Communism – Page 26 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Joe Biden’s Early Christmas Gift To The Right

“Well, you know, anything could happen. You could get run over, pickpocketed, . . . fall down a manhole, bump into people, murdered . . . imagine that. Or even just ridiculed.” – Flight of the Conchords

Bruce Lee had a son other than Brandon. This son was a famous vegetarian: Brock.

I’m betting that most of you saw the vidya of Alzheimer in Chief Brandon Biden taking a call from a parent about the tracking of Santa by NORAD. At the end of the call, the parent says “Merry Christmas, and let’s go Brandon.” You can watch it here (LINK).

Biden responds with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go Brandon! I agree!” The look on Jill’s face is priceless, like she had just eaten a tuna fish sandwich that had been fermenting under Joe’s butt for six days. I know that Jill told the Secret Service to not let Joe sit on them that long, but to quote Joe, “They’re just so creamy and feel so good and cool on my buttocks and make my skin so supple.”

Immediately, the Leftist Twittersphere™ erupted with all of the impotent rage of a six-year-old that’s not allowed to sit at the grownup table during Christmas dinner. A classic response is from the harpy known as Sarah Reese Jones. Here is her Tweet™, which I have not seen on her Twitter© feed, and may have been deleted because it was so insipidly stupid. I’ve seen it elsewhere, but if Sarah asks me to pull it down because it’s fake, I will. She made plenty of other comments that are still up there that I can pull from.

Sarah would make her Tweets® longer, but she ran out of character.

The salt to be mined from Leftist tears could make anyone a millionaire, and it looks like Sarah needs it. Whereas I have no idea if she’s had “work” done on her face, it looks like it has a higher composite chemical content than the re-entry surfaces on an Elon Musk spacecraft.

Yes, it’s a personal attack. I sort of feel bad because I think my readership is higher than hers. I know I look a lot less like Steven Tyler’s illegitimate child.

Why did the Leftists react so strongly to these bad jokes? I know that my readers react to my bad jokes like Hawaiians: A low ha.

I know that there are several things that drove instant hate to this exchange:

It exposed the media’s attempt to cover up the way people felt. Let’s remember where “Let’s go Brandon” started – with a television host attempting to cover up a crowd of thousands of people saying “f**k Joe Biden.” The clumsy cover-up caught fire, precisely because it was one of the most blatant lies of the year, outside of “Biden won the election.”
It exposed that this never happened to Trump. The media routinely had him under a microscope, looking for every single thing that could be used against them. In one instance, hundreds of stories showed up in the mainstream media that . . . Trump got one more scoop of ice cream than everyone else got.
It exposed that Biden is either so insulated or so mentally lost in the fog of someone who probably could no longer qualify for a driver’s license that he would actually repeat a phrase that meant, “f**k me.” Either of these things is figurative poison for a politician.

NBC© did a pilot for a sitcom about Abe Lincoln, shot before a live audience.

It exposed Biden to yet more mockery. This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. It’s Item 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
The Left hates it when their playbook is used against them. They have to defuse it at any cost. So, they either bury it (this segment is, I hear, already cut out of the transcript and official video) or attack it because it’s (according to them) inappropriate.
The Left doesn’t actually even like Biden. He’s just the only guy that they could keep hidden until the 2020 general election, drawing crowds of dozens to Trump’s crowds of thousands. He was the gluten-free, peanut-free, bread of the Left. It may be made from sawdust, but at least it doesn’t offend anyone.

The irony was palpable: the same people that had made a (not so) huge balloon made of Trump in a diaper were all twisted up about a phrase that no child would understand. Of course, the tombstone for the Right (in the very unlikely chance we lose) will say “Imagine if it were reversed.”

To make this clear: we don’t care because they don’t care. The games that they play are just that, games. The rules for civility are long gone.

To be fair, the biggest inflection point is either hot pants Clinton’s impeachment for perjury (which you could squarely blame on the GOP©) or George W’s election victory. Both of those enraged the Left in a way that they’re not over today. – they felt they had been robbed of their glorious forever lock on the halls of power, despite the fact that W had more in common with the Left than JFK ever did. Me? I think Alinsky killed them – and the Left has been playing for keeps.

Looks like someone made a measurement error when ordering the balloon that would “ToTaLLy oWn TrUmPz!”

“Let’s go, Brandon” had probably run its course. It had gone on for months, and eventually, every joke (like Joe) gets old. This probably gave it another month or three. But it doesn’t end here. There is more to come, and that’s what we must never, ever give up on. We must mercilessly ridicule the Left at every chance.

Why?

First, they hate it, they cannot stand it, it makes them stupid with rage.
Second, it’s fun.
Third? The Left has to react. And when they do, regardless of what they’ve taken over in society, the mass of the people will understand the foolishness we face. They are power. Speak Truth to them. Ridicule them. Have fun with it.

Sometimes, they do all the work for you.

Oh, and one more thing:

Let’s go, Brandon.

A Day Trip To Another America

“The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” – Star Wars®, A New Hope

Well, at least they’re admitting it . . . (None of the memes today are originals – they are “as-found” on the Internet)

Pugsley is an athlete, and that causes us to have to go to places to see him engage in his sport (elk milking) across the state, and sometimes across state lines. These are, for the most part, the only trips of any significance that we have taken in the last two years. Pugsley, sadly, is old enough that I can’t skip the trip with him on his sports jaunts since he no longer buys my excuse.

What’s my excuse? I’m adopted. So, I tell him, “I can’t go because my parents won’t sign the permission slip.” He doesn’t even giggle at that. He’s got a cold heart.

Here in Modern Mayberry, masks have essentially disappeared from all public life. The only place that might still require them is the local hospital, and thankfully I have no idea if they do or not. We ate brunch today and, although many of the patrons at the restaurant were older folks, there wasn’t a single mask to be seen. These are country folk. They’re more afraid of bad weather for the crops than they are of a virus, and they feel that they can control the virus about as much as they can control the weather.

Everywhere our family has been across the state, it looks and feels like the same. It looks a lot like the elk-milking competitions I went to when The Boy (Pugsley’s older brother) was in high school. This was back before the Great Plague Of Overblown Impact hit us. There are no masks, and people just behave like . . . well, nothing ever happened.

Late 2021 looks exactly like 2019 in my daily life. We even shake hands when we meet people and we don’t act like we’ve just dipped our hands in some sort of biohazard, or have touched AOC’s teeth. But I repeat myself.

The elk milking competition went well. There were hundreds of people all inside for a day. I coughed once, I think (nacho went down the wrong hole, and no, I’m not going to make that a joke about my nacho hole) and no one bothered to even look. Here in Midwestia, we’re over it. We’re not afraid.

We don’t care anymore.

Or, at least I thought.

