Communism – Page 26 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Fear And Loathing In Modern America

“There is nothing so deranged as a man in the depths of an ether binge.” – Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I hear an angst-filled teen robot is called a sigh-borg.

Artificial Intelligence may be taking us down the path to Civil War.

How?

Artificial Intelligence is upon us. To be clear, there’s little likelihood that A.I. in 2020 is conscious in any way that would be recognized by a human even though it has exceeded human ability in things like “playing” chess and “not forgetting to pick up Pugsley at school for three hours in winter.” A.I. doesn’t need to be conscious to be amazingly useful. Even in its limited form it is already important to the economy, and becoming more important every year. Here are some ways that A.I. impacts us here and now:

Shipping – from individual route selection to package delivery schedule, no single package is managed by an individual until the UPS guy pulls it off of the truck and walks to your door. The rest of it is scanned and the delivery path is optimized by computer as the delivery guy drops it at the wrong house. I wonder why my neighbors needed all that latex and baby oil?
Shopping – Amazon™ (or any other retailer I purchase from with consistently) knows my buying patterns as well as I do. Is it super accurate at picking things that I’d to buy? Yes and no. I went to the site to give an example of a ludicrous suggestion. And I bought a book instead. (Darn you Allie! Whatever you do, don’t go to her website and read it (LINK) the hilarious chapter from her new book because then you’d blame me if you bought it.) Then I went back to Amazon® to look for a bad purchase suggestion and bought yet another book. So, it beat me tonight.

I hear even A.I. is having to deal with LGBT stuff – they keep talking about trans-sisters.

Banking – three years ago I got a text from my credit card issuer – they thought a purchase charged to the card was fraudulent. It was. The A.I. was smart enough to realize that I probably wasn’t in Chicago at 4 A.M. on a Monday morning buying $300 sneakers. And, no, Amazon® didn’t recommend them to me.
Advertising – the websites I go to feature personalized ads meant to match my interests, but yet no human ever made the decision of what ads to place there – it was all based on the profile they’ve built of me. This might explain why they assume I need binoculars, dehydrated “survival” food, duct tape, a machete, and a subscription to “Sour Patch Kid®” candy of the month club.
Job Search – résumés of job seekers are submitted based on A.I. recommendation to be read by the A.I. that the hiring company bought to read them. People are being rejected for jobs by computer programs. I suppose it’s better than the future when unemployment claims are kept low by use of the Terminator® HRBot 3000.

A Terminator makes a really bad sales clerk. Whenever anyone asks where something is, they always say, “Aisle B, back.”

Journalism – simple stories such as football or baseball game descriptions have been written by A.I. for years. One could argue that any intelligence at the Washington Post® or New York Times™ has been artificial for decades.
Social Media – Twitter® and Facebook™ and YouTube© are carefully calibrated to maximize use engagement to maximize company profits. And they’re the companies that are causing all of the problems.

The easiest emotions to get engagement on are: fear, outrage, and anger. The reason is that it’s easier to make someone mad than it is to make their day better. Sure, we love “I can has cheezburger” cat, but to get people to click you need to get them scared or mad.

What emotions do you think the A.I. amplifies? Yup.

Fear, outrage, and anger.

It’s also sad when your navy can be defeated by asking it to identify which pictures contain a stop sign.

If A.I. has a profile of you that can select what t-shirt you’re most likely to buy, what else does it know? Well, it knows what your ideological profile is. It knows what stories resonate with that ideological profile, and will make you mad. Then? It shows them to you.

The motivation isn’t evil. The motivation is entirely neutral. The A.I. is there to make profits for Twitter©. Since it makes money for employees and investors, people will stop you from turning it off (to paraphrase Scott Adams from a recent podcast). Their 401k’s depend on the A.I. making money for them. I think Glenda from Accounting would slit your throat if you killed the goose that made the golden 401k. And the stock options!

But this A.I. behavior reflects back into human behavior even beyond Glenda from Accounting’s bloodlust for anyone who messes with her 401k. A.I. is also making divisions show up in the country.

Let me give an example:

A.I. was great at feeding polarizing videos on YouTube™. Up until a year or two ago, YouTube© was great at giving me a list of suggested videos that were farther and farther Right. Then, the great purge started. Content creators of any degree of popularity were banned, forever, if they were on the Right for no particular reason that YouTube© would share. Alex Jones was among the first banned, which is strange because he’s like the WWE® of radio hosts.

Sean keeps his pistol in his library. It’s for shelf defense.

The Right has stayed, from an ideological standpoint, in about the same place for the last 30 years. The Left, especially since 2004, has moved wildly Left.

Was A.I. to blame for all of that Leftward movement? No. There are other factors at play – especially a demographic shift of population with a huge influx in immigrants that come from countries that are all further Left than the United States. Why they want to escape their Leftist hell-holes and then vote for Leftism here is beyond me.

But A.I. certainly pushed people who were leaning Left, farther Left.

So, A.I. can change people by surrounding them with a nice, warm Leftist echo chamber. In what might be worse, A.I. is likely no longer just changing people, it’s changing events because that echo chamber exists.

Let’s take St. Louis, when Mark and Patricia McCloskey defended their own property. Most people who reviewed their actions who have a legal background have said everything they did was clearly lawful.

Except.

Not an original. Is this all the Terminator that 2020 could give us?

An elected prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies. What amount of A.I. inspired Twitter®-fueled hate-rage against the McCloskey family resulted in her having the courage to file the charges? It feels like to me, that online rage influenced her in some fashion. It probably doesn’t hurt that Ms. Gardner’s election was funded in part by George Soros’ foundations, but even one of Soros’ creatures knows they need to get votes in an election year.

To what extent is the decision of the District Attorneys around the country to release violent rioters aided by a compliant A.I. that feeds the idea that arsonists are, somehow, freedom fighters? People on the Right generally shake our heads in confusion as blatant criminals are charged with only the most minimal of charges yet bail for Kyle Rittenhouse is set, in cash, at $2 million dollars?

If the goal of the Left was to destabilize the country, causing everyone to lose faith in the justice system is a great start. But none of that is the goal of A.I. It doesn’t care. If an A.I. was programmed to make shopping carts, and turned the entire planet into a big ball of shopping carts orbiting the Sun, well, mission accomplished! A.I.s simply do not care.

Meanwhile, use of A.I. tech helps Google™, Twitter®, and Facebook© reach record stock prices. The big danger is that the forces of polarization and the actions that the various A.I.s unleash gets out of control. It’s not like those A.I.s are designed to realize that they’re destabilizing an entire country in a way that might lead to the most destructive war the United States has ever been a part of.

But, hey, those guys at Twitter still have stock options, right?

