Communism – Page 27 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

I guess if Google® made Lucky Charms©, they’d be tragically malicious?

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 wonder what narrative Facebook™, Google©, Twitter®, and YouTube™ will try to spin for them?

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

These are from Ricky this month:

CW chatter continues….

https://www.startribune.com/are-we-ready-for-a-civil-war-lite/571920212/?refresh=true

https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/07/29/stephen-kessler-is-trump-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/

…with Republicans promoting a vote for Biden to stop a CW…

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/6568575-Candidates-View-Minnesota-trying-to-prevent-a-civil-war

https://time.com/5870475/never-trumpers-2020-election/

…and the Washington-Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine invoking Godwin’s Law to prevent a descent into Nazi-ism…

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/23/portland-fascism-trump-election/

…while the MSM maintains the threat is all Boogaloo Bois…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/american-boogaloo-meme-or-terrorist-movement/613843/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53269361

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/16/civil-war-20-the-boogaloo-movement-is-a-wake-up-call-for-america/#206ec67b71ab

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/28/conservative-armed-militias-protests-coronavirus/?arc404=true

…and not peaceful Antifa….

https://www.csis.org/analysis/who-are-antifa-and-are-they-threat

https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-329-since-1994-antifa-killed-none-2020-7

https://www.csis.org/analysis/tactics-and-targets-domestic-terrorists

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/30/anarchists-and-antifa-not-according-to-the-data/

…all an example of the ongoing propaganda war…

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2020/07/21/propaganda-rules-america/

https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-the-medias-insane-whitewashing-of-portlands-violence-2083324/

https://fee.org/articles/vandalism-is-violence-destructive-riots-are-not-just-property-damage/

…part of a different kind of civil war, with skirmishes over property lines, not state lines; families, not soldiers….

https://ammo.com/articles/war-on-suburbs-how-hud-housing-policies-became-weapon-for-social-change

https://mises.org/wire/why-marxist-organizations-blm-seek-dismantle-western-nuclear-family

…while real battles heat up….

https://apnews.com/1dd1bb39093a3691f4e78093787ab877

https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/how-seattle-chaz-got-chopped/

https://farleftwatch.com/antifa-militia-group-encourages-facebook-followers-to-shoot-federal-agents-in-the-face/

…as costs mount….

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/george-floyd-protests-expensive-civil-disturbance-us-history

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riots-designated-a-catastrophe-in-multiple-states-a-first-for-pcs/

https://www.artemis.bm/news/riot-losses-said-up-to-1bn-in-u-s-retentions-may-protect-reinsurance/

https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2020/07/06/298012.htm#:~:text=Rioting%20set%20off%20during%20protests,a%20single%20retailer%2C%20he%20said.

https://www.genre.com/knowledge/blog/riots-and-civil-commotion-disquieting-times-ahead-en.html

Friday Books, Because I Said So

“It’s the most pointless book since How To Learn French was translated into French.” – Blackadder The Third

I finished three books during the quarantine. That’s A LOT of coloring.

Books.

I had a great-grand boss (three levels up in the company) once upon a time who was fairly philosophical in an industry not at all noted for philosophy. One day he showed up in my office, unannounced. We sat and talked for several hours about history and corporate strategy and got along very well. It probably didn’t hurt my career with that particular company.

One thing that my great-grand boss said during that meeting always stuck with me. I’m not sure if it was a quote that was original to him or not, but the quote was, “there is a way that minds can speak to each other through the ages. Books.” I thought that was pretty powerful, nearly as powerful as when The Mrs. mentioned she was going to kill off some of the characters in the book she was writing. The downside is that The Mrs. is writing her autobiography.

Books have been with us for thousands of years, but the earliest books were just a taking spoken word and carving it into a stone or writing it on papyrus or parchment. The true development of the written word came later, where complex ideas that transcended conversation were formed. The medium truly changed the message. The image of a frontier boy, book in one hand and plow in the other was formed. Heck, when I was working gathering with Pa Wilder I remember reading a book on anti-gravity, which was really hard to put down.

On the plus side, I did get a book.

