Competence – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?

“Jefferson Public School. Fort Wayne, Indiana. Back on that planet you say you came from?” – Planet of the Apes

I went into a bar for time travelers and they were upset I haven’t paid my tab from next week.

For large chunks of human history, things didn’t change all that much from one century to the next. Oh, sure, there were innovations and social changes and cyclic government transformations (Roman Republic to Roman Empire, for instance) but life was such that in many cases, dropping a Frenchman from Paris in 1300 A.D. into Paris around 1400 A.D. would have been a fairly comprehensible change for the resident, except he would probably have had to get a different color beret.

Let’s go back to 1900, though. What changes might have seemed like science fiction (dystopian or otherwise) to a time traveler from Fort Wayne (let’s call him Taylor) if he showed up in the year 2024?

I guess Joe is happy he finally made a banana republic.

Lets start with . . .

Social Changes:

Elevation of sexual fetish to that of a sacrament rather than that of a criminal offense.
Unromantic sex with large numbers of partners for unmarried teenage girls and women is the norm.
Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.
Universal, free availability of pornographic images and videos.
Women working. Sure, some worked, but it wasn’t the norm.
Women voting. Yes, it was allowed in some places, but certainly not all.
Criminals being treated with non-judgement, except when it comes to “hate crimes” – the concept of saying a “bad word” as being worse and less forgivable than murder.
Rap music. I still can’t believe it exists.
The fall in popularity of churches.
Staggeringly low birthrates in developed countries.
Credit scores as a primary measure of suitability coordinated by large, faceless financial companies.
Working for large corporations as the norm, rather than a rare exception, like the dude who worked for the railroad.

My grade on how Taylor would rank these? Utterly dehumanizing for most of them. I think he’d be shocked at the collapse of the morality required to run a just society in the absence of tyranny.

Why do I hate the metric system? I’ll never accept a foreign ruler.

I think the sexual stuff would be the most shocking. Sure, humans have been boinking each other in all sorts of ways since Adam’s third night with Eve, but the celebration of things that were called degenerate (or worse) in nearly every Western civilization for thousands of years would be the most shocking.

The criminal change would be a big thing for Taylor, since he was probably used to speedy justice of a trial followed by a fairly quick hanging.

World Power Changes:

The complete dissolution of the British Empire into a proto-Islamic Caliphate.
The complete collapse of the Major Power colonial system leaving many colonies adrift in a state of partially collapsed civilizations that can’t care for themselves.
Western government essentially declaring war on their own citizens in order to import aliens who don’t really assimilate, and importing those aliens in staggering numbers.
Near universal, real-time information gathering on nearly every citizen from cameras and tracking devices that they buy and carry with them.
A very small number of very large companies control what news people see.
Drones in modern warfare cutting down the ability of troops to be sneaky, at all.
Nuclear weapons which can devastate cities of a larger size than existed in 1900.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach any area of the Earth and devastate square miles in less than an hour.
Jet fighters which, although nearly obsolete, can move at multiples of the speed of sound and destroy people and planes and things hundreds of miles away.
Centralization of the financial systems of the world into a near-monolithic system where billions in capital could move easily from one continent to another in seconds.
World hunger as less of a problem than world obesity.
The staggering number of laws and rules from the federal level covering every aspect of life.
Identity theft.

The set of changes was bad, but this may be thought of as more chaotic. In Taylor’s time, colonies certainly exploited the natural resources of a region, but in many places they also gave order and governance to areas that had (until that time) were at the mud and straw hut technology level, and are rapidly regressing back to the mud and straw hut technology level.

Do national anthems qualify as country music?

Warfare went from Teddy’s charge up San Juan Hill to remote controlled impersonal warfare that has the capacity to kill billions in an afternoon. I’m pretty sure that would be horrifying to him.

General Technology:

Modern cars, including partially self-driving cars are amazing pieces of technology, and combined with modern highways provide a dream transportation system – coast to coast, in a car, in a couple of days.
Air travel from nearly any part of the world to nearly any other part of the world is possible in hours.
Humanity has travelled to the Moon. The Moon!
Instantaneous communication with people all around the world is possible.
Instantaneous video from anyplace in the world is possible.
Most of the knowledge accumulated by the human race is available nearly instantaneously.
Organ transplants are a thing.
Modern architecture has become ugly and soulless, with no space for beauty and humanity.
Creation of industrial “food” which incorporates large numbers of components that were created in a chemical plant rather than a growing plant or cow or pig.

What would Taylor say about these? He’d probably be impressed by the first part of the list, but the last two would be very troubling. In the last two weeks I ate a “pretzel” with cheezefoodsauce®, and it was tasty. But compare it to a freshly grown garden tomato? I’d rather have the tomato every time.