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened. I’m kidding, of course. I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living. Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race. For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President. By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored. Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump. His other advantage is, well, you know. You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind. Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open: 21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day. Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward. It won’t be. Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire? A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states. A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later. But has anything about 2020 been best case? The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth. In reality, the tension has been building for four years. In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt. We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable. This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good. This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral. I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic. In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week. I ignore most of them. Today? I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate. You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses. Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability. The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral. Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it. It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California. Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%. California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants. The result? The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money? You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times. They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

The Silenced Majority: How The Left Censors The Right

“You can’t stop the signal.” – Serenity

Joe Biden wants to win, so his kids can get jobs closer to home.

Sometimes my jokes are greeted with silence. You could hear a pun drop.

Nixon famously used the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” during a speech in October of 1969. Leftists were demanding an end to the Vietnam War. There were plenty of valid reasons to end the Vietnam War, but hating America wasn’t one of them. This was a speech to the American people about just that – and Nixon knew that the people not out in the streets were with him.

But in 2020, we face a different world, but in the movie. We still have a group of silent people who aren’t on board with the Left – and I believe them to be an absolute majority, or you and I both would be in a gulag right now. But there is another group, a group that would speak, but can’t.

I call them the Silenced Majority.

I write about the first type of the Silenced Majority almost every month in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. Why? The amount and type of censorship tells you a lot about how far a country has fallen towards a Leftist totalitarianism.

Also the Left: It puts the sanitizer on its skin, or else it gets quarantine again.

The vanguard of this behavior has come from Silicon Valley. YouTube® has been the great censor, keeping dogma from Leftist organizations but banning content from only moderately Right of center sources. But there is one way that YouTube© is like the United States government – both break their own rules.

The libertarians and Right-libertarians make the point that these are “private companies” and that free speech doesn’t apply. Sure. That’s what the cashier at the Burger King drive-through keeps telling me. But it’s not just Facebook®, Twitter™, and InstaSnap©. It’s also Gofundme.

Jason Blake, the guy in Kenosha who got shot while allegedly stealing a car with kids in it from a woman he allegedly raped, has a Gofundme® of nearly $2.3 million dollars. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old whose previous brushes with the law included being in a youth crime prevention organization, was prevented from having a Gofundme® at all because self-defense is the scariest thing in the world to the Left. You don’t need Papa and Mama Government when you can protect yourself.

Hmmm.

Living with the systems of the Left is difficult. Discover® recently said it won’t process payments going to Gab®, the free-speech alternative to Twitter™.

Twitter® has banned the term “treason.” Now it’s supposed to be “undocumented foreign supporter.”

Why?

Does it matter?

The Left has co-opted the media. And it’s not just from wild-eyed people on the far-Right. On my YouTube™ feed a video showed up from a (as far as I can see) balanced, centrist journalist. Like a real journalist, who has news Emmy® awards and everything.

The video was about Antifa®. This video was so good that I subscribed to her channel, along with 67,000 other people that week. That’s rare – I think I’m subscribed two three or four total YouTube® channels. Total. It was that good. And it was fair.

She got a million hits on that video. People are fascinated about Antifa™, and they want to learn more. To have the opportunity to learn about it from an unbiased journalist with credentials? What a hit!

Until YouTube™ shadowbanned it.

What’s a shadow ban? It’s tuning the search and recommendation algorithms so they don’t point to specific content. She’s got a great example in the video below where she searches for her exact video title with her name . . . and, well, she’s not the number one hit, I’ll tell you that.

You can search her channel for the vidya on Antifa®. The first one hit over a million people. This one was at less than 15,000 (LINK).

For whatever reason, Antifa™ is a sensitive subject for the Left. They don’t want people knowing about the group that’s responsible for riot after riot all across the country. The FBI® has joined them, with the Director noting that Antifa™ isn’t an organization, it’s an ideology. I wonder if he wear Stalin PJ’s?

YouTube™ will, if they bother to answer it at all, blame it on the algorithm, expecting us normies to not understand that every single algorithm is written by a human. Or at least an autistic person who they pay with chicken tenders.

Fox News™ doesn’t have that excuse. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was on some news show on Fox®. Newt was shut down for mentioning that George Soros funded the campaigns of dozens of far-Left District Attorneys. Fat George is proud of this. He’s bragged about this.

But Newt mentioning this? Forbidden. Fox News© shut him down. Cold. Don’t take my word for it, watch it here (LINK). It’s less than a minute.

It’s like the computer chip that Fox™ HR put into their heads started putting electroshocks into their brainstems.

What subjects can’t you even mention anymore? Antifa® and George Soros, certainly. How many others?

The second type of Silenced Majority are people who don’t speak. Why? Fear. They live in fear because a person on the Left can make the most outrageous claims and have job security. Heck, job security? Make outrageous claims in some organizations and you’ll be rewarded.

“All White people are racist.” Yup. You can say that and not get fired. Heck, in some companies you’re required to say it. You can work in academia and call people who disagree with you “subhuman” on Twitter® and pray for their extermination. As long as the people you’re insulting are on the Right, of course. Your punishment for that? Enjoying your tenured position and taxpayer-funded job.

After I asked my astrophysics professor how stars died, he responded, “Overdose, usually.”

But saying something simple and factual like, “The autopsy report on George Floyd showed that he was as high as my electric bill in summer after I left all of the windows open, the AC set on 60°F (8,675,309°C. or “Jenny” degrees), the oven open and set at ‘broil’, and a pack of 37 blenders running continuously for a month.”

Factually, that’s correct. George Floyd was so high you can see his footprints on the Moon. George Floyd nearly certainly killed himself with drugs. But could you say that at the typical workplace that has offices and desks and HR?

I was amazed at how many people are offended by breastfeeding. Heck, I was just trying to bond with my dog.

Sure!

But if you offended someone?

Then you’d be fired. And then HR would whisper “fillintheblankaphobe” every time you tried to get a reference. Good luck finding work after that, right?

And, yes, the idea isn’t that you said something offensive, it’s that you offended someone. That’s the standard. And in 2020, every single Leftist is looking to be offended. Wear a Trump 2020 hat? I’m sure that you’ll say something to upset some Leftist burrowed into your organization. They’re watching. Understand they don’t want justice, they want Social Justice, which to them means you being fired.

There are dozens of other, equally factual comments you could make that would get you fired. Cisco Systems® fired several people after diversity training. What did they do? Well, on was fired for saying “All lives matter.” So you can be sure that whatever those people said was the worstest evar!

I Googled® cigarette lighters, and got over 56,000,000 matches.

Another example? James Damore was fired from Google®. Why? He questioned the “ideological echo chamber” at Google™. Since (for now) it’s illegal to fire an employee in California for their political ideology, it’s likely that Mr. Damore walked away with a big pile of cash – but he’s the exception, not the rule.

The idea of the Left is to take us from the Silent Majority to the Silenced Majority. They don’t want anything to spoil their “ideological echo chamber” because the one thing that Leftists cannot tolerate is competing ideas, especially competing ideas that work.

Nixon had this one right. He wasn’t alone, at least not then. But you’re not alone now.

And they can’t stop the signal.

Fragility, Resilience, Or Antifragility?