The Boy has been off at college. As finals were over, and Pugsley’s elk milking competition was near his college, The Boy came on to cheer his brother on. Those elk milking siphons sure make a guy’s wrists tired. After the competition was over, we decided to go and grab some food. As we have exactly six restaurants in our usual rotation in Modern Mayberry, eating somewhere new is a treat.

The Boy asked his friends about good restaurants near where we were.

They were all in . . . Blue City. Every Red State has a Blue City, where nose rings and “meat is murder” t-shirts outsell gasoline and beef jerky. The friends came up with three names. Two were burger joints, and the third was a Japanese place.

I’ll admit I was interested in eating Japanese. At first, I had some pretty big resistance, until I explained it wasn’t Japanese people that we were going to eat, but Japanese food. Then everyone agreed. I guess it’s a matter of taste?

Huh, that’s a specific list . . .

We got to Blue City. Pugsley, fresh off of his second-place elk milking victory, was driving.

The first thing I noted was this: in Modern Mayberry, if I want to go to a place, I can park near it. In Blue City, in order to get to the Not At All Cannibal Where You Eat Japanese People Restaurant, we had to park over a quarter-mile away.

Honestly, the walk didn’t hurt me. Nor did feeding the parking meter $1.50 to park to not eat Japanese people. Nor did walking through the faceless, anonymous crowd. But it wasn’t a pleasant walk. It felt like walking in a street from some sort of dystopian movie, like Bladerunner®, filled with people who hordes of people I didn’t know or and who didn’t care about me on crowded streets. It was like being in my house in the morning before anyone had any coffee.

Thankfully I didn’t have to fashion a cloak out of an abandoned tarp. Or did I?

I came to a store that I wanted to go into. I was about to open the door when I noticed the laminated sign on the clear glass door: “No entrance without masks. If you wish to purchase our products but don’t want to wear a mask, feel free to visit us on the Internet.” The Mrs. quite succinctly mentioned where she thought they could stick their Internet, but I wondered if it would be uncomfortable for them to have so much CNN® up in that dark, moist place. We left them in peace, and I hope they have a lot of dark, moist success.

We kept walking to the Restaurant That Definitely Doesn’t Serve Asian People As Food Because Of That Health Inspection, the foot traffic was continuous. Many people were masked, though not all. Finally, we got to our destination. On the door was another sign, just like the first store, though they didn’t offer to ship cooked people over the Internet.

This immediately caught the ire of The Mrs., and since she’s at least a bit Irish, you don’t want to get the ire of an Irish lass too Irish. Or something. Let’s just say that she can have a bit of a temper that makes Belfast in 1972 look like a Care Bears® movie. I looked inside the restaurant, though, and there were plenty of people not wearing masks.

They were mostly all eating, but they weren’t wearing masks. Apparently, the virus doesn’t travel when you’re sitting and eating, only when you’re standing and ignoring the duct-tape crosses on the floor in the line. When we first entered the restaurant, there was another person not eating and not wearing a mask. Since he could get away with it, I figured we could, too. As he was a people of color, I would have a jolly fun time making a YouTube® show if they kicked us out, and not him.

They ignored that we were unmasked heretics and were pleasant and served us.

Hey, that’s Internet me!

The restaurant really didn’t serve Japanese food, just ramen. It was expensive ramen, since ramen with steak in it cost $14.50 a bowl. They took our order, and we waited at our table.

We got the oddly shaped (14 inches wide and eight-foot long) table near the front. The chairs were weirdly high and the restaurant smelled of . . . farts. Really. The ramen, though, was excellent. Mine was filled with steak and mushrooms and was unexpectedly (and subtly) spicy.

I generally get the chair so I can see the entrance – The Mrs. is used to it. We had gotten to the restaurant right before the rush – patrons that came in right after us were told that they could get a text when a table was available. In Modern Mayberry, you can walk into the best restaurant in town and (generally) have no more than a zero-minute wait. And a quarter block is a long walk to it.

But it wasn’t that which bothered me the most.

What I noticed were the patrons coming into the restaurant. They all wore masks, even the young children. I understand that there is both a logical and a scientific case to be made that masks do help stop disease spread. And nearly every person in the restaurant was at zero risk of serious complications from the ‘Rona. The children were at zero risk. Heck, I was nearly the oldest guy in there.

As everyone in the Wilder fam has had the ‘Rona, my fear level was zero.

Oh, money can’t buy love, but it can buy fear.

But what I saw wasn’t so much fear or even altruism in wearing the masks. What I saw was subjugation in its nearly universal compliance. Would I have put on a mask to eat a Japanese person bowl of ramen? No. I wouldn’t put on a mask to eat a nice steak bathed in PEZ® with Johnny Depp as he drank Amber Heard’s tears.

After dinner, I was struck by the differences in attitude between Blue City and Modern Mayberry. I felt fear in Blue City that I never feel around here. It’s not that the ‘Rona is done here – there are still 50 or so cases a week in the county. But I get the sense that residents here are just done caring about it.

Of the people who have died in our county, I know exactly zero of them. Zero. And I know a lot of people around here. As mentioned before, I’ve had some variation of COVID, as have The Mrs., Pugsley and The Boy. From the data I’ve seen, that makes us functionally immune in a way better than (insert jab booster number here) can never achieve. The virus itself will hopefully have zero additional physical impact on the Family Wilder.

Oh, wait. They’re not done yet?

But what impact will baseless fear have on our lives? Right now there is a threat that if we:

don’t take an mRNA shot that doesn’t work,
we won’t be able to work because we might be able to transmit a disease that we can’t get,
but that those who get the mRNA jab can get.
And those who get “jab” can also transmit.

Fear is the source of most Evil things that have plagued (intended) mankind. At this point, the biggest shortage we have is a shortage of courage. Stand strong. I won’t suggest that you do or don’t do anything, but for me, the mRNA shot and its infinite number of iterations is a step too far.

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

“There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Think you’ve had a great morning? Every day Joe wakes up and someone gets to explain to him that he’s the president.

Peter Grant over at Bayou Renaissance Man (LINK – if you’re not going there regularly, you’re missing out!) mentioned a quote from Monday’s post (The Winds Of War?):

The idea is simple – warfare encompasses absolutely every facet of the life of the enemy. Destabilize the government. Force their economy into chaos. Starve them. Own their communications systems. In other words, it’s just like a Biden presidency.

When I write these posts, there are generally multiple edits. First, I do a draft. Then I go through and edit that. Then I go through and use hammer, tongs, spackle and a welder to fill the post with jokes. The last bit I do is to go to work in the meme forge and sweat and pound and make (mostly) new and original memes.

If your only tool is a meme, every problem looks like a grumpy cat.

In this case, I wrote the Biden line in the first edit. I was trying to be a bit cheeky, but it just fit so well. When Mr. Grant noticed that line . . . I thought about it even more.