The Mrs. didn’t want a brain transplant, but then the surgeon changed her mind.

Wow. I don’t think he’d like to swap his steak and eggs and butter for Cheeze-Itz™ and Doritos©, but they seem popular.

So, what color beret kufi do you think the Frenchman be wearing in 2124?

Kamala: The NPC Candidate

“This isn’t a video game. There are no extra lives.” – Edge of Tomorrow

Kamala posted a commercial to YouTube®, I tried to reply, but just like Kamala the comments were disabled. (Memes and content mostly “as found”)

Kamala Harris has invented a new type of presidential candidacy – one based on being absolutely nothing. Seriously. She has stated exactly one position publicly: “No tax on tips” which is precisely the position staked out by Donald Trump two months ago. I guess we should give Kamala this one, since she’s no stranger to a variety of tips.

Oh, sure, Mr. Trump’s trademark is being “short on details” so that he can leverage a win, but based on 2016, what really outraged the GloboLeft is that Trump actually tried to follow through on many of his positions. One thing that Trump won’t be to voters is a surprise, but I think Kamala is so unknown as to be a surprise, and not a good one.

Kamala’s first interview question: “Describe yourself in one word.” Kamala: “Vague.” Interviewer: “Can you elaborate?” Kamala: “Possibly.”

Why?

She’s pulling what I’ll call an “Ultra-Clinton” approach to her candidacy. Back when Hillary first ran for senate in 2000, I was expecting that, finally, she’d have to address the public. There wasn’t any way, I naively thought, that she could duck the people for an entire election. I mean, without killing them.

Whoops. While Hillary did do carefully staged and vetted “listening tour” events, what she didn’t do was meet with anyone but fawning press. She successfully avoided all genuine interaction with people so she wouldn’t have to kill time. Of course, Hillary was well known to be a GloboLeft accomplice, so it wasn’t any surprise when the New York machine churned out a senate seat for her to launch an eventual presidential campaign.

Kamala Harris, though, is another matter. She is the ultimate in vapor. What, exactly, does she stand for? Apparently, no taxes on tips. But beyond that, she is a ghost.

Is she Indian or black? Yes, though my guess is that more of her ancestors owned slaves than were slaves.

I guess if she doesn’t owe reparations, nobody does.

Is she for or against illegals scurrying across the border in unending streams?

Yes. She wants to be seen as “tough on immigration” at the same time she promises to “let every illegal sitting in detention out on day one”.

Is she against inflation? You bet she is, and on day one of her administration she’ll do something (the something is not mentioned) to stop it. Why the Biden/Harris administration can’t stop it right here and now isn’t discussed and no one asks here that question, since that would be mean or something. As usual, the Bee nails it:

If honesty is the best policy, I guess Kamala’s normally uses the second-best policy.

Interviews? Trump sits down to a multi-hour open and candid conversation with Elon Musk, and sits for interview after interview. Kamala? She might sit for an interview sometime by the end of the month. Maybe. If they can keep her off the gin for that long.

And Trump’s request for three debates?

Well, there’s just one on the schedule, and that’s enough for Kamala, at least in August. Heck, in September I’m not so certain that Paperwork American Judge Juan Merchan won’t slap Trump in irons and send him to prison. Oh, sure, he’ll get out on an appeal shortly thereafter, but don’t count that possibility out. This election is a circus, and we’re far short of the finale.

They did a study of how often Kamala was drunk. The results were staggering.

But what is known is that Kamala is really attempting to appeal to a select group of voters: those who aren’t paying attention and who will vote for a candidate based on what they feel.

Kamala has no need to preen for the hard-core GloboLeftists that want to hang Trump because they don’t like his face. They’re going to show up for her even if she changes her tune to being pro-life and wants to start distributing AR-15s to every citizen. They’d vote for her, because what they believe in is based only on what the latest talking points are from the DNC. These people are Non-Player Characters (NPC) because they’re programmed by the mainstream news or by whatever the talking head night joke men tell them to believe.

What, really, is an NPC?

Since humans are social creature, there is an inherent tendency in many people to follow. In the past, this made sense. The number of people, say, a French peasant would have seen in their life was small, and they derived their beliefs by what was presented to them other people, rather than any other source.

This variety of NPC is popular in the UK, and in the United States too! Talk about diversity!

Women, especially, were subject to this effect. An example proving that was the number of war brides that American troops returned home with from Germany. I don’t have the total from Germany, but over 300,000 war brides came from Europe, many speaking little English, to the United States. These women immediately married men of the armed forces that had bombed and terrorized them for years because everyone said they were in charge now.