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense. Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords. I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day. In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile. The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not? Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II. Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me. After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile. Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance. But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up. In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions. It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points. A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too. More than once. Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score? Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles. The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone. My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away. I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend. And he was there for me when I got divorced. The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile. In fact, you move toward the next stage: Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union. Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery. But the Soviet people fought. And fought. And fought. Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure. The Soviet Union had redundancy. Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up. And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union. People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked. The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender. If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient? That’s the focus on values. Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile. Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher. It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger. Vases don’t do that. But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system. When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger. Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people. Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men. But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting. The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth. No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941. The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile? Well, start by being resilient. Then? Add learning. If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them? That’s a good start. Capacity? Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure. Efficient systems are prone to failure. The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn. When one income goes away? They system fails. Unused money (savings) is redundancy. It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks. Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you. This blog is one of mine. And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little. I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required. One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe. Nope. My soul is in this. Do I agree with everything I’ve written? Of course not. I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years. I’ve learned. Some of my views have changed as I have changed. I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more. But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me. I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode. It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode. Resiliency is about persevering. It’s not bad. There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life? Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: 56 Days To The Last Election Ever In The United States

“It appears we will be required to ignite the midnight petroleum, sir.” – ST: TNG

It’s all fun and games until it hits midnight. And we’re getting pretty close.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock. Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue: Front Matter – What Is A Civil War? – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 56 Days Until The Last Election – Links

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, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

What Is A Civil War?

Multiple comments that I’ve had, both in the comment section at the blog, as well as in email and even text message asked the question – what happens to the index this month. The answer is that we’re still at a 9 out of 10. The only thing remaining to take us to a 10 is a body count. That’s because I’m using this (admittedly academic definition by Doyle and Sambanis in 2000) as my definition for the existence of a civil war:

The war has caused more than 1,000 battle deaths. This war hasn’t yet done so. Is 1,000 an aribitrary number? This is the only criteria not yet met.
The war represents a challenge to the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state. I think it’s clear that Antifa® and BLM™ want nothing less than the dismantling of the existing state and construction of a Marxist Utopia©. The fact that they are aided and abetted by fellow travelers in district attorney offices, mayoral offices, and congressional offices doesn’t mean that they aren’t communist revolutionaries fighting against freedom from the inside.
The war occurs within the recognized boundary of that state. This is an easy one.
The war involves the state as one of the principal combatants. One of. Not the only one. Ask a policeman in Portland if they feel that they’re in control.
The rebels are able to mount an organized military opposition to the state and to inflict significant casualties on the state. It states casualties, not deaths. And that also makes this an easy one to check off. Organization discussion is directly below in the Violence And Censorship Update.

I list all of the five criteria for a simple reason – to show that the only thing between us right now and a full blown, internationally recognized definition of civil war is the number of body bags we have yet to fill. When I started this update last year, I was expecting things to move faster than you expected. I did not expect things to move faster than I expected.

They have.

Violence And Censorship Update

Violence this month is obvious. The killings have started. Outside of the increasing violence tied directly to police standing down because they have no support which I talked about last month, bullets are now flying in the “mostly peaceful” protests.

Outside of the CHAZ murders, where two teenagers were killed, much of the violence has been peripheral. I moved the index up to nine out of ten when killings became commonplace. As near as I can tell, the killings directly associated with the Antifa™ and BLM® action is probably somewhere short of 100.

But two of those deaths are deaths that Antifa© cannot abide. In Kenosha, I wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse’s clear self-defense shooting against both a pedophile and a wife beater, and alleged self-defense shooting against a person who was (by the film I saw) drawing down on him. You can read it here – reviews say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’d suggest my signature on my divorce papers from my first wife was better (Have The Kenosha Riots Given The Right Our Rosa Parks?).

From my vantage point, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero. But Antifa™ cannot let that stand. At all. It’s my estimate that out of rage, the killing in Portland as well as the attempted murder by car in Portland were “revenge” hits on people wearing paraphernalia of the Right. If you read reports that break down the killing (HERE) and other experiences (HERE) in Portland, it becomes clear that Antifa® is using military discipline, and is broken up into a military command structure. (H/T to Vox Day (LINK) and Mike at Cold Fury (LINK))

Antifa™ is a dedicated group. They have undergone a brainwashing and are a religious cult – no Jim Jones Kool-Aid® drinking cultist could compete. I wrote about that here (Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?), and stand by it. Antifa® and BLM© stand against everything that has made America wonderful, rich, and prosperous. And they are fanatics.

I’m not sure if you know what they have in mind for people that don’t agree with them. It isn’t pleasant. The idea is that there is a pure society coming, and the way to get to that new society is to eliminate everything that doesn’t fit. Which almost certainly includes you. But don’t worry – they want to torture people to death to show the remaining people how wonderful the future communist utopia will be. See? You serve a purpose in their minds.

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.

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II. Let’s go to the graphs. In general, I’ve used bikini graphs in the past. Given where we are, I’m a bit more somber. Here are the graphs, without bikinis.

Violence:

Up is more violent. June pegged the scale of violence. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. It’s lower again this month despite clear assassinations by the Left. Does that mean it’s less violent this month? Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence. Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking. That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is down, slightly. I expect September and October to be down more, since voting generally has a calming effect and all emotions are focused there. After that? All bets are off.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, are down slightly. Again, we’re nowhere near the bottom. I expect that to drop off in October. Maybe to historic levels. But I could be wrong?

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Oops! This metric is now nearly at the highest it’s been in years. As the Wuflu® hits Mexico, the Mexicans are deciding to head north again.

56 Days Until The Last Election

I firmly believe the United States has had stolen elections in the past. But the nice thing about the Electoral College is? It makes it really, really hard to steal an election. Impossible? No. Hard? Yes.

Every single person in every graveyard in Chicago, California, and Queens can vote for a Democrat, and it doesn’t matter. The Electoral College adds legitimacy to an election by breaking corruption at the state lines. That’s one reason the Left hates it. It makes elections hard to steal. In my state, my vote doesn’t really matter – my state will go for Trump even if every person in every grave, ever, votes Democrat.

Mail-in voting changes all of that.

Yes, this was one of my favorite original memes that I created, but a new version. Still valid.

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

It’s hard to cheat in a Red State. You have to steal zillions of counties. It’s easy to cheat in a Blue State – you just have to cheat in the big cities. If everyone in Chicago voted Trump, Illinois would still go 60% for whatever Democrat was opposing him. But with mail-in voting?

Examples I have seen show the party on the outside of the envelope. How hard would it be to casually “lose” a few thousand votes from envelopes that had a big, fat, R on the outside? Or a few thousand from precincts that consistently vote Right? Not hard at all. This is on top of demonstrated voter fraud in Left cities where poll workers were caught on camera dumping ballot after ballot into the box on election day.

If mail-in voting passes? We’ve had our last election day. From now on? It’s selection day – selection of the candidate that the Left wants.

Thanks to the innovation of mail-in voting, you don’t even have to bring the corpses to the polls! What else will modern technology come up with?

