Competence – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Erosion of Trust: The Secrecy State Sucks

“We’re drowning in secrecy, and the lifeguard’s on their payroll.” – The X Files

“Hello, is the anonymous NSA hotline?”
“Yes, John Wilder, how can we help you?”

As near as I can tell, in 1970 the U.S. government was still highly trusted. Sure, there was Vietnam, but we had landed men on the Moon and I’d suggest that, while trust wasn’t as high as it had been in the 1950s with the “super science will save us” feeling that culminated in Apollo, it was still pretty high.

I think the Nixon takedown is when the mistrust started to metastasize, though I’m open to other suggestions. Regardless, this is the time when the lid comes off.

The Nixon takedown was big – the tapes showed Nixon’s complicity in a petty break-in to get information from the Democrats that was entirely unnecessary due to Nixon’s popularity. Plus it was sloppy – I think they picked the locks with Twizzlers™.

But the even bigger impact was a collapse in trust. At least one person who was there at the time, Geoff Shepard, thinks that Nixon was taken down by the security apparatus, more commonly known as the Deep State now when prosecutors colluded with judges and suppressed evidence in order to get Nixon out of office.

Does that remind anyone of the Russian Collusion Hoax?

I bought a toothpaste called “Death”, and now every morning I have a brush with Death.

Add in revelations in the seventies about Operation Mockingbird coming in 1976, where it was alleged that the CIA, operating in the United States, had manipulated the news media (over 400 journalists) to influence the American public. Oh, and the CIA program MKUltra, a program that tested drugs and psychological torture on hundreds if not thousands of unwitting civilians.

Like Ted Kaczynski. If he hadn’t been MKUltra’d, perhaps he would never have developed fascination with the US Postal System.

Nixon’s fall opened the floodgates, and 1976 was the year the dirty laundry really started showing up, skidmarks and all.

Also, in 1976 the Select Committee on Assassinations came to the conclusion that JFK’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, but couldn’t figure out who was responsible. I mean, it’s congress, right?

1976 was a year when trust began to evaporate, and that trust evaporation was really about seeing what people did behind the cloak of secrecy. Gallup™ polls showed that trust in government in that year was 36%, down from 73% in the 1950s.

Some Indian wrote a book for nervous surgeons: The Calmer Suture.

Now, do I believe that secrets can and should exist? Yes, I do. I remember coaching a game of PeeWee football, and wanting to see if a particular trick play was legal, so I went into the rules, and found this gem, “Deception is the heart of football.” I had never thought of it that way, but that’s 100% correct, and the same would be the case in war, so, yeah, there are the need for some secrets.

It’s clear, however, that we’re doing secrecy wrong. I’d like to think that we were on the right track to defang the security state, but it’s actually headed the wrong way. In 2001, the Patriot Act was passed into law in October, not six weeks after the 9/11 attack. The law was 342 pages, and was amazingly complex, since most of what it did was amend other existing laws, you know, turning “shall not” into “shall”.

Don’t worry, though, we’ve got a special court that was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Oh, the FISA court gives the government a yes 99.9% of the time – over 78,000 requests, and only TWELVE denied? Well, they said no at least once, so they’re not a rubber stamp or anything. What’s the motto of the FISA court? “Yes, Daddy.” And you don’t want me to get into what their Tinder® profile says.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs. Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post. The revelations were huge: emails, chats, browsing histories of anyone that the FBI or CIA or NSA wanted to look at. And the NSA used the “Five Eyes” sources, so if they were prohibited from snooping on a person, boom, just have the Aussies do it for us.

And it’s certain they are still doing it. Secrecy has enabled these nightmares.

Speaking of still doing it, those 51 former intelligence officials that said Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation? It’s the Security State trying to get its preferred candidate elected. And why are Epstein’s records still not public? Saving it for a rainy day?

I hear that Epstein used to high-five his guards, but the last one left him hanging.

Although I don’t have any evidence for this statement, I am nearly certain that the Deep State is still committing horrors under the cloak of classified information, things that no politician sees. It is certain that this information is used for political blackmail and control on a regular basis.

Paging Epstein, anyone?