We are on a journey as a world to becoming post-literate. We can still read, but the idea of developing longer, more complex ideas and widely sharing them has gone a bit the way of an endangered species. The ideas that were formerly expressed in literature seem to be passing by the wayside in many ways. The last time I picked up a Time magazine at the doctor’s office, it seemed like I was reading a magazine written for not-so-bright kids.

Is this on purpose?

But for me, books were a formative experience. They remain a part of my life. I had another post planned for tonight, but decided I’d throw out a few books that just came to mind. Were these the best books I’ve ever read? No, this isn’t a best-of list. But, arbitrarily I added some rules: the books have to be at least 20 years old, and no author gets more than one. It’s obvious I love The Lord of the Rings (Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths) since I wrote about that last week, so it’s not on the list.

It’s mainly a list of books I just want to talk about today. Why? Because. So there. Feel free to toss the ones you want to add in the comments.

The Starship that can’t pay back a student loan? The Millennial Falcon.

One of the first books that came to mind was Starship Troopers. Robert A. Heinlein was a favorite author of mine growing up – he wrote a series of “juvenile” books in the 1950’s that I think are his best work. And of those? Starship Troopers is my favorite. I read it in junior high, and it was thrilling and thought provoking. Mobile Infantry? An amazing concept.

Starship Troopers isn’t the parody movie of the 1990’s. Nope. It’s a real discussion of the tension in the world between liberty and responsibility. It’s a discussion of honor. It’s also a depiction of a world where there is, dare I say, a spirit of nationalism? It doesn’t have Heinlein’s later squishy and retrospectively creepy, um, “free love” ideas. I’ve made both Pugsley and The Boy read it, as I’ve made them read the next three books on this list.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley was one my seventh grade teacher gave me to read. If she were still teaching in 2020, she would probably be shot for that. Huxley could see the future of conformity – the idea wasn’t that we ever had to ban books, we could just make them irrelevant by replacing them with amusements and intoxicants.

Into this world, Huxley injects a free radical – a handsome blonde individual that was born free and has awareness that the average citizen doesn’t have: John the Savage. Hmm. It’s almost like John was wilder?

Nah.

Anyway, the book for me was haunting. I got to the end, and had to do a full stop. And re-read. Then I got it.

Most babies are born at womb temperature.

I think that Brave New World was what we were living through in the United States from, say, 2000 until 2017. It’s a template for control through amusement. But what happens when the state runs out of other people’s money to spend? That’s the next book.

1984, by George Orwell. I read this one in eighth grade. I can recall reading about the rats while sitting in class on a warm spring day. Many people don’t know that Orwell was a committed socialist until he ran into actual communists during the Spanish Civil War, and at that point he was disgusted and repelled by what he saw. When exposure to actual communists makes you anti-communist, what does that tell you about the reality of communism?

Nah. Antifa® is sure it will work this time.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. The original movie was kind-of awful in many ways. The 2000-ish miniseries was okay. I’m sure it will be butchered in the latest adaptation that’s due out soon. But the book remains the book. It was enjoyable, but when I read it, it was confounding – it seemed like every decision the protagonist (Paul Atreides) made, I would have made the opposite decision.

The story is fairly rich in plot, and has truly wonderful villains. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was pure evil, but a smart, cunning evil. I always thought that Orson Welles would have been perfect for the role, since Baron Harkonnen was really fat, and Orson Welles had already eaten Ohio just to prepare for this role.

Some people call me the spice cowboy, some call me the Duke of love, some people call me Muad’dib, because I speak of the sandworm of love.

This is the novel that really exposed me to the idea of resource constraints, and spice is certainly a thinly-veiled metaphor for oil. Can a lack of resources bring down an empire? Certainly – that’s why China is working so feverishly to set up systems that bring it all the resources it needs. And why we’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East.

Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. A mysterious space vessel shows up in the Solar System and is using the Sun to slingshot to a new trajectory. The astronauts sent to explore the vessel find lots of cool things, but no actual aliens, which remains part of the mystery.

I got this book when I was a kid of 10 or so. How? Some library sent us a catalog. Apparently, the Wilder Compound up on Wilder Mountain was viewed as so remote that they sent a list of books to us along with news that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected president. I put a checkmark by the three books I wanted and sent them the form, and they sent the books to me along with a prepaid return envelope and a new list of books I could check out.