In a further, ominous sign, the Media® has been setting up the idea that Trump will win on election night in a convincing manner, but will lose as the mail-in ballots are counted. This is particularly horrific.

If you knew which six counties you needed in close states, could you game the Electoral College? Absolutely. You could have boxes of ballots pre-staged in Philadelphia, or Milwaukee, or Cleveland to flip the results. Simple. Want Florida to turn blue? Just found a box with 25,475 Biden votes in Miami.

Don’t think the Left wouldn’t try it. They would do anything to win the election, since they’re contemplating electing a person who couldn’t navigate a corn maze with more than two stalks standing.

If mail-in voting is made the law of the land? Expect that this is the final election, ever, that won’t be a simple selection of the candidate that best fits the desire of the Left. Sure, there will be some token people on the Right elected, but they’ll mainly be people who believe in real conservative values, like only allowing 1,000,000 illegals in a year, and only allowing 7,000,000 people a year in on H1B visas, and restricting anything but a muzzle loading black powder rifle, like our founders intended.

Oh, wait, conservatives have conserved nothing! They just pick the values from the Left from ten or twenty years ago, and defend those until the death.

LINKS

That’s a bad ending to a video game . . .

All are from Ricky:

MSM message: alt-Right continues the march to civil war….

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1316052/proud-boys-group-brawl-antifa-protests-kalamazoo-michigan/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1354432/portland-brawl-breaks-out-proud-boys-antifa-fight/

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/09/03/schmidt-trump-supporters-want-to-see-a-second-civil-war-in-this-country/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-incite-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/americans-sense-something-is-wrong-gun-sales-up-72_08272020

…a challenge that must be met with force…

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/08/18/berkeley-columnist-calls-for-violent-resistance/

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/08/12/this-war-cant-be-civil/

http://thesaker.is/will-hillary-and-the-dems-get-the-civil-war-they-are-trying-to-provoke/

…for abstract justice…

https://theweek.com/articles/931090/are-bread-riots-coming-america

https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/black-lives-matter-organizer-calls-chicago-looting-reparation/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

…and with concrete action…

https://summit.news/2020/08/14/black-lives-matter-mob-demands-white-people-give-up-their-homes/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-blm-protesters-shot-homeowners-while-marching-through-rural-pennsylvania-town

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/battle-zones-america/

This revolution WILL be televised, as documentaries…

https://theduran.com/steven-turley-new-civil-war-being-fought-on-three-fronts-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-is-here-part-i-the-combatants-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-part-ii-strategy-of-the-blues-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-civil-war-part-iii-update-dr-steve-turley-largely-confirms-video/

https://theduran.com/the-utopia-of-democrat-activism-video/

…an unending stream of gripping short-attention-span clips from the front lines…

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1300955946521432064

(Scroll here for more video gems:) https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/

….and an explosion of editorials…

https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/02/rowland-civil-war-real-possibility/5690696002/

https://themichiganstar.com/2020/08/28/commentary-in-kenosha-the-seeds-of-civil-war/

https://greensboro.com/rockingham_now/opinion/ending-the-civil-war/article_a2f83f72-eaef-11ea-88b4-e7bcbc8a60ec.html

https://signalscv.com/2020/09/jonathan-kraut-an-undeclared-civil-war-in-america/

https://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/singer-promoting-a-new-civil-war-in-america/article_399450b1-7aee-5a47-abd1-8555b616d0cf.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/portland-killing-trump-caravan-civil-war-20200830.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/kenosha-trump-kyle-rittenhouse-portland-antifa-20200901.html

https://www.newspressnow.com/opinion/editorials/stop-a-civil-war-before-it-starts/article_57576526-e7d3-11ea-a6c0-f31f4893dc90.html

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/08/20/thursdays-headlines-armed-for-the-civil-war-edition/

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://www.independent.com/2020/06/14/an-american-civil-war/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-kenosha-wisconsin-unrest-violence-shooting-20200826-m3e7zcqg7faxxou2xhqywmsobe-story.html

And as one (now-dead) Antifa guard claims to have fired the latest shot heard ’round the world…

https://www.insider.com/portland-shooting-suspect-said-saw-civil-war-coming-2020-9

…a newspaper founded during the last Civil War won’t be around to cover any new one…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/09/04/trump-and-stars-and-stripes-attacking-american-icon-column/5706859002/

Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?

“Prime minister? I thought Italy used a king?” – Archer

There’s a joke to be made about that cake, but just like food under communist rule, you wouldn’t get it.

Sometime earlier this year, I asked myself a simple question. Why would anyone be attracted to communism? It’s the one single system that has never succeeded. It’s a system that, when implemented as designed, kills tens of thousands, and in the twentieth century, over 100 million of their own citizens.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what would drive so many people to communism in the year 2020. In 1900 in Russia? Well, maybe. A typical Russian peasant wouldn’t have known much about the failings in Paris of the Leftist French Revolution. Some bald guy says, “free loaves of bread for life,” and that might have done it.

But during the 2000-2020 time period in the West, it’s clear that communism shouldn’t take root, right? Up until the COVID-19, the economy in the United States was going so well that some of Joe Biden’s kids could afford to quit their second jobs in the Ukraine. But even with that economy, young people were being recruited to communism.

Why?

I had no idea how they could be recruited. But in roving through the Internet, I found a book, Anatomy of the Red Brigades by Alessandro Orsini, which had exactly the information I was looking for. The Red Brigades were a Leftist terrorist organization that was formed in 1970 and lasted until the 1980’s. They were most famous for kidnapping and killing a former Italian prime minister named Aldo Moro. They were also responsible for the later kidnapping of American Brigadier General James Dozier, who was rescued.

I have other pencil jokes, but most of them are pointless.

Post-war Italy was a difficult place. It was rapidly transforming from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Like me, I’m sure some were tempted to steal industrial cooking implements. But I didn’t – I’m not a big whisk taker.

As people moved from rural farms to slums in the cities to work in factories, they were uprooted from centuries of continuity in life. That uprooting was the first step in creating a communist. As a rule, the Red Brigades recruits were disaffected. These people were already at the margins of society. Orsini calls this process disintegration. The group manipulating the new recruits would do everything possible to remove the new members from their previous outside relationships.

Once they were removed from those old relationships, reality was what the group said it was. And what reality were they focused on creating? The basic idea is one familiar to doomsday cults around the world. One Red Brigadist described it as the “fanaticism of a new religion.” Communist recruits are taught that:

. . . they are “children of the light, arriving in this world to punish and redeem, to destroy and purify. The Red Brigades want to wash away the sins of capitalism with blood.

They are taught that the world is corrupt, and in danger. Remind you of anything, say, Greta Thunberg? The idea that capitalism is sin is now taught nearly uniformly to children of the world. Of course, it has to have a name, and Global Warming® is probably the most convenient: it’s a sin brought on by capitalism and the old people, and will kill them if they don’t take rides on multi-million dollar yachts and speak before the United Nations. Oh, and then be invited by CNN™ to talk about COVID-19. Yes, they asked Greta for her expertise on that. And for her expertise on Some Black Lives Matter©. Each of these three has the same story being pumped into the head of the Marxist – there is a threat to the existence of all that is good in the world, and only Leftism can solve it.