The government still echoes the worst of Project Mockingbird, putting pressure on the social media outlets to censor information they don’t like, from COVID to anything pro-Trump. The FBI flagged over THREE THOUSAND accounts for censorship. Secrecy has gone from a tool to keep us safe to a weapon to keep us in line.

The physicist Eric Weinstein thinks that string theory (in physics) was created to stop actual, useful research in physics. Why? To distract the Russians (and now Chinese) because you can’t classify physics, and someone in .gov thinks that there are some significant physics applications they don’t want the world to see, especially related to quantum gravity.

Please don’t ask me where all my cats went.

Do we need to end secrecy entirely?

Certainly not, but when the CIA still holds that lemon juice as invisible ink is a state secret, we live in Clown World. Here are my suggestions:

First, no secrets, at all, after sixty years. Okay, maybe fusion bomb design, but even the Pakistanis can figure out atomic bomb design when they can’t figure out can openers, so we’ve got one secret. Maybe set up a board that will allow one secret per year related to technology that the other side hasn’t figured out yet. But only big things. Like time travel. Or the feared anti-PEZ™ bomb that eats all the PEZ© and leaves small pictures of Rosie O’Donnell everywhere.

Second, after sixty years, absolutely no redactions in the released documents.

Third, someone needs to watch the watchers. There needs to be an oversight board, and protection for whistleblowers like Snowden that show blatantly illegal conduct. How do we prevent them from being co-opted by the Security State? That’s a hard question. Maybe have a clean AI review them?

Fourth, reform and fragment the CIA, the NSA, and most of the FBI. Certainly, take guns away from them (and the ATF, but that goes without saying). After Ruby Ridge and Waco, it’s obvious these children can’t be allowed to play with firearms unsupervised.

We need to break the glowie machine so that it can’t police itself.

The Indian philosopher said: “I think, therefore I scam”.

Transparency in government isn’t a luxury; it is survival for freedom. We need to demand Sunlight. From a CIA document (declassified):

“The free society must have confidence that its oversight mechanisms have adequate access to secret material to make judgements, and that this judgmental process is being exercised independently. There has to be trust that secrecy is not being used against the best interests of the free society; that the activities which are being protected by secrecy are being conducted effectively . . . . It is this confidence and this trust in the oversight mechanisms which has broken down.”

This was made public in 1996, when things were certainly better than they are today.

Me? I think that if we can build trust with Sunlight, maybe well get back to some of that super-science optimism of the 1950s. On to Mars, maybe using quantum gravity propulsion . . . .

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole. I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union. As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination. In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing? They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way. They had the institutions: colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose. They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power. Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor. How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks. The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found)

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves. This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof? Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it. Yay death!
Wanting to have Zero Population Growth©, at least in white populations living in traditionally white countries.
Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first. This happens in roughly this order:

Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal? What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies. The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see. Men are women? Truth is a lie? Strength is weakness? Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either. They’re currently working on “messaging”. What is messaging? It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong. The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them. The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

Men are no different than women,
Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
Being a woman is something anyone can be,
Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change. One of those changes has and will be in economics. I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight? Certainly, it will. But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist? If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society. Ha! Just kidding. They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested. DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is. And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland? You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated: the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon. No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit. The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything. Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

Ukraine versus Russia.
Palestine versus Israel.
Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant. I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion: I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me. And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it. News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion. Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details. I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy: what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary: if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away? Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really. And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them. I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board. It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe. People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game. But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares. In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased. Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral. I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity. Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders. Just not our borders. Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction? Not a problem.

Oh, Europe. I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians. And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go. If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about. The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20^th century. Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin. Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic. I guess I can see that. Ma Wilder cared what I thought. Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him. Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador. Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much. Why? The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right. When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first. And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

Trump’s Axe

“By this axe, I rule!” – Kull the Conqueror

My email password has been hacked. This is the third time I had to rename my cat.

Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026. Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment. Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic.

But it might be necessary.

There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot. Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there.

The impact of his efforts was minimal. Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts. He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.

If a Gnome is a pimp, does he manage the garden hoes?

Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out. Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.

Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him.

That changes a guy.

Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe. During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders. The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.

The rot is deep: it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left.

The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax. The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.

Allergies around here are so bad in springtime that the tweakers turn their meth back into Sudafed™.

The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war. Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began. Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure.

And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently. Before they fried differently.