Who paid for it? I have no idea, but they stopped doing it after two years or so.

The book? Not really great by the standards of today. The part that sealed the deal for me when I read it as a kid was the last line, which apparently was added in the very last revision. I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone read it in 2020, but when I was 11 years old and read it?

Magic.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. I remember this book because I devoured it in a single fall afternoon – the first book I picked up and didn’t put down until I was finished since my victory over the Cat wearing a Hat. Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang takes place after an apocalypse occurs and for (reasons!) the people decided to reproduce through cloning rather than the usual way. But a boy is born who isn’t a clone, and manages to, well, be human. It won a Hugo™. I just wish my nomination for a Hugo® would have gotten me a better place than sixth out of a field of five.

Oh well.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This is a deeply nerdy novel. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s fun. But it’s nerdy. Really nerdy. The novel revolves around codebreaking and looted WW II gold. It’s also the only novel on this list where The Boy and I met the author, twice. The first time, The Boy was seven, and I dragged him to an author reading.

The Viking longboats had bar codes on the side, so when they got home they could Scandinavian.

He acted like a seven year old. The Boy, not Neal. The next time I took The Boy to meet Neal Stephenson was when he was sixteen. The Boy’s favorite author in the world was at that time? Neal Stephenson. I made him apologize to Mr. Stephenson, who played along and said that he’d never recovered from The Boy’s previous antics.

Good times. If you like this book, Stephenson has several thousand pages of related books that are similarly Asperger-y .

So, what books do you want to add to the list and why?

How Bad The Economic Crash Really Is

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

HC pointed out this picture. How could I resist?

Last week it was announced that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States collapsed. If you’re not aware, GDP is simply a measure of how much PEZ® is produced in the economy of a country. Okay, it’s not just PEZ©, other (lesser) goods and services are included, too. Call it a rough guess at how well the economic machine in the country is working.

“Collapse” is a word that gets overused by the news media. They want to pump up your fear so you’ll click on their article and give them $0.000043 per click. They don’t make much money at $0.000043 per click, so they need a *lot* of clicks (87,209) to pay for their daily soy latte. The best way to get that many clicks? Either scare people, or provide nudity. Or, if you’re Kamala Harris, do both at the same time.

In this case, however, the use of the term “collapse” is entirely appropriate when 32.9% of the economy disappears. And that dismal number is after an unprecedented borrowing and spending. The US had a GDP of about $20 trillion in 2018. This year, so far, there has been about $5 trillion in extra spending and balance sheet expansion.

So, $10 trillion in half a year, reduced by the 32.9% lowering in GDP takes us to $7 trillion or so. That’s how big they’re saying the economy is. That’s bad. But if you subtract out the $2 trillion in “stimulus” funds that takes you down to $5 trillion.

Borrow a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Borrow a billion dollars, and you own the bank. Borrow $26.6 trillion dollars? You are the United States.

Even if NONE of the Federal Reserve’s® balance sheet where they sprinkled money into the stock market got added to the GDP figure, we’re talking a 50% reduction in the economy in real terms.

50%.

Half.

The economy isn’t an economy at this point – it’s a smoking crater. Well, it would be a smoking crater if there was enough money to pay for the smoke. Yet the Fed™ had pumped enough cash into the stock market to keep it at near record highs. Me? I avoided that and bought a warehouse full of chicken soup stock cubes. Now I’m a bouillonaire.

The solution to our economic crisis from the Left is to keep sending checks to everyone. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the Weimar Republic mentality. “We can print money and send it to people, that’s all we need to have a functioning economy.” It’s the post-economy economy. All we have to do is make PowerPoints® for each other and wait for our Leftybux payments and then we can go down to the grocery store where the food mysteriously appears each month.

Wish someone would have mentioned that.

If we were going to just send money to a few people to pay for their rent, it would probably work out okay. We’ve been printing money for years and giving welfare based on debt for fifty years. Heck, hundreds of people in town are getting unemployment right now, I even know some. I guess I finally have some friends with benefits. But that’s not good for the economy.

The result is stunningly predictable. As I said before, we’d see deflation, and then inflation. Deflation isn’t universal. Some parts of the economy are working, some aren’t. Inflation has shown up first in food and things people need. Eventually, even toys, say balloons, will show inflation. Inflation will show up later everywhere.