Radical Leftism. See how that works?

The process of radicalization was described by Jean Guitton (as related by Orsini):

Segregation – They are kept apart from healthy past relationships – their new relationships only come through communist contacts. They are then immerse in Leftist thoughts and theory.
Permanent Indignation – Inner purity is confirmed (and signaled) through outer indignation – the Left loves to despise any who think even slightly differently than they do.
Desire to be Persecuted – When people in the “world” make fun of the Left, the Leftist love it – it shows how virtuous and pure the Leftist is, and confirms to them how horrible the rest of the world must be.
Purification of Means through the End – Any violence is justified because it will lead to the promised land of no work and infinite goodies. Building it on a mountain of skulls is just a feature.
Principle of Secrecy – Antifa’s© external goals that they advertise aren’t their real goals. They know that what they really want is the complete destruction of society, and to have it rebuilt just as they see fit. But they don’t say that – so every member is essentially a member of a secret society. That binds them together – they can only speak freely to each other.
Preventative Internal Terror – The one thing Leftist cannot stand is anyone to the Right. Anyone collaborating with the Right in any way? Betrayal? Any member who strays from Leftism is certainly the biggest enemy of the Antifa©, even more so than actual fascists.

I got a puppy, but the ducks attack it. Last time I get a pure bread dog.

The focus then becomes one of purity.

Purity, of course, can never be reached. That’s why SBLM® and Antifa™ aren’t fighting for anything real or measurable. The goal of SBLM® is “the end to systemic racism,” whatever that is. The problem is it can’t really be defined. It’s not a real goal – it’s a stand-in for purity, a purity that can never be reached.

The reality is that this impossible goal of for their purification must be unreachable. It must be ludicrous. Why? The goal isn’t to end systemic racism. The goal is to engender hatred in the members.

How bad is the hatred? “Love and Strength will subdue and destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie; we shall build a society free from the slavery of salaried work,” is directly out of their literature. To quote Orsini speaking about them, even when Marxists kill people, they see themselves as the real victims. “They are desperate people who have no real alternative to murder.”

We all know that OJ was the real victim, right?

And that’s the difference. The people who manipulate the communists want power. That’s not the goal of the communists. They want the power so that they can personally cleanse the world. In one interview, Orsini quoted a communist who didn’t want any luxury himself after the communists won. Nope. All this particular commie wanted was to be allowed to personally execute capitalists after the revolution.

Capitalism is what they hate the most. And fascism. What’s fascism? Anything that’s not communist. Don’t be fooled – Antifa© isn’t against fascists. They’re against Bernie Sanders because he’s too far right, and think he’s probably a fascist, too. Antifa™ wants to kill everyone even slightly to the right of them.

In their current state, the concept of logic and argument isn’t something a Leftist in Antifa™ or SBLM© can even hear. They will, due to their programming, ignore any logical argument, any evidence. Point out that when Pol Pot takes over Cambodia in a bloody revolution that kills off nearly thirty percent of Cambodia’s population. If they’re not too far gone, they just won’t hear you.

If they’re far gone, you’ll just hear silence, as they think, “They deserved it.” Purity is the goal. Their thought process that they cannot let the lives of people stand in the way of the future Earthly paradise.

I had to use this picture.

How did Italy defeat the Red Brigades? Massive numbers of arrests, and large amounts of jail time for those involved. Hundreds of Leftists were forced to flee Italy to avoid prison. I’m fairly sure this was fine with the Italians – as long as they never came back.

And our Leftists in the United States? Getting rid of them won’t be easy. They’re fully supported in most cities, even as they slowly destroy the cities – some district attorneys won’t charge Antifa© or BLM™ rioters with anything more than a misdemeanor. Beyond that, they’re well-funded – SBLM™ alone has hundreds of millions of dollars available.

I wonder if they’ll make reparations to the business owners that were destroyed through their riots?

Nah. The looters were the real victims of the riots, right?

Have The Kenosha Riots Given The Right Our Rosa Parks?

“We’re all Sons of Liberty here.” – John Adams (2008)

What was it that Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty?

Friday posts originally were about health related topics. I’ve deviated away from “health” as a topic to focus on what might be more important now – mental health, specifically attitude. There’s a reason for this.

The goal of the Left, as amply illustrated by Yuri Bezmenov (Yuri Bezmenov’s 1980’s Prediction of 2020), is to demoralize the West. Demoralization’s goal is to destroy the moral outlook of our nation. The goal of Demoralization is to destroy your moral outlook.

If you’re a Christian, the goal of the Enemy (you know who when I write the big E) is to make you feel despair. If you’re not a Christian, and still on the Right, the goal of the enemy is the same – to make you feel despair. To make you feel you cannot win. To make you feel that there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable march of history. The Enemy (or enemy) wants you to believe that the victory of the Left is inevitable.

That’s why my Friday posts are, at least recently, focused on the opposite. The victory of the Right is inevitable. And that’s what scares the Left more than anything. They will do absolutely everything they can to make you feel powerless. They will do whatever they can to make you feel that nothing you do matters. You can’t fight them.

That’s smart. But a 17 year old in Kenosha proved it was a lie, and may very well be the Rosa Parks of the Right.

I was wrapping up the writing on Wednesday’s post when the events in Kenosha happened. By events, I mean where Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people and wounded a third. I say allegedly, because even though I saw it from nearly six different angles, nearly in real time, by saying allegedly that makes me sound official. And my attorney Lazlo says it makes it harder for Leftists to sue me.

What I saw was fairly simple. It was a 17 year old kid who ran from someone who was allegedly going to hurt him. I allegedly saw a muzzle flash, which meant that someone shot at Kyle as he was fleeing. A melee ensued, and several shots can be heard on the video.

Kyle is then seen on video, first looking to provide medical care to the man on the ground, and then talking on his cell phone. The dying man on the ground is 5’3” manlet Joseph Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was an ex-convict who had spent nearly a decade in jail for sexual misconduct with a minor, who was required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Clearly, Rosenbaum was a gem of a manlet.

Rosenbaum made the mistake of chasing someone with an AR-15.

Oh, maybe that explains it.

Running from a fight is clear evidence of attempting to de-escalate and avoid bloodshed. When shots were fired by others first? When Rosenbaum caught the pudgy Rittenhouse? Someone shot Rosenbaum in the head. It’s not even clear at this point that it was Rittenhouse, but if it was, he was clearly being attacked.

In another video just after the first, you can see Kyle running toward the police. Kyle falls, since it looks like he has a body made for being the first kid knocked out in dodgeball during PE class. Immediately, Rittenhouse is attacked, kicked in the head. What amazes me is that Kyle rolls into the attacker who is allegedly kicking Kyle in the head, knocking him over. While he’s rolling over, it looks like he’s clearing a jammed round on his AR-15.