But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War. The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.

By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”. Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost. MKUltra? It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program. Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later?

Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?

Is a line of people waiting to buy that doll for girls a Barbiqueue ?

Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets. But we should have about 12 of them. Which 12? I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function: an enemy. The rest of the secrets? We put them where no one would look: in the middle of a Disney® movie.

I can’t see that we have one. Russia? Putin asked to join NATO in 2000. Are the Russians a bit skeevy? Sure they are. Are they a threat to us? Only in a nuclear fashion. After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations. We didn’t.

Why?

The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.

The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state. Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink. Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.

“Let me tell you: you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer. Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?

Guess that makes me the pot.

The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks. Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs. When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively.

Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution? Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit. Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.

Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price. The people who have all of the climate “solutions”? They are the GloboLeftElite.

The axe is required.

Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift. What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows. GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.

Yet there’s a goal in here: a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader.

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away. There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole.

It’s ugly. It’s necessary. And it might just be enough.

All without building a single GULAG. Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists. They need REEEEEEEEE-education.

Deflatormaus, Or, Watch The Economy Rise From The Ashes Of The Left

“It’ll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.” – 300

Crime doesn’t pay is outdated. “Crime doesn’t pay as well as politics” is probably more accurate. (All memes “as found”)

As a kind poster on X® pointed out earlier this month, 20% of America’s “jobs” are essentially a Universal Basic Income for the GloboLeft. Think of it as welfare for the woke.

This 20% are government jobs, sure, but they’re also the jobs at all of the NGO foundations and organizations that siphon off your tax money to do things that nobody but the GloboLeftElite wants and that they certainly don’t want voters to know about.

Think: billions of your tax dollars going to induce illegal aliens to move to the United States. Trump, however, has started cutting the funding and this has already had a dramatic effect: D.C.’s home prices are already down 10%, and the soy-latte crowd are already feeling the pain.

None of this is new. As I’ve written in the past, Peter Turchin calls the process of the GloboLeftElite extracting cash from the populace the Wealth Pump. And, if you control the Wealth Pump, why not pump part of the wealth to the people who vote for you?

How GloboLeft are government workers? 75%? 80%? I’d imagine at most NGOs the number is nearing 95%, and the other 5% are Green party voters.

When I was young, Ma Wilder would feed me and say, “here comes the choo-choo train”. If I didn’t eat, she wouldn’t untie me from the tracks.

The NGO cash is especially damaging. It circulates through a network of intertwined foundations and charities and think-tanks whose boards often are the same cast of characters. Not all grants fall into this cycle, but plenty of the grants do.

Now the cash is being tracked, and it is being shut down at the source. It’s also likely that tens to hundreds of thousands of .gov employees will soon not be. Now, generally I feel compassion. I like people. Really.

But when it comes to .gov and NGO jobs, they’re not jobs, many of them are just members of a publicly financed voting bloc. Just go onto Reddit® and read the unhinged reactions to being asked to write five simple sentences about what they did last week. Five sentences. Even at the slothful speed of, say, Health and Human Services, it shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes and a smoke break.

Just work through the tears.

The only reason to resist it? If the employee added no value. That’s it. The only reason. I refuse to feel sorry for work-from-homers afraid about losing their remote-work herbal-wrap lifestyles.

But this brings out an interesting concept: deflation. During the Biden Residency, people on the GloboLeft couldn’t understand why flyover America was angry. The had no idea, since their lifestyles of Pilates in the morning before going to buy more ill-advised yoga pants wasn’t impacted at all. They were, as I noted, living the “$90,000 a year for making PowerPoints™ about gender” dream.

If they’re unemployed, their spending dries up. If government spending dries up as well, or even if the growth of government spending dries up, well, there goes your inflation. Those who used to tip baristas will fight to become baristas because they don’t have any other quantifiable skills.

First, who voted for Ukrainians to psyop us? Second, is there even $140,000,000 in cabbage, vodka and despair in all of Ukraine?

In fact, on the higher end, you could see cuts that would amount to 5% to 7% of GDP. Oh, and Starbucks™ just announced it is laying off 1,100 people right as D.O.G.E. is attacking the heart of the lair.