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

destabilize our currency (not money, currency) through massively printing it,
produce and disseminate propaganda to further polarize the citizens,
import millions of people with no ties to the country and no understanding of its governmental systems,
work through an admitted conspiracy encompassing virtually all media(traditional and social as well as search engines), corporations, state and to make sure the vote produced the “correct” winner,
make yet more Marvel movies,
effectively purge from the military all senior officers who don’t follow the correct ideology, and
create a culture of dependency on government programs,

we would say that was an act of war, or a copy of the secret Disney® business plan.

Sure, Donald Duck can walk around Disneyland© without pants and he’s beloved. I do it, and I’m “banned for life.”

From an economic standpoint, one goal appears to be: destroy the middle class and destroy small independent business owners.

Why?

Large businesses can be easily converged into following the Narrative with little actual damage in most cases. Need examples?

Gillette® attacks traditional masculinity. It’s still in business. It doesn’t want my business, and doesn’t care. It’s doing fine financially.
Coke™ reportedly provided access to training that told employees to “be less white” and its stock is up about 20% since that came out, despite my personal boycott.

That’s two. There are countless others. If you look at the major companies that financially support the radical Marxist organization Black Lives Matter©, they are overflowing with cash. They are free to take whatever political positions they want, as long as those positions are Leftist. Just ask Ben & Jerry’s®, which is a Leftist political organization masquerading as an ice cream company. I guess communists have finally fed someone.

I met a French guy – what a coward. He kept asking for “mercy” . . .

Big Businesses love Big Government. They love the huge shield that regulations bring – the more regulations, the fewer competitors they face. And, if you’re lucky like me, OSHA names a new safety regulation after you.

Big Businesses also don’t care what consumers think, because most consumers are mad for a week or a month and then forget. Me? I haven’t bought Levi® jeans since 2002 or so when they went full anti-Second Amendment. I guess I’m stubborn. Must be in my jeans.

Big Business also doesn’t really care about inflation. So what if a dollar is worth less? Their job isn’t to sit on piles of cash, their job is to create cash flowing through the business, while keeping some of the cash for themselves. Because the cash is flowing through, it doesn’t matter much if that cash is becoming less valuable every day, they’ll just make more cash and use it immediately to buy more raw materials.

Hunter wanted to be the Secretary of Energy until he found out it wasn’t pipes and lines.

Destabilization of the economy through inflation, though, is good if you want to create more government power. Another way to create more power is to make sure people are polarized. That means that they can’t come together to demand freedom.

Increasing poverty is a good one, too. Having people become poor makes them slaves to the government, and afraid to speak up at injustice. Microsoft® may choose to support Black Lives Matter™, but individuals can be fired for criticizing it on their own time even when not connecting that criticism to their employer.

Is it government suppression of speech? No, why would they bother when private businesses will do it for them. The effect, though, is the same.

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

Is it too far to call it warfare against the Right? It’s more than that – it’s a war against every aspect of American culture and the basis of what made that great – Western Civilization. The statues are coming down not because the Left hates slavery or “colonialism”, the statues are coming down because they want to erase the history of America so that they can rewrite it to fit.

Looking into what that means to wealth for individuals, let’s extrapolate what we know:

The United States government for over 100 years had gold and silver as money for a very special reason – gold and silver meant stability for the money of a country. You either have gold or you don’t. You can’t print more. Could you manipulate it? Sure, but it was certainly harder than running a printing press.

When FDR (press S to spit) took from American citizens the right to own gold, he was effectively robbing them. He bought gold from them at $20.67. A year later, he revalued the dollar to $35 dollars to the ounce of gold. It now took $1.69 to buy what a dollar did before Roosevelt’s heist.

“For example, the free circulation of gold coins is unnecessary, leads to hoarding, and tends to a possible weakening of national financial structures in times of emergency,” was what that philandering monster said to excuse the theft. Me? After I read that, I was glad he was in a wheelchair.

Fun fact: he never ran for office.

But the pattern is there: if the Left wants something you have, they will take it. Will they confiscate gold in the future? I don’t know. I tend to think not, unless it’s just for spite. In this case, they’ll inflate the currency, and lend freely to Big Businesses and Big Banks so that they can acquire houses and land and every asset with cheap, borrowed dollars. Why steal the gold when they can make people so impoverished that they sell it?

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

Inflate again if they missed something. Will they lose control and end up in hyperinflation?

Probably not, unless they want to. But realize that almost every person reading this doesn’t have a seat at the table, and the game is certainly rigged. We knew that.

But what happens when a government declares economic war against its own people?

You’re Not Alone

Got home late, and feeling a bit under the weather. Got 90% through a new post, but then the tired hit. The good news? I’m way ahead on next Friday’s post!

“Théoden King stands alone.” – Lord of the Rings

Google® is so biased they only ranked our Solar System one star.

Originally this was going to be an economic post (as is usual for Wednesday) about Crisis Capitalism and how this particular Crisis, like many others in the past will be used to concentrate wealth even more, perhaps with bikini graphs. Maybe the bikinis get smaller as the economy shrinks? At least that would bring some good out of the current crisis. Plus I’ll always be known as “the guy who made economics interesting at last.”

That post will have to wait until next Wednesday.

What hit me today was an onslaught of news. Not one story, but nearly every story I read was about deplatforming or attempting to silence alternative viewpoints to the conventional narrative as seen on TV. In rapid-fire, I saw stories about deplatforming of news and opinion outlets, deplatforming of individuals and doxing (making private personal information public of non-public figures) of pre-teens(!) for thoughtcrime.

Heck, there was even a Serbian soccer player (playing soccer for an American pro soccer team) that was fired (after he was made to apologize) for comments his wife made on social media. And his wife made those comments in Serbian. I guess that he should have done his manly best and kept her home without access to electronic media devices? Is the message that athletes should take away from this is that they should keep their women on a shorter leash?

Is this the Left telling men that they need to be more patriarchal and tell their women to be seen and not heard?

But his wife wanted to go anyway.

But the seemingly disjointed activities all had one purpose: to make you feel alone.

The biggest story is that Zero Hedge® was cut off from Google® advertising revenue. Since ZH™ is a for-profit company, this will hurt them. Why was it cut off? The story I saw indicated that it was because people commenting on the site were being less than politically correct. And, yes, Google® has the legal right to do this, unless they did it because Zero Hedge© is transgender.

No, I don’t have examples, but these are commenters, not ZH© staff. I jumped in to see the comment section on a typical post that I thought might be incendiary. Would all the comments be safe to repeat at work? No. Have I seen worse comments on Twitter®? Yeah, a lot worse. I’ve seen worse commentary on Yahoo® news stories.

Zero Hedge™ has already been banned “permanently” once by Twitter©, and then reactivated. The reason given was that Zero Hedge® had “doxed” a Chinese researcher . . . by publishing information that was already on the Wuhan Institute for Creating COVID Virology’s website. As of now? They’re unbanned. Twitter© called it “an error.”

But it’s clear that they have made someone angry.

How much will it Google’s deplatforming cost Zero Hedge©?

I have no idea.