See? NPC.

But as family groups become fractured due to no-fault divorce and a system that gives women cash and prizes for divorcing men, and as people become uprooted chasing economic success in areas far from where they grew up, they became reliant on a different tribe: mass media.

No one is entirely immune, but some are entirely dependent on mass media for their opinions. A close-knit family, longstanding friends, family stories and novels and other idea intrusions (like this blog) serve as counter-programming to the NPC soup that many live in. The more you’re divorced from Infocancer like The View, the greater your immune system, and the less of an NPC you are.

This phrase must have tested highly with the NPC species Karenus Manageriusspeakum.

Kamala is not for you. Kamala is for the NPC.

Kamala has to appeal (or pretend to appeal) to the middle. These are the people who aren’t on the GloboLeft, and aren’t on the TradRight. They just want to grill and enjoy the sunset and consume mass media. Be aware, this how they were built – to follow. Immersive multi-media that’s fed from a screen and doesn’t require any critical thought is what they desire.

For the NPC the TV or TikTok™ is their tribal sense of purpose. Along with a lot of drugs.

How the NPC class copes.

The difficulty for Kamala is that for many of these people the last four years have been hell. Their businesses have been closed (if they own a business) and their paychecks have dwindled in the face of ever-present inflation. They’ve seen awful riots, they’ve seen this weird transgender explosion that they don’t much like, and now they notice huge numbers of people who moved into their neighborhood and don’t speak any English staring at them when they fill their gas tank. They know they’re supposed to like them, but also have a tingling sense that these aren’t refugees or immigrants. They’re becoming worried that this is an invader class.

Huh. Wrongly think. Get on board, citizen!

Kamala has to appeal to those people to win. She can’t do it on record, so the best option is to run against anything she has ever stood for, or at least pretend to run against that. She can say anything in front of any group, and will wait for the networks and search engines to run interference for her so that she can fulfill her strategy to win the White House.

How? Kamala intends to be the first NPC candidate, standing for nothing, with no real substance except a desire for power with the media as her staunchest friend and defender. Let’s get this woman some more gin!

Will Great Britain Rise Again?

“They chose to murder and steal.” – The Dark Knight

Notes: All memes are as found, and no podcast tomorrow – The Mrs. has to catch some sleep.

Alice Smith is a reciprocal follow on X®. She’s the great-great-great-granddaughter of Scottish economist Adam Smith, and is a good person to follow (@TheAliceSmith) if you’re already following the most important account on X™, @wilderbyfar. She’s from the UK, and had the absolutely best post I’ve seen on the current sickness that’s destroying the West:

Doesn’t that say it all?

Immigration to the West (Europe plus the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) has nothing to do with freedom or our culture for most immigrants. It’s merely about the stuff.

The sickness?

It’s from the GloboLeftElite attempting to brainwash the world into thinking that:

There is no difference between a man and a woman,
Anyone can be a man or a woman,
There are no intrinsic differences between races and ethnicities,
No one can pretend to be a different race unless it’s been okayed in advance even though all races are the same,
White people should somehow feel shame for their race even though all races are the same,
There is no difference between people of differing I.Q.,
People who are wealthy merely “won a lottery”, and,
Every culture is valid.

It’s the last one that we should talk about right now.

I’m not particularly interested in going on a culture jihad, so, perhaps all cultures are “valid.” I suppose, if cannibal, rape-y, stone age tribes are your thing, I guess you could call it valid.

But all cultures are certainly not equal in things like freedom, justice, morality, and economic output.

Here, for centuries, the West has been far ahead of the world. Europe was free-ish (feudalistically speaking) since the Black Death, which greatly changed the relationship between serf and local lord.

And in a continent that was freer than any in the world, there was a place that was freer yet: Great Britain. Great Britain had a really big advantage: after the year 1066, it really was never invaded by a external enemy army. Sure, you could make a case the culture has been subverted by outside forces (and I will below) but not by force of arms.

This isolation as an island nestled right next to Europe allowed a strange development – yeoman farmers who were encouraged to take up the longbow and become soldiers so that while the English lost land in France, there was never a doubt about them losing England. The Scotts in the north were much the same, being hard-headed independent herders, they had to be strong, and were used to fighting both against and with other Scotts as well as the English. And, yes, that’s a complement. (I’m partially Scot myself).