Tax cuts and regulation cuts, however, will end up increasing real jobs that add to economic wealth. Welders and truckers and men who build things, and not just the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate market. Berkshire-Hathaway™ has a record amount of cash sitting in a pile, all ready to pounce on assets as Wall Street reacts because they see this coming.

Tariffs won’t be as bad as anyone thought. One recent study predicts a whopping 0.3% increase in consumer prices related to tariffs. In the best case, we see a D.C. and blue city bust, while flyover country booms.

How many people have the Department of Education educated? How much energy has the Department of Energy added to the grid?

But that’s after the recession. We’re due one, and we’re due a market correction, and not a small one. Here’s hoping that we have the good sense to not try to “fix” things like they did during the Great Depression, but instead have a short, sharp recession to clean out the rot that has creeped in over the last 15 years.

The other side of the tunnel is bright, however.

Imagine:

5 million few fed/NGO jobs.
10 regulations hacked out for every new regulation.
Productivity jumping and real (not inflated) wages jumping since illegals have been rooted out and sent back to their homes.
Free PEZ™, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone!

Not everyone is going to win, however. If D.C. is finally hollowed out, home prices there will crater without the GloboLeft UBI jobs. Home prices there drop 25%. 50%.

What happens when a middle-aged CIA dude has to find a real job?

The other downside is that blue urban areas explode with violence. They lose the NGO cash, they lose the loose GloboLeftPartyGirl spending, and crime will spike, especially if Kennedy makes EBT funding work only for actual food and not pizza rolls.

Is a crime spike of 20% realistic? 40%?

Guess those Soros District Attorneys weren’t a bargain, after all.

But this won’t happen in Texas. Not in Florida. Not in Montana. Those states mostly flourish. Ranchers don’t need diversity consultants, avocado body balm, or hot stone carbuncle massage.

But let’s not spend a lot of tears on the GloboLeft who no longer are consuming kale smoothies. They didn’t build anything, they just consumed.

Remember all those transgender Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc? Yeah, me neither.

But, hey, good news!

I’ll bet you can get a place around D.C. pretty cheap nowadays. Maybe might even have that fresh GloboLeftist tears smell.

I love winning.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

Movies, Foreigners, Blazing Saddles, And The Fight For Your Mind

“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man

Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.

Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm. Gradually sequels became popular. A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original. But they would make money, even if they were crappy.

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed. How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws? None. Zero. I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars. Revenues from China in the 1970s. From what mud hut theater? Paid in what? Chickens?

Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage. and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs. But the audience was different. Avengers: Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51^st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas. Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included. The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.

Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences. Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again. So, movies have changed because the audience has changed. And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.

Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.

The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks. Trial mix.

But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever. One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing. By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry. 12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest. Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists. The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.

This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts. How bad is this movie? During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room. This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors. Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.

When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction. Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:

To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in. But after years of having woke slammed into my face? My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.

The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.

Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise. One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”

My response was rather pointed, “Why not? Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love? Is it the normalization of gays? Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff? Is it the interracial romance? Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”? Was it shooting a hole in a Bible? ”

No. It’s racial slurs. But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes. But I recognize it. Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black. Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?

Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.

What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone? Sans Sheriff.

The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville. This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.

I really hate this movie. It is the worst sort of subversion. The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s. Their lives are in black and white. Literally. That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color. When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color. A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.

The result?

Color.

The message is clear. Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring. Live your life. Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.

Pleasantville is anything but. Obviously, critics loved it. Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.

Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998. It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance. Be proud of that deviance.

Hmm. Proud. Pride month. Got it.

In 2025? It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie. The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37^th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.

Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?

Bad Luck, Diversity, And Bank Robbers

“Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony?” – Kill Bill Volume 2

I got mugged by six dwarves. Not Happy.

There is such a thing as bad luck. A neighbor of mine told me a story of when he was a kid. He and his friends were throwing dirt clods at another group of kids. Now, I remember doing exactly that. Dirt clods were perfect for throwing because when they hit the ground, they exploded in a puff of dirt that I pretended was a grenade.

Pretending I was blowing up my friends. Huh, sounds like a Unabomber childhood when I put it that way, doesn’t it?

Regardless, my neighbor said that one of the other kids got a dirt clod in the eye. Why threw it? I don’t think they ever figured that out, but my friend was the only one sued. Why?