Google® did give a four star rating to Chernobyl. They would have given it five, but the locals ran out of fingers.

I do know that The Federalist™, another website was threatened with Google® demonetization due to comments on articles like this one (LINK). The Federalist© just shut off comments entirely.

And that just might be the point.

Comments here are (generally) fairly unmoderated. I think that outside of auto-moderated comments, I’ve nuked only one or two comments out of thousands during the life of this blog. I am blessed with some of the smartest, most well read, and politest commenters on the planet. You’re also probably the most physically attractive commenters on any website in existence, and I bet you all have impeccable armpit hygiene to boot. But the comment section gives people a chance to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and get to know each other. It also is a little light on a dark Internet letting you know that you’re not alone.

Even the people who don’t comment benefit from the comments section. For each person who comments, at least 100 other readers don’t comment. But they read what you say. And it’s important to them, and lets them know that they’re not alone, either.

Then there’s Laura Towler.

Laura is a British YouTuber® who is on the Right. On June 6, she sent the following Tweet® and got the reply that follows it:

“Chuffed” is slang that means “happy as a poodle with a pudding pop.”

This all went international. The idea that a company would be so “brave” as to come out in favor of a group that is only supported to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the largest tech companies and most of the largest news companies is really risky.

To boot, Yorkshire Tea© then picked on a (nearly) unknown individual citizen. Brave, indeed – I’m sure that Laura is quite the power to be reckoned with given her 50,000 or so YouTube™ subscribers. And Yorkshire Tea® is so small, being the biggest selling tea in Great Britain (which made 5.5 billion tea bags last year).

It’s like Coca-Cola® decided to pick on some kid going to prom.

But it led me to ask this question: Did any of the companies that sponsor BLM even bother to go to the BLM website?

Outside of the cringing references to “comrades” and “collectivism” on the BLM website, they note that BLM wishes to:

“disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and “collectively” care for one another.
They also want to [free themselves] “from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

This is not the language of a civil rights program, it’s the language of a communist front masquerading as a civil rights program. And it’s not even Halloween yet, and I think that all of the cosplay conventions are on Coronahold.

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

We’ve seen that at C.H.A.Z. and virtually every other protest activity that BLM is tied tightly to Antifa. Imagine that C.H.A.Z. wasn’t six blocks being held by armed Leftists, and instead was being held by a militia from the Right. I’d imagine we’d see National Guard Apache helicopters and the Seattle mayor calling for a neutron bomb strike to make the Hug Box of Seattle safe again.

I’m sure someone will bring up the Wildlife Refuge seizure by members of the Right in 2016. But 26 of the occupiers of the Wildlife Refuge were charged with felonies. Care to take bets on if the C.H.A.Z. occupiers will face any criminal charges? Any of them?

Ms. Towler was able to handle the media storm that followed, and not apologize. Heck, her Twitter® feed now cheekily shows “Disavowed by Yorkshire Tea©” as the lead line. That takes style.

But Laura knew she wasn’t alone, and has weathered international condemnation.

It doesn’t stop there.

Russians call their website censoring the Inter-nyet.

The classic (and very boring) movie Gone With The Wind, the television shows of COPS®, Live PD™, and an episode of (the very funny) Fawlty Towers that first aired on October 24, 1975 have since been either hidden or cancelled. Just like statues, these works of art define who we are as a people. And removing them makes us not more, but less.

Every person who has a statue made out of him has something in common with those works of art – they have faults, especially when viewed through the lens of the 2020s. And removing them or hiding them or tearing them down with mob violence is meant to make you feel alone.

If you’re against police corruption and militarization? You’re not alone.

If you’re against excessive use of force by police? You’re not alone.

If you’re against rioting and mob violence? You’re not alone.

If you mock companies that virtue signal popular causes while avoiding tough issues like the near slave labor they use to produce goods that they offshored from American production? You’re not alone.

If you’re against globalism and collectivism? You’re not alone.

I’m not saying that the position of the Right is always the right position. There are times the Right has been wrong. But the positions of the Right aren’t based in hate – they’re based in a love of freedom, or family, or tradition, or nation, or a healthy desire to be religious.

If those things are important to you?

You’re not alone.

And if you suffer from paranoia, you’re not alone. There’s someone behind you.

If you want this nonsense to stop so you can see economic graphs featuring bikinis?

You’re not alone.

Bikini Economics And The Red Queen

â€œYou heard Marcellus threw Tony Rocky Horror out a four storyÂ windowÂ for giving me a foot massage? And you believe that?â€ â€“ Pulp Fiction

Ahh, Chuck Norris, with his hair feathered like the wings of a majestic eagle . . .

We have a built-in bias that there is a way that the world should be, rather than spending effort on understanding how the world it, and adjusting accordingly.

When something â€œbigâ€ happens, the default human condition is to assume that things will eventually go back to the way that they were before the event.Â This is normal.Â I recall reading in Talebâ€™s The Black Swan about how his relatives in Beirut kept expecting Lebanon to go back to the way it was before war broke out in the 1970s.Â It hasnâ€™t.

And it wonâ€™t.Â And Lebanese police have it the worst:Â they have to investigate restaurants if they hear of a bad hummus side.

Our economy is that way.Â It is built, in large part, on inertia.Â In January 2020, a broad definition of money (the Federal ReserveÂ® calls it M2) was $15.5 trillion dollars. Â Today, it stands at $22 trillion dollars.Â Keep in mind that this includes money just sitting in accounts, gathering dust.

The money supply has increased by at least 43%.Â How?

This graph is somewhat misleading â€“ it doesnâ€™t explain that savings accounts were added in the adjustment to make that big vertical line.Â The totals I have in the text above are the latest I could find at the FedÂ®.Â All I can suggest is that you find someone as interested in you as the Wilder SpokesmodelÂ® is interested in economics.

The government printed it and then spent it.Â The banks lent it, since there is essentially a zero reserve requirement now.Â Regardless, what it means is that dollars are being printed at an ever-increasing pace.Â The latest spending bills just add trillions to the mix.

Through all of this, economists are pretending that 20% inflation is growth.Â As prices go up, the Gross Domestic Product goes up. But inflation is increasing faster.Â Weâ€™re in recession, but that recession is hidden by inflation.Â Our economy is shrinking even as printed money makes it seem larger.

Oddly, there are plenty of jobs at lower wages that are going unfilled.Â Why?Â Because with current stimulus spending and government benefits, in some cases it doesnâ€™t make sense for people to go back to work.Â Work for $15 an hour, or play vidya and eat TwinkiesÂ® for $12?

Not a hard choice for many.

Did you hear about the Amish topless bar?Â Not a bonnet in sight.

What about people who want to work but donâ€™t want to take the â€œjabâ€?Â Those wages are going up phenomenally as companies work to compete for a shrunken pool of labor.Â Think EMTs.Â Firefighters.