Are you sure this isn’t John Wick? Or John Wicksconsin?

Do you think his power comes from the Crocs® or the socks? Or is Crocs™ in Socks a new Seuss© book?

That first attacker moves on, wisely deciding that trying to fight someone with an AR might have fatal consequences.

The second attacker, one Anthony Huber, then slams a skateboard down on Kyle’s head. Anthony Huber was convicted, twice, of domestic abuse. Including strangulation. It’s amazing that out of two BLM® protestors, we have two dirtbags. Hmm. Surely this isn’t a pattern?

Clearly that’s a peaceful use of a skateboard, right? Now who is going to raise that kid his girlfriend had with another dude?

Kyle allegedly brings up his AR-15 and launches one round, center of mass, straight into Huber. Now, where I come from, if someone is attacking you with a fifteen pound piece of wood and steel while you’re lying down on the ground, that just might be considered an attack with a deadly weapon.

Huber staggered a few feet, and then collapsed. He ultimately lost the battle with life, as predicted in the Book of Eugene Stoner, Chapter 5.56. Huber was 25. His pronouns are was/were.

The final person that Kyle allegedly shot was Gaige Grosskreutz, 26. Grosskreutz is a member of the “People’s Revolution Movement of Milwaukee,” and we all know how level headed communist revolutionaries are. But Gaige, good commie that he is, was allegedly (I can’t verify this independently right now) convicted of felony burglary, because hey, private property is theft, right comrade?

Mr. Grosskreutz allegedly held both hands up to Kyle, who was sitting on the ground. One of the hands held a pistol. Kyle didn’t shoot. But when Grosskreutz moved to draw down on Kyle? Kyle reacted with the reflexes of a cat and allegedly blasted away Grosskreutz’s right bicep.

Grosskreutz’s pronouns are now Lefty the Leftist and Ow, I Found Out. Oh, and alleged felon in possession of a handgun? I’m sure that will go over well.

Yup, that’s a gun. But certainly a peaceful member of the “People’s Revolution Movement of Milwaukee” wouldn’t want to hurt Kyle, right? Re-education is what commies do best. Right?

Ooops. Forgot. Commies want one thing, I mean, besides food.

When reviewing the footage I was astonished at the discipline of Kyle Rittenhouse. Each person he allegedly shot was clearly attacking him. He held back the second each threat passed. If I had been shooting, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have kept shooting at the targets commies until the magazine ran dry, especially with Grosskreutz. It’s also astonishing how quickly it happened. The elapsed time from when he was attacked by Huber and when he allegedly shot Grosskreutz? Less than five seconds.

Life comes at you very, very fast.

The Leftist press has lied, again and again and again about what happened. “Shooting into a crowd” was a headline I saw. Didn’t happen. This was from Reuters® tonight:

“The charges against Rittenhouse in Kenosha County include first degree intentional homicide in the death of Anthony Huber, who was carrying a skateboard when he was gunned down.”

Well, technically Huber was “carrying a skateboard.” But Reuters™ failed to mention that Huber was using that skateboard as a weapon to smash in Kyle’s head right before Kyle allegedly shot Huber. This is clearly shown in the picture above. Sadly, Huber’s string of domestic abuse convictions will have to end at two, and the world will be deprived of his skateboarding. It’s like saying that JFK was not able to comment after a mostly peaceful ride through Dallas. Technically true, but still a lie.

The reaction from the Leftist-controlled media is proof – if you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target. The Kyle Rittenhouse story scares them to death. A young man, with a gun, saves his own life while trying to do the right thing. The biggest irony is that every bit of information about the people he allegedly killed or wounded shows that these people, like George Floyd, like Jacob Blake (allegedly shot seven times while allegedly going for a weapon after allegedly resisting arrest in Kenosha) appear to be failed human beings. Drug addicts. Violent. Pedophiles. Wow, the Left sure chooses heroes from the wrong side of the track. I’m sure they’ll show a heart of gold by the end of the movie.

The person in opposition? A 17 year old kid who wanted to be a cop who was seen scrubbing graffiti off walls earlier in the day. This scares the Left more than anything. They want every city to be as lost and broken as Portland. But the lesson here is that cities fight for themselves. Why would people from Montana come to the rescue of Portland? The people in Portland made the mess.

Kenosha means, in Potawatomi, “the place of the pike.” Wonder what the Potawatomi translation is for “the place of the AR”?

One 17 year old has pulled the underwear tightly up the butt of the Leftists in America. One. That’s why they are frightened of him. This is the same way that society was afraid of Rosa Parks. Here was one man, standing up for his rights. He stood up, even though he was 17, to fire and chaos.

Can a black woman sit in the front of the bus? Sure. Can a 17 year old defend himself from people trying to kill him? Sure. And all of the virtue signaling in the world won’t save you from the Left. They have proven that, again and again.

Well, honestly, it’s not like Unitarian Universalists believe in anything, anyway.

Kyle Rittenhouse has just been notified that the same attorney that atomic-wedgied the Washington Post® for Nick Sandmann is now on his side. And, I hear, he has a funding site from this news article (LINK).

If real justice is done, Kyle Rittenhouse will be out of custody within a week. I’m not holding my breath. But now the Right has a face. A story. And the real truth about what it takes to fight and beat the Left. Honesty.

And a 17 year old boy. Remember, the victory of the Right is inevitable. Not necessarily today. Or this week. Or this year. Or this decade.

Remember, we are stronger than the Enemy, or enemy, ever will be.

And smile.

For the last several years, most of my memes have been forged in my underground meme foundry. These are all “as found” on the Internet – thanks, /pol/. Comments are mine.

Yuri Bezmenov’s 1980’s Prediction of 2020

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

Video games never made me want to hurt people. Working with people did that.

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the West in the 1970’s. Bezmenov told everything he knew to the CIA, and was set up in Canada. He did several interviews which are available on YouTube®, which I’ll link to in a bit. Most recently, Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War™ brought Bezmenov back into the public consciousness by cutting in clips of his interviews in.

You can watch it below. It’s only a minute or so.

During interviews, Bezmenov made the quote that only 15% of the KGB’s activity was tied to James Bond® stuff. Their primary goal wasn’t to find out which parts of an F-15E jet fighter were made out of titanium and which parts were made out of paper-mâché.

Matching the United States in weapons systems was important, but it wasn’t number one. Besides, the KGB generally had a spy class of ideological communists built into numerous classified projects. Bezmenov said that 85% of the KGB’s efforts were spent in destroying culture in the West.

Why fight an actual war, if you can get your enemy to become you?

Bezmenov even set out the mechanisms that they were in the process of using. It wasn’t a complicated process, and it was just four steps. They called this process, “active measures” and it was nothing less than subverting the ideology that made America great.

The first step was Demoralization.

Demoralization is based around removing the moral framework of the country you’re attacking. The easiest way to do this is to co-opt the education system. Bezmenov said that this took 15-20 years, but his number was low. First, the educational institutions needed to be captured. The people who train the teachers, the people who are the “guiding lights” in educational theory must buy into Marxism.