Every cloud has a silver lining. Except a mushroom cloud. That’s probably cobalt or strontium.

His dad owned a bank. As I recall from the story, his dad’s insurance company ended up settling the claim. No one said, “Oh, bad luck.” There certainly doesn’t seem to be a place for bad luck in our world, but sometimes bad luck really does happen. I mean, once upon a time a fortune teller that I would have to suffer with eight years of bad luck.

“And then things get better?”

“No, you stop suffering because you get used to it.”

To me, this seems unfair, but remember Law School Lesson 101: never sue poor people. It’s a variation of the Willie Sutton school of law, when he responded to the question of why he robbed banks with the answer of “Because that’s where the money is.”

I want to own a bakery just so when someone walks in and points at a cake and asks, “Is this gluten free?” I can respond, “No, that’s $16.50.”

That’s one part of the equation, but the second part makes it really rough: massive damage awards. Ask Alex Jones about the nonsensical $1 billion jury award against him. Why not a trillion? It’s not like Alex Jones has a billion dollars, and it’s not like they can strip being “Alex Jones” from Alex Jones, so if they take Infowars™, well, he’ll be in business the next day with a new company. And if they take that, yet a new company.

Poor people are lawsuit-proof because they don’t have money. Alex Jones is lawsuit-proof because (like James O’Keefe) his company is him.

Since most companies can’t hide behind the idea of being Alex Jones, they have to have a defense. The defense?

Standards.

David Hogg has personally sold more AR-15s than Palmetto State Armory®.

If a company does the same thing the same way all of the time, and if every other company does that exact same thing the same way every time, it’s now a Standard. While a company can certainly be sued if they screw up, it’s a pretty good defense to say what Ma Wilder described as a weak excuse, “Well, everybody else is doing it.”

So, if you ask Proctor and Gamble™ if they would jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it, the answer is probably something like: “If that would help us actualize projected profits in the near term and help build organic growth in the sector, that would be a strategy we would engage with.” Or, in human terms, yes, yes they would jump off a cliff if everyone does it. Sadly, this throttles innovative products.

This also leads to a herd mentality in large companies. “Does Disney™ have DEI? Well, looks like we need DEI, too.” These companies realize that there is safety in numbers. Sure, they want to be different, but they all want to be different in the exact same legally non-actionable way.

If being a diversity hire is a good thing, why don’t we publicly name them so they can celebrate it?

This (in part) has led to the extreme pliability of the companies to Woke propaganda, and their quick rebound once Trump was elected. Was Google© all in for Kamala? You bet. Has Google™ swapped their maps to “Gulf of America” at the same time removing Black History Month©, Pride Month™ and scrapped targets to not hire white guys?

Yes, yes they have.

This surprised me. I was expecting these companies to keep being part of the ResISTanCe since they actively opposed Trump during his first term. Either they were neutered during and by the pandemic, or they’re horribly afraid of Trump and Elon. Or they’re worried about the inevitable wrath of Barron when he reaches his full height of 65 feet (1 kiloliter).

In the end, there really is “bad luck”. Now, I don’t think that everything is bad luck, I mean, when that double amputee tried to rob a bank? That wasn’t bad luck.

After all, he wasn’t even armed.

Why Do They Want To Replace You? Control, Oh, And To Increase This Quarter’s Profits

“I am Iron Man. The suit and I are one. To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself, which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution – depending on what state you’re in.” – Iron Man 2

What’s the difference between an Indian and an African elephant? One’s an elephant.

I had intended to keep the posts between now and the next Civil War 2.0 update fairly light in content – fewer serious topics and more just “fun” stuff. But, no matter how much I try to get out, they keep dragging me back in. What inspired this post was the brutal civil war on X© this week over H-1B visas.

The H-1B visa program is a program that was (originally) set up to bring in workers in extremely specialized jobs, which required a unique talent or body of knowledge. Very specifically, the intent wasn’t to displace Americans (it says) but rather help employers who cannot otherwise find these skills.

No shortage of American rock star students here . . . .

Obviously, that’s government bullshit, and the program is one of the most abused government programs, which says quite a bit.

Who abuses it?

Mainly people from India – Indian companies and Indian workers, though plenty of “American” companies abuse the program as well.

How?