It is a weird recession â€“ prices go up, wages are going up (but not as much as prices), labor is scarce, but the GDP is down in constant dollar terms.

Looking around the corner, this simply cannot last.Â Iâ€™ve written about the Red Queen before.Â The Red Queen said to Alice in Alice in Wonderlandâ€™s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass as Alice asks the Red Queen why theyâ€™re running and not getting anywhere:

â€œNow, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!â€

Well, itâ€™s almost a bikini picture.

Printing dollars like we are is just keeping the economy (sort of) in the same place.Â Itâ€™s the monetary equivalent of using increasing amounts of crack to cure a junkie, or using electrical shocks and massive amounts of medication to keep a doddering 79-year-old Alzheimerâ€™s patient mobile enough to give a rambling speech off of a teleprompter when wheeled out in front of a crowd.Â But in either case, a Biden and pudding are involved.Â So thereâ€™s that.

Iâ€™ve begun to wonder if Hunter might not be the best of the two for the Oval Office, at least he has goals.Â Prostitutes and crack cocaine are goals and there’s a chance he might not show up for work at all in a four-year span.Â He’s good at taking jobs and getting paid for nothing.

But this ignores a basic principle of fact. Â When I print a dollar, I have created nothing.Â To explain this, Iâ€™ll go back to the writings of dead French guy FrÃ©dÃ©ric Bastiat.Â Bastiat asked a simple question:Â what happens if someone breaks a shopkeeperâ€™s window?

Well, he must go buy another window.Â If that costs 6 francs (7 and 3/16 liters) then the glassmaker has an economic gain, which he could invest in increasing the size of his glass manufacturing, or, more likely (since he is French) use it to buy cartoonishly long wands of bread, cheap cigarettes, and berets.

So everyone wins, right?Â The shopkeeper gets a new window, and the glassmaker gets a profit.

Well, if that were correct, then all we would have to do is enjoy the George Floyd Economic PlanÂ®:Â burn down cities and everyone gets rich when we rebuild them.

Obviously, thatâ€™s nonsense, primarily because the economy is (at best) the same as it was before.Â At worst?Â Every dime spent to replace broken glass is a dime that wasnâ€™t spent making the economy wealthier:Â many profits are spent to increase capacity or efficiency.Â Increased capacity increases the wealth that the factory can produce.Â Increased efficiency lowers their cost.Â Both of these things are (generally) good.

Breaking windows, like printing dollars, is just theft.Â Whereas the shopkeeper has his window destroyed, the people can have all that they worked for and saved destroyed.

My friend patented a cold air balloon, but it never took off.

Printing cash is theft, but theft from those that have been productive to those that either leech off of the system or those that are insiders.Â But I repeat myself.Â In the bailouts following the Great Recession in 2009, billions of dollars were offloaded to Wall Street insiders for taking no-risk positions in mortgage-backed securities.Â If the insiders won, they won and kept the money.Â If the insiders lost, the U.S. Treasury (that is, us) lost.

The games have gone on too long â€“ the economy is a lie, and politicians of both flavors are happily breaking windows to keep it going just a few more years until they get theirs.

Iâ€™ll point out that Iâ€™ve correctly predicted five of the last three recessions, so I do tend to be a bit on the pessimistic side.Â Regardless, Iâ€™ll maintain that all of the elements exist right now for significant and lasting decline.Â All of the â€œemergencyâ€ spending bills, the â€œBuild Back Betterâ€ bill â€“ all of those have one purpose â€“ to feed the Red Queen so we can go faster and faster.

To stay in the same place.

Why do I never eat before a marathon?Â I fast.

As much as we might like to go back to a simpler time â€“ a rewind to the 1990s, perhaps, we cannot.Â Resets donâ€™t really exist â€“ the only actual outcome is to create a new (or the same) set of winners.Â We are on the verge of a strange and dangerous new future.

It starts the moment printing ceases to have any effect.Â Thatâ€™s just around the corner.

Time to stock up.Â I think there might be a lot more broken windows by the time weâ€™re done.

Why Leftists Hate You

“Well, I don’t care if he’s a Liberal or an ax murderer, I want you two boys to stay clear of him, understood? – Eerie, Indiana

I hear that Greta loves this blog – she knows most of my jokes are recycled.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” – Aldous Huxley

Regardless of whether or not you like Huxley, he certainly hit the mark with this comment. This has certainly been the case with the reaction of the “vaxxed” crowd to those that have chosen to avoid having themselves subjected to more-or-less experimental-level mRNA manipulation. I hear the lead scientist was Gene Hackman.

If you’re a coward, the FDA has just approved a new drug. Ask your doctor if Growacet® is right for you.

Though Huxley tapped into a universal weakness, this is a reaction that is far more common on the Left than on the Right. Leftism is built on weakness. If people can take care of themselves, if they are confident, if they respect themselves, it is much less likely that they will become Leftists.

Leftists, at the core of their being, feel inferior. This is observable in the ways that they protest – they constantly put themselves in danger. They lie down in front of cars. They block highways.

The reason is that, due to their feelings of inferiority, they actually long to be either punished or to have their existence ended. And the data shows that Leftists are much more likely to suffer from a mental issue. Much more likely. Here’s a thread where data scientist Zach Goldberg breaks down a Pew® study (LINK).

If you didn’t click on the link, here is just one fact that says it all: 56.3% of white female Leftists between the ages of 18-29 have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental health condition. White “conservative” men in the same age group? 16.3%. Leftist men in the same age group? 33.6%.

Do insane accountants hear strange and threatening invoices?

If you are talking to a young Leftist woman, it is more likely that she has a mental health issue than not. If you are talking to a young Leftist man, you are talking with someone who has a greater chance of having been diagnosed with a mental health issue than any age/sex group on the Right.

So, Leftists feel inferior and lead the league in diagnosed mental issues.

What else?

This sense of inferiority coupled with mental illness makes Leftists especially brittle mentally. They cannot even listen to ideas that they disagree with. Ideas that they find distasteful, no matter how true, are psychologically devastating to them. When they say that they are “literally shaking” it’s probable that’s correct. Me? I only “literally shake” when I make James Bond® a martini.

We know the true villains the Left wants to stop . . .

This leads to the Great Counterfactual Gambit of facts that Leftists have to ignore to live on a day to day basis:

Men (on average) will always be much stronger than women. When a high school boy beats a woman’s world record time in swimming practice, it’s normal. Yet some people (weirdly) say there’s no physical difference between women and men.
This brings us to trans- people. Any suggestion that the latest mantra of “trans women are women” is against all manner of biological facts, well, is unacceptable. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to have a word for “trans women”. Likewise, “trans women” wouldn’t be upset that they often can only get dates from other “trans” people.
We aren’t all born with equal abilities, temperaments, or physical characteristics. We are actually not even remotely the same in many respects. Sure, we’re human, but some populations have extremely different DNA, with great degrees of differing abilities based solely on that. Intelligence is (studies suggest) at least 60% heritable, and maybe higher. The trend is that, in 2020, people segregate themselves by I.Q. before they marry – we’re mobile and smart people end up (mostly) marrying other smart people. This increases the number of very smart people, and it’s not random. (And, perhaps a reason that autism is on the rise.)