This isolation of individually armed individuals set up an independent society with no safety nets. If you were too poor, stupid, or drunk to make enough money to live, you died. If your lord decided he wanted something out of line, well, your +3 longbow could outrank his +1 armor at a distance. As a result, Britain’s I.Q. rose over the course of centuries because the culture itself winnowed out stupid people, yet the strong, stubborn sense of independence remained.

Even the song “Rule, Britannia!” has the following lyrics:

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves;
“Britons never will be slaves.”

This is a very, very different culture than that of the current people who opened the floodgates to Great Britain – they were unabashedly Globalist and Leftist, hated everything that Great Britain stood for, and were more than willing to start the migration into Great Britain. I’d be lying to say that none of them pulled their weight – in some cases Britain got some of the best from their home countries, hence the term “brain drain”, but this was the exception rather than the norm. Most of the immigrants to the UK have been a net negative to the country.

But no outside army ever conquered Britain. Except the army of beggars that have invaded it have done something that no one thought possible – united the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – against the onslaught. What does it take to get people who have been fighting each other for centuries to hold hands, literally, and march together?

Whatever it is, it sounds Evil to me.

And it is. Evil. Brought directly to the shores of Great Britain by GloboLeftists in misguided altruism and the GloboLeftistElite out of a calculated bid to displace inconvenient people who don’t want to be replaced.

There reaches a point where something so awful happens that a culture revolts: it says, “That’s enough.” In the United States for transgender acceptance, it was the murder of six children by a trans killer so crazed that they still won’t release her manifesto. That was enough. The GloboLeftistElite wanted to try to hide it (see how autocomplete will try to take you to murders of transgenders, but not murders by transgenders). These murders is why Bud Light™ is Bud Deadtome© for so many consumers.

It appears that the United Kingdom (Great Britain plus Northern Ireland) has had enough of murderous vultures in their society. The cause? The murder of three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in a town called Southport. By knife. By a 17-year-old that had no place being in the United Kingdom in the first place.

English people had watched as rape gangs of organized sexual assault on at minimum 1400 young women that was denied to even exist in Rotherham because the victims were mainly white and the perpetrators were of privileged minority status – Pakistani, mostly.

This was covered up at a national level. Filing cabinets full of the data on the case mysteriously disappeared. That was never solved.

But would it matter? Probably not:

Some of those convicted (many weren’t even tried) got as little as 2 years. Britons can get more time for being mean with words.

Oh, and the last one? She was posting Bible verses.

That set the situation, along with other, repeated, ongoing murders and rapes by people not fit to live in any sort of civilized society. These three final murders were enough.

The response of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exactly what you would expect from a member of the GloboLeftElite: he blamed the people pushing back against unrestrained and unrestricted illegals swarming the United Kingdom. And if you complained online, even if you were more likely to be arrested than the illegals swarming the streets with swords and machetes.

They’re now calling him “two-tier Keir”, since his justice has two tiers: a harsh one for actual English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish and one where all acts by any minority are ignored. Probably because Starmer hates his own people, because he hates himself.

I guess that’s easier.

The United Kingdom has found a point where they say, No More.

This is coming soon to a country near you.

Oh, and if they offer the type of deal below? We should take it. Because it’s not about the stuff.

At all.

Civil War 2.0, A Chaotic Month

“I knew your brother would send assassins.” – Gladiator

I would tell a joke about my time travelling experiences, but you guys didn’t like it.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
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.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 3

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Destabilization – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Kamala – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

Destabilization

I’ll start with a couple of my own quotes from last month’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report:

July will be an even more eventful month, if my guess is right.

This level of political intrigue is the highest since 1859 or so, and it’s quite clear that the glue that holds the country together is nearly gone, and this is a signpost on the way to Civil War 2.0.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was a surprise, and certainly not one that I had anticipated. In the immediate aftermath, Trump’s popularity soared as people saw the raw response to the event from Trump in one of the most iconic photographs of my lifetime, his fist raised in defiance.

Trump is certainly a showman.

As the details of the event continue, it looks like the Secret Service was doing its job as well as Boeing®’s Starliner™ design team.

The other thing the assassination attempt did was show how pathetic the attempt to prosecute the January 6 “insurrectionists” that were so ill-behaved that most of them used trash receptacles for their water bottles. Comparing the two events shows how silly, vindictive, and political the prosecution of the protesters was and is.

Immediately the political attacks restarted on Trump. He was Cheeto® Hitler™, and still is in their minds. Many of them were in open despair that the shooter had missed.

What followed? Joe Biden dropping out of the race. Joe was done, but his last middle finger to Obama, who I believe is the one who pushed for the June debate and pushed for Joe to be booted, wanted someone else, anyone else, other than the retarded girl-child with a love of vodka known as Kamala to be the nominee.