Well, Indian companies abuse the program by being consultancies: they essentially air drop in tens of thousands of Indians who they’ll rent to you so that they can do whatever it is you want them to do: accounting, programming, or running a cash register.

Running a cash register is a specialized skill that Americans can’t do? Yes, if you believe a company up in the Northeast which applied to sponsor $22,000 a year convenience store clerks on H-1B visas.

But, like I said, “American” companies abuse the system, too. In 2014, 250 American IT employees at Disney World© were laid off, but they were forced to train their Indian H-1B replacements. Want to know why I have a beef with Disney®? This is certainly a part of it.

Musk defended this program, noting that it should have a minimum wage of (he said) at least $120,000 to keep up with inflation. I looked up the H-1B workers he employed at Tesla® in Austin, Texas. The process engineers were making in the low $80,000s. Not bad, right? Well, it is when you compare them to the national average, which is $94,000. Elon’s hires aren’t the 0.01% “rock stars”. Nope, he’s hiring a garage band that you can pay in weed and porn magazines that will sleep on the sofa.

To be fair, this latter analysis assumes that “Indians” are a homogeneous population, and it’s likely that there are subgroups with higher I.Q. Is this the basis of the caste system? That would bring the numbers up, some, but the lower castes would likely have much lower functional I.Q. to make up the difference. I’d consider this the lowest number of Indians with an I.Q. greater than 130. I’d suggest the population could be in the low millions. Final note: I’d be that my readers come mostly from America’s 8 million (along with some wonderful foreign people!).

Vivek Ramanotanamerican further came out with a long, impassioned screed where he says that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence”. To be clear, Vivek’s company seems to be founded on a bit of a scam (LINK), and has consistently lost large sums of money. He’s also 100% cratered his political future by telling Americans being replaced by folk of his ethnicity that they’re lazy.

That is another glaring point that we simply have to bring up: India, as a country, is kind of awful and they don’t like us very much. There’s a game that I’ve heard some people play, which involves going on Google® Streetview™ in a random place in India. How do you win? If no trash or poop is visible in the random place, you win. Despite trying a dozen times today, I was unable to win. As to Indians not liking us much, see all the love that some Indians have for us below:

The Indian culture itself is a kleptocracy where bribery and corruption appear to be endemic. Why do scammers in India target the United States? Because they ran out of Indians to scam. Per the U.S. Department of State, politicians and public “servants” are openly corrupt and never charged with crimes because no one wants to fund anti-corruption investigators. Why spoil the party?

How bad its it? One report notes that Swiss bank assets held by Indian nationals are worth 13 times the national debt. When the Indians aren’t engages in trying to scam Americans for gift cards, they’re busy scamming themselves. Oh, and those Indian scammer businesses? When found, they’re never prosecuted. Why bother? No Indian was harmed. And, according to this speech (LINK) given by an actual Indian, Jayant Bhandari, India is far worse than you think. An article version is also available at American Renaissance® – warning, AMREN is likely banned by your work (link directly below) and will get you a visit from your HR if you click it and don’t own the place.

India: It’s Worse Than You Think

So, of places we want to emulate, India is probably the very last, and if we fill America with Indians, it won’t be America anymore – it’ll just be another India, and nobody (not even the Indians) want that. And if America is just an idea, why can’t they have that idea over there, rather than coming to the United States?

But part of the corrosion from the H-1B program is that ghost jobs are constantly advertised, not to bring in candidates, but to bring in applications that can all be denied so that a foreign worker (they’re not all Indians, just a vast majority) can be hired for far less than an American. I even saw some Xeets™ indicating that the reason that employers preferred the H-1B is that they never asked for time off, would work 100-hour weeks, rarely raised issues, and would happily work on the 4^th of July.

So, like indentured servants?

One of the big points that Elon and his co-Xeeters™ brought up was the idea that American has to win. No, it doesn’t, not if it isn’t America anymore. To replace the people to win a game turns the United States into an NFL® franchise where nobody is from the city where the team plays, and everybody is swapped out on a regular basis. Or fired.

As found.