I don’t have a direct measure of the ratio of Leftist to Rightist in those that teach education, but I’d imagine it’s no less than journalism, which is at 20:1. It may exceed history, which is 33.5:1. Regardless, the educational academy is now firmly in the hands of the Left. This leads to the production of teachers in a Leftist pedagogy (fancy word for teaching), with bad Leftist theory sometimes even enshrined into law. No Child Left Behind? Yes, that was bad. Common Core appears to be worse. Here’s one example:

Yes, this is really what they tried to teach little kids. From the Heartland Institute.

I have to wonder if the idea is that such simple things like addition and subtraction can be made so complicated that parents won’t be able to teach them to their children. In essence, it’s a way to further sever the ties between parent and child, while strengthening the ties between child and state educator.

Certainly, not all educators are Leftists. Here in Modern Mayberry, there are a few, but I think we likely have a more healthy balance. But there are those who look at the remote classes from COVID-19® as a potential threat to their attempts to indoctrinate children:

Is Demoralization 100% complete? Not as long as we have those pesky parents standing up for the customs, culture, ideas, and values of the West. Is it complete enough to take over society?

Maybe.

The goal of Demoralization is a lot of what we see now on the streets of Portland or Seattle or any other major Leftist city. Bezmenov described the end product of Demoralization as:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

In other words? Leftist robots.

Destabilization is the next step. This is the destruction of the systems that define the country. The economy. Social relations. Defensive systems.

In the last few months, the economy has been put into the most precarious state within living memory. The United States is more divided politically, ideologically, linguistically and ethnically than at any time in history. Naval vessels ram freighters. Senior officers are fired due to ideology. Women are brought into combat operations despite proof that their inclusion lowers fitness for mission.

Bezmenov said that Destabilization took two to five years.

Destabilization leads to Crisis. Crisis in this system is necessary to get people to accept a new government, new systems, and to give up the old system. There’s been a great deal of experience in creating Crisis by the Left. Think the Color Revolutions that have taken place all over the world, from Georgia to Ukraine to Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

What does Crisis look like in the United States? How about open violence encouraged by receptive District Attorneys that refuse to prosecute? Does it look like the dollar losing 7% of its value in three months?

Crisis leads to promises by the Left. High minimum wages. Free healthcare. Guaranteed basic income from the government. “Equality” in housing, in education, in policing.

Are the promises real? Of course not. The promises are whatever it takes to get enough support for the Left so they can take control.

If we are not in the Crisis, you can certainly see it from here. Ideally, for the Left, Crisis leads to control, or Normalization.

Normalization is the end game. It’s consolidating the country under the Leftists. It’s the creation of new institutions. In the Soviet Union and in China, it consisted of killing farmers and replacing them with people from the cities and expecting these collective farms will feed the nation.

Of course, all of the Leftists burning Kenosha and Portland think that they’ll be the ones in charge. In the new Socialist Utopian States they’ll be the ones who will write poetry and conduct gender reeducation camps, right?

This poetry comes from Seattle, I believe. Plans are now in full view.

No. The reality is that they’ll be most likely to be put up against the wall and shot or sent to the convenient leisure gulags. Why? They will be disillusioned when the actual power structure emerges. The reality of every communist paradise in history is that the intellectuals are shot first, especially the intellectuals that are communist. Why?

Dissent is a thing of the past.

Here are Yuri Bezmenov’s ideas, in his own words:

The Data That Drives Advertising . . . Could Decide The Election?

“Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Mark Zuckerberg has been banning bots from Facebook™ before the election. Trump has made Mark turn on his own kind.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mrs. used to be in radio. On one of her jobs, she did the news, sports, and weather for a collection of stations. The thing that fascinated me was that The Mrs. was the one that selected which news stories and which sports stories to put on the air, even to the point where she interviewed Senators and Congresscritters as part of the press pool. The Mrs. might be a wizard, but she couldn’t really select the weather, so the weather was what the weather was.

The Mrs. didn’t like the NBA®, so during basketball season she refused to cover it. At all. If you would have listened to her broadcast, you wouldn’t have known that basketball was a sport. Despite that the NHL® didn’t have a “local” team, The Mrs. covered hockey, even though after a storm the farmers care more about grain wetzky than Wayne Gretzky.

I’ve told that story before, but it’s been some time since I mentioned it so I know it’s new to some of you. I think now is the perfect place to mention it again.

I used to tell radio jokes, but the reception was poor.

Why? That will become clear.

But let’s start with this idea – you’re a product. Almost six years ago I heard a quote in a Wired® article (LINK) about the predictive power of social media interactions:

In the end, the researchers found that with information on just ten Facebook© “Likes,” the algorithm was more accurate than the average person’s colleague. With 150 “Likes,” it could outsmart people’s families, and with 300 “Likes,” it could best a person’s spouse.

Imagine the power. With enough data, Facebook® could sell data to companies with complete certainty that they’d be able to understand your income level, age, health problems, fears, and what it takes to sell you a product. By knowing when you went to bed, they’d be able to predict if you were a night owl, though I didn’t predict The Mrs. reaction when I replaced our bed with a trampoline. She hit the ceiling.

It’s not just Facebook™, and in my mind they’re not even the worst. I make it a point to never use my work computer for personal “stuff” – I don’t log in for email, social media, or any other site where I log in. Heck, I made it a point to minimize my surfing to the point where most of my Internet use at work was work related. I learned that they really don’t like you surfing YouTube™ videos at work during the six hours I spent at a job as an air traffic controller.

I’ve never been an air traffic controller, but I hear that their motto is: “If the pilot screws up, the pilot dies. If the air traffic controller screws up, the pilot dies.”

But one day I went to a weather site, and saw ads about something I’d searched for at home – something I was thinking of buying.

If it were a normal thing, that would make sense. In this case, it was a fairly obscure outdoor product. Boom. Right there on the weather page. It wasn’t just one product, which would have been a coincidence. People who are interested in the weather might be outdoorsy, right?

Nope. It happened again and again. Somehow, Google® (my guess) had figured out that John at home was the same guy who was using that work computer. I had noticed years earlier that Google™ gave one set of results on a search at work, and a completely different set on my home computer. That almost made sense – people at work are usually not looking for the same results as people at home. For instance, always make sure when you Google™ the actor Gary Oldman that you type in an “r”.

But look at all of the sources of data that exist on you, primarily (but not always) generated via social media. Just your search history tells the companies serving the Internet a lot about you. The Mrs. is a writer and was looking for ways people die for a book. She joked that the FBI® probably would arrest her if anything ever happened to me. But I don’t trust the FBI™, since the last time I was at the dentist they wanted to do a cavity search.

Facebook’s™ statement that with 300 likes they would know a person better than their spouse is nearly six years old. How much better than that are their computer systems now? I would imagine much, much better. Now they have data stretching across years that would likely predict a lot about a person’s outcomes.