I could go on and on. The difficulty is that Leftism requires that people ignore reality when reality gives them results they don’t like. I read one article where a Leftist was writing a hand-wringing piece about how disappointed that he was that artificial intelligence could determine the race of the patient being x-rayed with a high degree of accuracy. This bothered him because the researchers intentionally took the data and degraded it.

The A.I. could still easily determine accurately the races of most of the people being x-rayed. This bothered the scientist because it violated his belief that race was just a social construct, yet here a robot was dismantling that very belief.

If you make a device that’s good at noticing patterns, you can either accept that patterns exist, or you can make the machine ignore reality and thus make it useless, and Congress can’t stand the competition.

If an A.I. takes a picture of itself, will that be considered selfie-aware?

This reflects outward in the art that Leftists love. They hate the world, so they like art that is to a sane mind repugnant is what they seek. They see themselves as afraid of any sort of competition, so they want to practice inversion:

Weakness is strength.
Cowardice is courage.
Ugliness is beauty.
Defeat is victory.

Oops, forgot! Slavery is freedom.

The result of an inverted Leftist utopia is a burned world, cleansed of all that they despise.

The philosophy of the Left is similarly bankrupt. The ideas are based on another rejection of reality:

All cultures are equal.
Scientific analysis is led by philosophy, and valid only when it backs Leftist talking points.
Classification of things – good and bad, smart and dumb, fat and thin is inherently wrong.

Remember, the best way to win an argument is to silence anyone who has a different opinion!

The granddaddy of all of these is this:

All truth is relative.

This one is especially insidious – it takes a True statement (we cannot know everything) and thus takes it to the idea of the general: we can know nothing for certain. Start with mathematics: if you believe that 1+1=2, then you believe that there is Truth. Gravity always pulls down. Truth.

Do I see every event from every angle? Can I know the position of every atom inside of every person in a play? If I watch the play from a different seat, do I get a different meaning?

Sure, I’ll buy that I can’t know everything. But if I jump in front of a semi that’s traveling down the highway at 120 miles per hour (4 liters per second) I will die and what’s left of me will look like someone dropped a bag of vegetable soup. Unless the semi is made of Nerf® material, but that’s fairly unlikely since it absorbs vegetable soup.

Lastly, the Left feels they have no power. Ever argue with someone in real life who has never had any real power? Whatever they have, they will use until it’s nearly abuse – the average DMV will prove my case. Power is the end product. They feel that they are inferior, reject reality, and wish to have power so that they can have revenge against those that they feel have slighted them.

A Leftist won a contest – he would get $100,000, but $200,000 would go to the person he hated most. I wonder what he’s going to do with $300,000?

Together, these ideas explain the absolute hatred that the Left feels for those who have refused to take “the jab.” These are based on the idea that, at last, they are superior. What would they do to get and keep that power? Would they put people into camps? Would they gladly watch them die?

Yes, yes they would.

Black Friday: 2021

“Oh, and remember, next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.” – Idiocracy

When I was a kid, I thought, “This little piggy went to market,” meant the pig went shopping. He did not.

Thanksgiving is over, sadly. We had a great one here. We had eight for dinner, and five under the roof when nightfall hit. Of course, Stately Wilder Mansion has room for more, but this was a good number. After dinner, we played games and enjoyed being with each other until things got rough – I was put in jail and nearly stabbed while I was in there. The family takes Monopoly® pretty seriously.

Other than that, it was a peaceful night. That is why I love Thanksgiving. It’s a space where (around Modern Mayberry) only one store was open today, and that store was only open for a few hours. Not that it mattered – we had everything required for dinner. I thought we were low on cream, so I sent Pugsley to the store on Wednesday. He brought home nonfat half-and-half.

At least he tried. Nonfat half-and-half? That’s like PEZ®-free PEZ™.

Thankfully, The Mrs. already had cream, and we had plenty for the mashed potatoes.

But now it’s time for the Friday after Thanksgiving: Black Friday.

My activities in Black Friday in recent years have mainly been related to not leaving the house. I really love spending time with my family, but spending time with strangers standing in line to buy things I don’t really need?

What’s the best place to find a man who has no arms and no legs? Where you left him.

That’s not my idea of fun. I don’t like shopping, even for shrubs – plant shopping always leaves me bushed.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t look down on people looking to get a bargain on Black Friday. I’ve been fortunate enough in the last two decades of my life that the main shortage in my life isn’t money, it’s time. For those that are experiencing an acute lack of money, well, I can sympathize. To be a few dollars short is tough. Marrying my first wife was like winning the lottery: five years later I was broke.

I’ve been there.

At one time in my life, I was running at the ragged edge. Every dollar that came into my life had a home – it was already spent. That was okay, but it limited my choices. One time I was needing to pay dues to play rugby with the local club, but I was raising two children with help only from my friends. The dues were $75. I didn’t have a spare $75.

So, I had decided I couldn’t play. The next day? A check for $200 showed up (that I had no idea was even owed to me) in the mail. Huh.

I guess I could play (prop), after all.

Why are Jedi® so bad at rugby? Because there is no try.

Regardless I’ve known a life where a spare $20 made the difference in a month. This helps me to understand those that stand in line for deals at Black Friday without looking down on them. Those people are looking to do the best that they can for their family – they’re trading their time to make the lives of their family better, just as everyone who has a job and sells 40 or 60 hours of their life every week does.

The part of Black Friday that has always bothered me, though, isn’t the searching for bargains. The part of Black Friday that bothers me is the willingness of people to abandon rules of civil behavior so they can get $10 off on a toaster that they’ll use once in the next year.

Oh, sure, I love toast enough to keep mine in a cage – then I can say it is bread in captivity. But I don’t love toast enough to engage in wanton violence for cheap consumer goods. I have standards. It would have to at least be moderately priced consumer goods for me to riot for them.

The violence, though, are a signal that the cohesion that made society function so well during most of my life is breaking down. I already know that economy is broken. I think that here, in 2021, the economy is broken more than at any time in my life. That’s the good news.

I got one federal stimulus check on Saint Patrick’s Day. Must be the luck of the IRS.

Why is that good news? Even though it will undoubtedly be difficult and tough, the way forward always brings with it the promise of a new rebirth. This rebirth isn’t unprecedented – at more than one time in history have the eternal guideposts of truth, beauty, and virtue faded.

But they keep coming back. Truth may become dim under the tyranny of oppressors, but the fact that it is being oppressed doesn’t make it any less True. Again, I believe in absolute Truth. I didn’t say that I had it, but I know it exists. One plus one is two – it is never any other number. If you start at the physical, very quickly there are many examples that prove that Truth isn’t relative.