And I know that Elon has like thirty kids from half a dozen women, but I’m not interested in swapping my children out because I can get a deal on some Asian kid that has a slightly higher SAT® score. No, American can succeed or fail as America. We did wonderfully in the past, slowly assimilating people of similar backgrounds and faiths, with occasional small numbers of wildcards from other cultures. America is a Western European nation, and filling it with hordes of non-Westerners who worship blue elephant gods is a recipe for social division, which only leads to totalitarianism.

I can see bringing in true rock stars, but not 7-11® cashiers – they have to go back. Setting a minimum salary of $200,000 to $400,000 seems about right, as long as that salary at least twice the 90^th percentile for wages for that job. Those are rock stars.

Real rock stars. Okay, there were a few Germans in there, but those were German rock stars.

I think that Elon, after having been raked through his own website now has the understanding that Americans aren’t at all excited about being replace and having their wages artificially held down through practices that would make Indian scammers blush. And, this is where the TradRight is the exact opposite of the GloboLeft: when we see something worth fighting against, we fight against it. Elon is not our leader. Vivek is not and never will be our leader.

I like 2016 Trump.

I’ve said it before: Trump is not our leader, either. Trump just saw a parade, and then jumped out in front. We will not follow him when we don’t want to go that way. Period. And America isn’t a franchise sweatshop where if we don’t race to the bottom on working 80-hour weeks forever, we’ll get replaced by 9 billion other economic units.

No, we won’t. We won’t go quietly onto that goodnight. And maybe, just maybe, Elon bought himself a clue this week.

Be vigilant. Don’t give in. Let your voices be heard and don’t let them backslide.

Is The Bottom 20% Killing America?

“Attention students, m’kay. There will be a presentation by the special education department in the gymnasium Friday during lunch and recess, m’kay.” – South Park

If they make a show about the Biden Administration, will it be titled “House of Tards”?

In what will probably be one of the more controversial posts I put up, I figured it’s time to discuss the boat anchor on Western Civilization: the bottom 20%. It’s in response to seeing the X® up above, because it got me thinking of just how right the author is.

Let’s look at high schools, for instance. When I was in high school, there was a room for the special ed kids (we called them speds) so impacted by genetic or environmental trauma that they were effectively never going to do much in society. Think Down’s syndrome. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with those kids, because they were so far down the rabbit hole of human cognition that they were operating, on their best day, at the level of a four- to eight-year-old.

The second set of low achievers were tossed into the school’s “alternative” program. This, as far as I could see, consisted of coming to school and smoking cigarettes outside the alternative building. I recall my AP Chemistry teacher glancing out the window and remarking to the eight students in class, “Oh, look, the alternative kids are out playing advanced volleyball.”

I recall this really cracking me up.

How does the Spanish Dr. Who greet people? Buenos TARDIS.

When I was in high school, this wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. To be a sped was a social stigma. Not that we treated them poorly – far from it. But the cheerleaders weren’t going to date the dude who was 4’2” and communicated in a series of grunts and hoots.

Today, there are roughly 7.5 million kids with learning disabilities so profound that they are required by federal law to have an Individual Education Plan, so, per one article that’s 15% of kids in schools (school being between the ages of 5 and 18 for most kids). Most of these IEPs are not for gifted kids, rather they’re for people who can demonstrate disabilities.

I hear Michael J. Fox and his kids set up a parking lot just for disabled people. Park n’ Sons.

Parents, especially low-income urban parents, love having their children on IEPs. Why? Having an IEP does quite a few things:

Bulletproofs the child from being flunked. It can be done, but it requires more paperwork than would be required to launch the Boeing® Starliner™ again.
Bulletproofs the child (mostly) from being suspended for behavior. Until they curb-stomp a teacher for taking away their Nintendo Switch® and are charged with a felony. But, hey, the parents say, “He’s a good boy, he was on an IEP.”
Depending on the IEP, the current trend is to require that they be placed in classrooms with “normal” children, becoming a boat anchor on the rest of the class, dragging down progress. Think about having a class with Whoopi Goldberg in it. But she’s violent. It would be like that.
Depending on income, an IEP may make the family eligible for up to an extra $943 a month – tax free. We give parents incentives to have children that have the impulse control of Diddy at an Epstein party.
Depending on the IEP, the school district may need to provide what counts as essentially free day care until the age of 22, thus providing an environment where free-range 22-year-olds can stalk kids as young as 13. Thankfully, I think most of the 22-year-olds are out killing people rather than stalking 13-year-olds.
Using Pennsylvania as a guide, having a student with an IEP costs between $5,000 and $77,000 more per year than having a “normal” kid.
Children with IEPs are often given more time for things like tests, and are excused from things like deadlines. This one ropes in the parents of low-performing children of GloboLeftist parents who want Rachel to get into Harvard®.