But not yet.

What is showing up is that people in the rest of the world are starting to do the same math that I did up above. How many years can a country’s primary production be debt and expect the rest of the world to ignore that? Well, in the last six months, gold is up 30% and silver is up nearly 50%. Part of that is to be expected – uncertainty driver up precious metal prices.

The Mrs. was yelling at me last night. Thank heavens! That reminded me we were out of duct tape.

In the last two months, however, the United States dollar has dropped by 5% versus a basket of currencies called the USD index. That means that people are liking the USD less, because they see the weakening of the economy. It’s bad enough that my tattoo of $100 bills on my hips is now a waist of money.

It’s tempting to think that all the stuff is there to restart the economy. And in many cases it is just sitting there. The restaurant that closed down is still physically there. The stoves and ovens are there. The refrigerator is still there. But the need for it isn’t there. People have less money to go out and eat, so there’s less of a need for restaurants. Heck, even our best fancy restaurant with a pork theme had to close. I’ll miss Swine Dining.

A growing economy is a virtuous cycle – new business spawns new business. A shrinking economy is a vicious cycle – each job lost at that restaurant has ripples further down the economic chain – the waitress can’t make rent if she doesn’t have a job that generates tips.

Banks have stopped (in many cases) loaning money. Why loan cash you have into an environment where interest rates are at 3.3% in an uncertain economy? Vox Day pointed out this disturbing story showing a collapse in bank lending (LINK).

Yes, collapse is the right word. I’ve long been on record that the economic system of debt-based welfare could only last for a certain amount of time. I had picked 2026 or 2027 before it folded up the tent, and given that markets can stay irrational for a long time due to inertia, pushing into the 2030’s was reasonable.

I had an irrational fear of a speed bump. But I’m getting over it.

Watching a complex system fail always provides unexpected consequences. The system has been headed toward failure for years. Without the extraordinary efforts of 2008, it probably would have collapsed then. I think it was far closer to collapse than most people were aware.

The downside of putting off a system failure is that the pressure from the underlying causes keeps building up. When it inevitably finally does fail, it fails spectacularly, and much worse than if failure had happened earlier. When huge failures happen, sometimes civilization doesn’t recover for hundreds of years.

We have seen, again and again, the concept of systems becoming irrelevant. Sometimes, it’s technology that makes them irrelevant the way that the combination of the Internet and Wal-Mart® has destroyed tens of thousands of small stores. The Black Death altered the economic balance of Europe, and destroyed feudalism while kick-starting the Renaissance.

I hope Covid-20 is different than Covid-19. I hate plague-rism.

What will our current crisis lead to? The end of Globalism? A world without debt? Free PEZ?

It’s hard to say. But the birth of any new civilization is painful.

Not as painful as having to admit they want a soy latte, but painful.

Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings

After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits. That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.

I’m probably in the minority on the following thought: there is actual evil in the world. The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.

Psychological problems.
Different cultures.
Bad parents.
No parents.
Being my ex-wife.

But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.

I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.

Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free. It was good. Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading. In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie. But then I was off to middle school.

I stumbled across Tolkien again. He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was: The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep. Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.

Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.

I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.

I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring. The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.

Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times. He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:

“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”

A Nazgûl floats into a bar. The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’

In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now. The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.

In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots. Murder rates are up in those cities. Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty. That doesn’t make the news.

Why?

The riots are described as peaceful protests. To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year. They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values. And what about all of the uprooted lives?

That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating. Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.

Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.

I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits. This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.

Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant. The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.

I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.

Yes, I believe True Evil® exists. The joy for me is, knowing that True Evil™ exists, I am also sure that True Good© exists, too, even though destroying the One Ring turned Frodo into a hobbitual drinker. I’ll turn it back over to Tolkien for one final quote:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

Oh, sure, Tolkien can write. But can he meme?

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres

I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.

Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:

Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.

Why do I bring this up?

If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.

This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”

“Move.”

I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.

“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”

“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.

Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.

I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.

“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”

The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.

My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.

“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”

After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.

That’s what scared The Mrs.

I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.

Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.

And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.

The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.

This is a true statement.

If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.

The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.

And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.

Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.