  In 2017, girls who think they are boys were allowed to join.  Deciding that none of that mattered anymore, in 2019 girls could become Boy Scouts Scouts BSA™ members.  At every point, the Left made the point:  it’s not enough.  Now they want atheists to be able to join.

The Boy Scouts® used to stand for something.  Scouts BSA™ stands as just the latest conquest by the Social Justice Warriors.  Note that commies throughout history have hated the Scouts.  Now that they own it, they can finally kill it.

This is just one story.  You can find attack after attack on the Boy Scouts from the Left since the Scouts were founded.  Why?  Boy Scouts until 2010 was the thing that scared Leftists the most:  strong individuals who were responsible for their own actions.

Hollywood© is a similar American story – rooted in the West.  About the time that Burnham was killing his way across South Africa and unwittingly starting a youth movement that would transform the 20th century, the movie industry cranked up in California.  Why?  Well, Edison owned patents, and California was a very long way away from Edison’s lab in New Jersey.  The bandits that Burnham knew in California didn’t disappear – they just turned into businessmen.

See?  I can do a transition!

Hollywood™ has been a similar success story, though with a few twists and turns.  For a large number of years, films coming out of Hollywood© mirrored (in many cases) the Rightist views of the American public.  In the height of the Vietnam War protests, John Wayne starred in The Green Berets.  Even as late as 2002, Disney® put out Reign of Fire, which was staunchly Right in attitude.

I’m not ashamed to say that I love movies.  There are those who say that’s silly, and you’re more than welcome to your opinion.  I see them as a way to thrill to bravery and watch as Good defeats Evil.  It is a myth-making process that can showcase the very best of what we, as humans, can be.

Duty.  Honor.  Tradition.  Cannons, pistols, and swords.  French people being shot.  How can you not love this movie?  Did I mention French people being shot?

Now, in Current Year, Hollywood™ has managed to mangle several amazing film franchises because they had to inject either gender or identity politics into the films, and not in a light way.  The latest Star Wars™ films?  Pretty bad, like eye-rollingly bad.  It wasn’t the effects, mind you.  Those were amazing.  It wasn’t the actors – Hollywood© is a consistently ruthless meritocracy of talent.

It was the stories.

Once upon a time, movies were fun.  Really fun.  Some, of course, still are.  But what happened to the funny teen comedy?  Well, comedy requires that someone is made fun of.  So?  Comedy is out.

No, today movies have to be “woke” and parrot the Social Justice Warrior line and teach an important moral.  It’s funny when that moral isn’t what China likes, so that Hollywood™ has to change their picture, or change posters to minimize black cast members so Chinese people will go to see the movie.

Hmmm, I wonder if BLM® approved of the poster change? Think they speak Chinese?

Perhaps the reason for the injection of the Leftism is the studio executives wanting to placate their talent or their audience?

It doesn’t matter.  It failed horribly.

Sure, it’s a Wilder Bikini Graph®.  I was so very not going to do a bikini graph for the Boy Scouts.

Just like in Boy Scouts, now that the Left has fully taken Hollywood®, the rot has set in, and it begins to decay.  People don’t want to tune in to see what Leftist fantasy has won this year’s Leftist award.

Neither one of these losses of the Left is a win for the Right.  The world was better when we had Boy Scouts.  The world was better when we had more movies with better heroes, and comedies that made fun of everyone.

Thankfully, I have a sea of old movies that I can watch.  Also, thankfully, something will come to replace the Boy Scouts in time.  Politics is downstream of Culture, and Boy Scouts and Hollywood® are part of a culture that no longer exists as it did for nearly 100 years.

That’s okay.  We will rebuild.  We will create institutions that will renew our culture.

Just like Burnham taught us:  we will never give up.  We will keep the flame alive, and fight when the odds are stacked against us.

Why?

Because we are so very pretty.  We are just too pretty for God to let Western Civilization die.