Likewise, beauty. We know what it is, because we see it. The curve and texture and color of a rose petal is elegant. It is something that is beautiful. You can, no doubt, come up with many similar examples. Beauty, though difficult to quantify, is nearly always something that people can agree on.

And virtue? For thousands of years we have known what virtue is. It shows itself in the action and grace of those that walk with it.

TOAST

I keep the toaster on the lowest setting. I am black toast intolerant.

I have spent paragraphs and posts talking about truth, beauty, and virtue. Why? Because truth, beauty and virtue matter. They are timeless and ageless. They will endure.

Humanity cannot be long isolated from them. We keep finding them, again and again, not because we are clever, but because they are eternal concepts.

Happy Thanksgiving 2021, Wilder Style

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

Isn’t it odd the only people who tried to tell you how many people it’s appropriate to have for Thanksgiving dinner are the Centers for Disease Control and Jeffery Dahmer?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

I would say that it has always been my favorite holiday, but that’s not really so. When I was younger, say between toddler and 12, Christmas was. The reason that Christmas was so important was, well, the stuff. The movie A Christmas Story says it all.

But as I grew older, Thanksgiving kept growing in importance. In part, it grew in importance because it didn’t have the gifts. It had all of the proper things that, in my mind, a good holiday should have:

Time away from the cares of the day,
Time focused on being grateful,
Free from stress, and,
Cold.

The stress of Christmas was from the commercial aspects. Would I get that thing I wanted? The gifts overshadowed the holiday. Of course, each year the presents got less and less important, and the time with loved ones became more important. That’s when Thanksgiving started to win.

This year is the 400^th anniversary of Thanksgiving. The first one was held (according to a letter) in 1621. It wasn’t held at this time of year, rather, sometime near the end of harvest. The Pilgrims knew that they were going to make it.

April showers, bring . . .

It wasn’t always so clear. The original deal that they drew up was socialist. Everybody worked, and everybody shared equally. That worked as well as it ever has. Nobody worked, so nobody shared anything, except starvation. That was 1620.

Starvation is a tough teacher.

The Pilgrims then came to the good and sensible decision that if you grow it, you own it. The result?

So much food that they wanted to have a party – a party that lasted three days. And history teaches us that the Pilgrims weren’t teetotalers. But this harvest festival was sheer joy: giving thanks for the good sense to give up socialism and allow people individual freedom. There’s a big lesson here, yet we keep trying to repeat the same evils that impoverish men.

Oh well.

The holiday being a direct repudiation of the philosophy that’s killed more people than any other philosophy, well, that’s not the main reason I love the holiday. It’s just whipped cream on the pumpkin pie.

It’s so cold this Thanksgiving I saw a socialist with his hands in his own pockets.

The cold plays into why I love the holiday as well. The work of planting is done. The work of growing is done. The work of the harvest is done. Now is the time to sit, rest, and be thankful. The harvest was good. The food will last us through the winter and spring until the next crops can be grown from a renewed Earth.

It’s that stillness, that preparation. The great woodpile set and prepared against the winter’s cold. The food stocks set against the winter’s hunger. Now is a time of peace.

And that resonates through 400 years.

The life of a man, when faced with 400 years, is but an instant. But the peace of a single Thanksgiving can seem as an eternity. The moments created when family gathers together to celebrate is nearly magical. Overcooked turkey or gravy as lumpy as the Hunter Biden’s thighs? Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

I’m pretty sober, but even prettier when I’m not.

A drunken uncle who wants to need Mom about something that happened when they were six? Not a problem. Your team doesn’t win the football game? Not a problem.

We are here to give thanks.

Of course, at this point, the question is, to give thanks to who? Well, in our folks, the dinner will start out with us giving a prayer. That is, over those 400 years, the most common way the feast was held.

Giving thanks is part of being human, whether you are religious or not. Being thankful is a way to be healthier. The mere attitude of being thankful changes the way that people think. It moves them from a spirit of greed for what they don’t have, to a spirit of gratitude, for what they do have.

French tanks have rearview mirrors, mainly so they can see the battlefield.

Studies have proven that being happy about the things you have is about a zillion percent better for your health than being unhappy about things you don’t have.

Duh. This is the equivalent of psychology professors stealing money to do a study, because nothing in the history of humanity has been more obvious since, well, ever. Yet, they studied this. You could look it up, but, why?

You already know that it’s true. To quote it again:

We are here to give thanks. Not complain. Not be upset about any of the day-to-day things that always go wrong. Thanks.

I seemed to figure that out a little each year as I grew older. When I was six, it was all about the stuff. I remember ripping through the wrapping paper like a velociraptor in a room full of Leftists who had been raised on soy since birth. Some of the bits probably reached orbit.

As I got older, the greed waned, and the importance of Thanksgiving increased. Last year when I cooked the turkey upside down? I don’t think anyone but me noticed. But we were together as a family on the 399^th Thanksgiving. Together, in a house filled with the smells of turkey and pumpkin pie and a family that loves each other.

The most frustrated ghost in the world? The one that tried to haunt Helen Keller.

The things that I am thankful for are so numerous I couldn’t list them if I kept writing for the next eight hours. I’d put my list down, but I’m going to (as my textbooks always said) leave this as an exercise for the reader. It’s not what I’m thankful for, it’s what you are thankful for that will help you.

Even in the deepest depths of difficulties, there is a time and a place to stop. And give thanks.

Every minute I think about those things I give thanks for, I feel better. And the crazy thing I’ve learned? I don’t even need a turkey and mashed potatoes to do it. But the gravy? I’m especially thankful for my annual gravy bath. What would Thanksgiving be without it?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Rittenhouse Has Caused More Tears Than Old Yeller

“Ladies and gentleman, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookie from the planet Kashyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that. That does not make sense.” – South Park

I guess Kyle did have a salt rifle.

The reaction from the Left on the Rittenhouse verdict has been different than I expected – I expected a few riots, sure. Riots are the standard when dealing with Leftists. They want the world to burn, so why not start with a Starbucks®? Or, heck, almost any huge corporate entity. They seem to love it when Leftists burn down their buildings – they immediately respond by vowing to rebuild and then donating to the very groups that . . .

. . . just burned down their store.

But Kyle Rittenhouse bothered them, deeply.

Don’t recognize his two IMDB® credits. Probably wouldn’t be a good dinner guest.

I watched, while not the whole trial, a huge chunk of it. Just after the Prosecution was done, the Defense could have said, “The Defense rests,” and still won.

It was that clear-cut. I don’t know why it took the jury so long, perhaps they were just waiting around to see if they could get those Panera® sandwiches the judge promised them if they were still deliberating on Friday.

The Left, who has never seen a criminal atrocity so bad that they don’t want the criminal to go free, was fixated on this case. The media was on board, mainly. Large numbers of people thought had no real idea of the facts of the case, and some even thought that Rittenhouse had killed multiple black people for no reason other than that they were protesting.