Several years ago YouTube® used to suggest me content that was much edgier than I had initially searched for. It was as if I watched a video about the Right and got fed another that was six steps farther Right than the previous video. YouTube™ was giving me more and more “extreme” content. Why? Because more extreme content drives emotions. It pops chemicals into my brain and stimulates more viewing time.

YouTube™ was optimizing based on getting more viewing minutes. The best way to do that? Show me videos it predicted would increase emotion, especially outrage. And, as we all know, it’s easier to get strong emotion with anger rather than happiness.

I watch chemistry videos periodically.

For a while, I was on Twitter® – there is still a John Wilder account, but I had some fun with a parody account that was since deleted. But I noticed the same pattern at Twitter™ – keeping eyeballs through generating emotion.

What happens when you aggregate all of that data?

You can be told a story that’s unique to you. Immersed in information that is designed to drive your economic behavior – understanding what you’re most likely to spend money on, what time of day to best provide an ad, what phrases cause you to click, and which ones you ignore.

I’ve cut back on social media. Facebook® is only used on a single browser, and I haven’t opened it in months. Since I never understood what was fascinating about Facebook™, that’s super easy. It doesn’t need a replacement. Likewise, it’s been months since I was on Twitter©, although I do spend some time on Gab®.

I’m cutting back on YouTube™ and moving towards BitChute© – YouTube™ in the last year has been on a tear of censorship and herding – trying to move people farther Left. Some things are harder to find on BitChute™ – it has the worst search I’ve seen. But when I can find the people I listen to normally on BitChute®, I go there.

Dracula got caught uploading illegal content to YouTube™. He’s got the problem – a count suspended.

And browsers? Have you tried Brave™?

Understand that Google©, YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® (among many!) are creating a product based on you, and attempting to sell you to whoever they can. Heck, if YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® merged, they would have an amazing amount of data, but they’d be stuck calling themselves YouTwitFace®.

If it were just that, we’ve been facing less sophisticated versions of advertising for years. As even the Romans said: “Buyer beware.”

But with this immense power, what are the odds that they are consciously attempting to craft a narrative to change what you believe? Is there an agenda behind the stories that are presented to you, the way the headlines are written? Is there an agenda behind the stories that you’re not allowed to see?

I wanted to buy a skating rink, but my realtor only gave me a ballpark estimate.

Most people coming to this blog are pretty good at making up their own minds. But this fall’s election might be based on the votes of perhaps a 20,000 people or less, who have no idea who they’re voting for right now – elections are won by convincing the undecided.

I’m betting it has nothing to do with hockey.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Life at Two Minutes To Midnight

“I can’t sugarcoat this. We’re at Threat Level: Midnight!” – The Office

If you eat a clock, know that it’s time consuming, and don’t go back for seconds.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock. Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue: Front Matter – Talking About Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Living Two Minutes To Midnight – Links

Talking About Divorce

I read an article once that said that couples that talk about getting a divorce are much more likely to get a divorce. Heck, when my ex-wife said she wanted a divorce on Valentine’s Day, I was surprised – I wasn’t planning on spending that much. But talking increasing the divorce risk – that made sense to me: every time you talk about an event, you tend to bring the event closer to becoming real.

How?

It’s not magic or a witch’s incantation, or at least I didn’t see my ex-wife doing incantations, though there was a smell of sulfur around midnight. It is simply that when people talk about divorce, they start imagining what it would be like. When divorce fantasy is better than marriage reality, the lawyers get called in.

But they stayed together because of the kid. Nobody wanted custody of him.

In a recent “war game” of different election scenarios, John “Spirit Cooking” Podesta played the role of Joe “stay in the basement until November” Biden. Crucially in the war game scenario where Biden lost, “Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states (California, Washington, Oregon) to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.”

Both sides are talking about divorce.

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence associated with the protests is now so common that stories that would have made national news four months ago are, at most, up for a single news cycle. “Peaceful” protester draws an AK on someone driving by and gets ventilated? Yawn. Two women (I guess) are frolicking on an interstate at night and get (inadvertently) mowed down by someone driving a car?

The Mayor insists that Chicago isn’t violent, noting that they’d only lost three school bus tailgunners this month.

It’s bad. In Chicago, 2,249 people have been shot this year as of July 29 (LINK), which is nearly 700 more than in all of 2019. At this rate, more people will be shot in just Chicago this year than during the entire Falkland Island War between Great Britain and Argentina. This is patent proof that black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter®, since deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of cops in all of 2019 were, according to USA Today™ (LINK) only . . . 25.

Unjustified use of police force is horrible. But . . . cops killing unarmed black people is nearly the smallest problem faced by black people in the United States. BLM©? It’s a lie.

Alcoa® and Planters Peanuts™ secretly rule the world. They call themselves the Aluminutty.

Censorship was up again this month. In focus was Qanon. I wrote about Q a long while back (QAnon, The Chans, and Other Cryptic Stuff), and haven’t kept too much up with that subject. But this month in another set of coordinated censorship Twitter® banned over 7,000 accounts that Tweeted™ about Qanon. YouTube® has deleted “tens of thousands” of videos and “hundreds” of channels that were about Q. Facebook© won’t be left out – they nuked a Qanon group with 200,000 members.

What about Qanon scares the mainstream?

Updated Civil War II Index

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II. Let’s go to the graphs. As is custom at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, the graphs are presented with girls in bikinis, because if civilization is collapsing what better time is there for bikini graphs?

Violence:

Up is more violent. June pegged the scale of violence. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. It’s lower this month. Does that mean it’s less violent this month? Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence. Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking. That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is down only slightly, which might seem weird, but the political system is still stable overall. I expect this to spike in the next two months, and may introduce a new measure based on the election as we get closer to November.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, but this month it’s up. The part of me that hopes, hopes we’re on a real upswing. The part of me that thinks says we’re nowhere near the bottom.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is near a five year low for this time of year.

Living Two Minutes To Midnight

Two minutes to midnight is a tough place for the United States to be sitting, and we’re here. The confluence of great events, economic, political, and social is upon us. It’s in these times of upheaval that systems collapse in complexity from a high level to a lower one. Highly complex society provides us nice things like video games and delivery of eyeglasses made in China in a week.

Societies of low complexity struggle to feed themselves and live in mud huts. Low complexity societies are always on the edge – a famine could mean real death due to starvation, not that the shake machine is broken at McDonalds® again so you have to go to Sonic™ if you want a shake.

In order to grab or consolidate political power, there are politicians that would gladly drop our standard of living to that of starving people in mud huts. Those that would support them imagine a world where they’ll be allowed to be artists and poets and philosophers and the mud huts will be left for those who oppose the new way of doing things.

Living in this time, I have one suggestion: be as prepared as you can be for nearly anything to happen. Understand that things you’ve taken for granted your entire life can change in a day. I never thought I’d live in a society where rioters could stop cars of peaceful citizens with impunity and the tacit approval of local and state governments, but here we are.

Things are moving fast. Be ready.

LINKS