Yeah, you can see just this one program from just one federal law (the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with the horrible acronym IDEA) has spawned trillions of dollars in direct spending, but has also destroyed the educational experiences for those left in the normie-tier classrooms.

If you win a pumpkin carving contest, is it a hollow victory?

In my experience, after I was out of the general education part of high school (think P.E. and Earth Science) I was in very few classes with any Special Ed kids – it’s not like they were going to sign up for Physics or Advanced Algebra. I guess in 2024, Rachel might try to do that and her parents would berate the teacher with all of Rachel’s special needs, “Oh, did she not get a Hostess® Cupcake™ and an extra two hours to take the test? She must have had a low blood sugar and been under stress that’s why she got 40% on the test, you monster!”

But in the classes I did share with special ed kids (P.E.), they were horribly disruptive. In one case, one of the students – Down’s syndrome – managed to lock himself in an unused gym locker. These lockers were big enough to hold a 4’2” kid if they hunkered down, since they were designed to hold football gear. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure that coach went home that night going, “They don’t pay me enough to do this job.”

What would happen if we didn’t spend these misplaced compassion dollars into society? First, the parents would have to foot the bill.

Tough, right?

Well, that’s life.

I’m oddly proud of that one.

Second, classrooms could eliminate students who wouldn’t or couldn’t behave. Having a child lacking that much in control indicates that structured education won’t help them at all unless it’s enforced with an electric cattle prod. That horrible law, IDEA, just turns school into a holding pen for unsocialized brutes.

Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn. And, perhaps, just a few of those disruptive students with poor self-control with appropriate and judicious use of cattle prods might just learn some self-control.

Again, the parents could and should be held responsible, and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours. Oh, and unless the child is profoundly (Down’s syndrome or worse) disabled? No SSI benefits. Did I say parents? Yeah, let’s be real. 90% of these kids don’t have parents, just a parent.

This one misguided GloboLeftist program, IDEA, has probably cost the United States between $1.5 trillion (low end) to $3.3 trillion (median) over the last 20 years. The result?

What’s the difference between a Taliban outpost and a Pakistani wedding? I don’t know, man, I just fly the drone.

Our schools are in shambles, and our test scores are dropping, and the environment makes The Road Warrior look like a conversation between reasonable people. All of this is for the lowest 20%. Imagine how bad it would be if we had spent double that.

Certainly, there are kids that can do wonders with a little bit of additional help. Dyslexia, for instance, is very treatable. I mean, what would happen if famous dyslexics Whoopi Goldberg or Alyssa Milano could actually read? They might not be the grifters that they are today.

But we can probably do that for less than $4,000 a year per kid.

This is only one example where the lowest 20% sets the rules for everyone.

Who are the people doing the crimes on the subways? I assure you, these are the crimes of the lowest 20%. Why do we not have clean and affordable public transportation? The lowest 20%.
Who are consuming the most public services? Yup, the same, and the perverse nature of our welfare system provides incentives for these people to have lots of children, which they often do via a revolving carousel of gene donors, who are also of the lowest 20%.
Who are doing the vast majority of murders? Eliminate the lowest 20% of the population from the statistics, and the United States would be the very safest nation on the planet.
The kid who shot up Parkland High School? I’ll bet a No Prize that he had an IEP, and was of the lowest 20%.

The solution is glaringly simple.

We have to stop coddling and funding the lowest 20%. Period. Social Darwinism only works if those who are exhibiting negative qualities face negative consequences. People respond to incentives, and if your incentive is to produce a never-ending stream of children that get rewarded for having no impulse control, well, you’ll get what we see in the cities.

Did Darwin tell his children that they were adapted?

The good news is the same as I have been preaching forever: bad times will winnow out this most artificial construction. A society cannot long produce a feral fraction that creates a low-trust society.

This particular boat anchor won’t cause society to fail, but the anchor will surely be surprised when it is cut loose.