So, what did they have to say? (Some language not safe for all audiences, and all memes today are as-found on the Internet.)

Umair Haque is a grifter, and a fairly successful grifter. Does he bring up valid issues? Certainly, from time to time. And, if his solution is commies leaving the United States? I will personally help buy tickets if they promise to never come back.

Ayanna apparently has a keyboard that doesn’t allow her to type a capital “W”. Also? She takes her love of Jean-Luc Picard a bit too far.

Does “Prince Jellyfish” describe his arm?

Possibly fake. But funny.

Take a breath and come up for some Umair, Umair.

If you had any doubts about who we are dealing with . . .

That explains everything! Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: “What does this have to do with this case?” Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me, I’m a lawyer defending a major record company, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation… does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

Okay, the real testimony was even worse than the South Park® quote above.

Why can’t Gaige point to Kyle?

Oh, yeah, that. The ol’ Spicey Bicep.

A moment of silence, please.

Huh, yeah, I wonder what would happen if they let clinically insane socialists out on the street?

And the only people that Kyle shot ended up being felons? What are the odds??

The prosecutor will probably never end up living this one down . . .

And, for of course people could see the next round of trouble coming:

The Mrs. really laughed at this one.

And then The Bee® stings.

Who knows what the future will bring?

Reminder that it might be time for Leftists to change their password . . .

What Is Truth?

“She’s always hungry. She always needs to feed. She must eat. All she gets is nasty Orcses.” – LOTR, Return of the King

I saw a wanted poster for Schrodinger’s cat. It said, “Wanted Dead And Alive.”

I have a general routine that I start before I write. I interact with my family because they seem to want me to do so. I then retire to the Wilder Tub of Genius where I smoke a cigar the size of a crutch that Tom Cruise might use. It’s not a huge cigar, since Tom isn’t that tall. But it is a mighty cigar nonetheless.

Then I generally enjoy life. Unfortunately, sometimes the muse hits me while I’m happily hanging out in the hot tub, and it pulls me away from the three pages (yes, it was that many) of notes I had prepared for you. Whenever that happens, I always, and I repeat always, go for the muse.

The idea of a muse is simple: it is creation. It’s an untamed force that hits you and takes over. It’s not exactly like The Mrs. hitting me in the face with a raw chicken covered in Ranch® dressing, but it’s close.

That’s tonight. Fridays are often that night where I go where the muse hits me

What hit me tonight?

Tonight it was this simple idea: controlling what goes into your mind is the key.

https://youtu.be/VYEU-12U32A

Except the dormouse. I hate that guy.

I start every post with a quote. There’s a reason why I do this – it sets the mind of the reader into a familiar idea. If the reader (you) doesn’t recognize the quote, it’s okay. The quote isn’t necessary for the magic that follows, but if you know the quote, you are nearly instantly transported into the ideas that will follow.

It’s like a subtle form of hypnosis, but one in which I don’t require you to pretend you’re a duck who has just created an egg out of chocolate and plutonium. Well, not more than once. As far as you know.

I use that because I want to create a mental space where the ideas that follow will sit well. If you’re already on familiar ground, the ideas will flow more smoothly. It’s a stupid idea, but it’s grounded in reality. Besides, I like movie quotes.

The reason I chose movie quotes is because they are the most shared of our experiences. Millions have seen, say, Ghostbusters®, while only hundreds of thousands have read Dostoevsky. Heck, I told my buddy who was an Orthodox priest that I was reading Dostoevsky and he shook his head and said, “John, that’s a little heavy, don’t you think?”

There was a really bad joke about ghosts. It still haunts me.

When a guy in a Russian cassock tells you that Dostoevsky is a bit heavy, well, it’s probably not the best way to reach people. By the way, spoiler alert: It’s Russian literature, so everyone dies. And then it gets worse. It’s almost as bad as reading a German instruction manual for a chainsaw – I tried reading one once all it gave me was a longing to invade Poland.

Or a British cookbook. Good heavens. The British have ruined pudding for me forever. Well, maybe Cosby beat them to that, but, still.

So, here I am, admitting that I want to manipulate the emotions of my readers so that they are more receptive of the ideas of crazy people like Plato or Seneca or Aristotle or Twain (Shania, not Mark) and the message that follows will sound crazy.

Be careful of what goes inside your head.

You don’t think that color scheme was an accident, do you?

I’ve tried again and again to show this very simple point: in 1900, the only regular contact any American would have had with the Federal government was the postman bringing letters. Now? When I get up in the morning I have nearly a dozen interactions with the Federal government before I leave my front door. The alarm goes off, and

The lights (subject to Federal emissions standards at the power plant) come one and
I go to the shower (subject to both EPA water standards and EPA waste disposal requirements) and
Brush my teeth with toothpaste (subject to FDA requirements) and
Put on my clothes (subject to The Mrs. wanting me to not look too cool in public) and
Go into the Wilder Morning Den and drink a cup of (USDA approved) coffee and
Have some (USDA approved) bacon and
Pick up my (Federal Highway Administration Approved) keys and
Check my (FCC approved) cellphone for messages and
Walk upon my (Building Code Approved) floor and
Open my door (which is made of lead and plutonium) and
Start my (Insert a zillion Federal regulations here) car and drive to work.

Oddly, this little demonstration undersells the impact of government in my life. There are dozens of regulations that I skipped because, well, I’ve been drinking. Blame Jim Beam®.

This is just the setup, however.

What goes in your head?

I’ve told you how I try to make a post better by increasing your receptiveness to it. My motives are simple – I am not trying to sell you anything except ideas. And those Ideas are (mostly) the ideas of the most brilliant people who have ever lived on Earth. I try to sneak a few of mine in, because, hey, my beard is awesome, so I might have built up some wisdom.

But who is trying to manipulate the ideas that go inside your head?

The Mrs. had a complement the other day. She couldn’t listen to mainstream media coverage on a certain topic because Truth that I shared with her had infiltrated her brain. Every Single Time the media tried to lie to her, she reacted in revulsion because . . . the Truth had set her free.

What goes in your head?

What do you feel that is real? Why is that you feel that thing?

Those are very, very difficult questions, and are not for the weak of heart – what if you understood that most things you felt were truth were instead, lies?

This is a devastating lens. What lies do you believe in because they are pretty little lies? The more you examine them, the more they fall apart.

Communism sounds good on paper. Unless you’re reading a history book.

I promise you that I have done my best to make every word as Truthful as I can make it. But I ask of you this, can you understand the immense amount of propaganda you have been fed nearly every day of your life?

Step back.

What, really, is the Truth?

There is an entire industry made of tens of thousands who want to feed your head. They want to bring their ideas into yours. There is an amazing amount of money being spent to try to influence you.

What, then will you choose?

The pretty little lies, or the Truth that you know exists underneath?