Obama lost, and Kackela Harris will soon be voted in by the Democratic delegates as their first candidate that never received a single primary vote, and was selected by a senile man as a revenge choice.

All of that screams stability.

Just kidding. Of all of the strange and destabilizing things we’ve seen so far, I would lay money we’ve yet to see the strangest part of this election season, and it will be more destabilizing even than what we’ve seen just this July.

Violence and Censorship Update

Well, there’s this:

Which resulted in proof that you don’t hate the media enough:

And also proof that the constant drumbeat has made GloboLeftists evil or crazy. Or both:

And the GloboLeftElite try to hide what we all saw:

But don’t bet on Bing™ to be unbiased:

And here are things they’re also attempting to memoryhole, including billionaire Alex Soros with a bullet hole and forty-seven dollars. Hmmm, Trump, if elected would be the 47th President:

And Prince Harry shows why July 4 is still important:

And here are things that the GloboLeftistElite don’t want you to think about:

But there are Bright spots:

Biden/Harris Misery Index

If Democratic economic policy had a face:

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again. It’s like there’s a pattern here . . .

More to come:

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

Violence:

Violence is up. I wonder if Chicago’s Democratic National Convention is going to spike temperatures? Maybe they’ll play some soothing music?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down. I expect this fall to drop.

Economic:

The economy looks to be juiced, but thankfully we have housing options.

Illegal Aliens:

July is showing as down, again, since (my take) the .gov folks are just making up numbers now.

Kamala

I was going to write a bit more, but I’m a bit under the weather, so here are some related memes, in order:

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1818705002023530940

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1818801077308809307

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1816613118056837285

https://x.com/DaRealMonch/status/1817987959922250083

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1817614424141857175

https://x.com/Glock_Topickz/status/1815899177596903814

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1816611210214731827

Good Guys

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/89EFTHojJRw

One Guy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlrzw5550o

Body Count

https://dnyuz.com/2024/07/25/kids-a-growing-number-of-americans-say-no-thanks/

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/how-the-origins-of-americas-immigrants-have-changed-since-1850/

https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1817731127672779239

https://reason.com/2024/06/15/house-passes-bill-to-automatically-register-young-men-for-the-draft/

https://themilitant.com/2024/08/02/congress-discusses-upgrading-the-draft-and-conscription-of-women/

https://www.newsweek.com/us-army-military-women-draft-conscription-1916238

Vote Count

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184621/presidential-election-voter-turnout-rate-state/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/voter-rolls-ballot-challenges-true-the-vote-elections/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-voter-roll-challenges-explainer-36c5596361f4596f245ffeee7b138764

https://dentonrc.com/elections/conservative-group-has-challenged-17-000-names-on-voter-rolls-in-denton-county/article_71d1993e-4ec8-11ef-bd2b-5fd65c628b62.html

https://azmirror.com/briefs/republicans-sue-to-purge-at-least-500000-people-from-arizonas-voter-rolls/

Civil War

https://theconversation.com/one-inch-from-a-potential-civil-war-near-miss-in-trump-shooting-is-also-a-close-call-for-american-democracy-234628

https://radaronline.com/p/trump-shooter-suicide-mission-trigger-second-civil-war/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/23/ohio-republican-trump-civil-war

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-civil-war-talk-1235066760/

https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/508690/this-controversial-record-breaking-thriller-is-again-the-most-watched-movie-on-amazon/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/29/how-civil-wars-start/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/movies/war-game-documentary-review.html

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/democracy-suffer-quiet-death-simulated-trump

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

“You know what doesn’t look good? A story about gross incompetence.” – American Hustle

My garden shears will never be obsolete, after all, it’s cutting-hedge technology.

My science teacher in high school, who I’ll call “Mr. Johnson” (not his real name except that was totally his real name) often lectured us on things entirely unrelated to science. It wasn’t a doctrine he was trying to instill us with, it was merely that he was old enough and close enough to retirement that he really didn’t give a damn about 90% of the class. I don’t think that he even cared if we listened, since he was only talking to 10% of us anyway.

You either got him or you didn’t.

One of his random asides was about the word “crisis”. Mr. Johnson hated the use of the word crisis except to refer to a single moment in time. His definition was that the crisis was a moment – the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone was poised to push the button, and yet backed away from world condemning us to live in a world where The View exists.

Regardless of Mr. Johnson’s definition, I think we’re in the midst of a crisis.

Why do I think this stage would smell of old kitty litter and stale chardonnay?

Datapoint:

Crowdstrike™

The Crowdstrike© software incident from just two weeks ago brought down at least 8.5 million computer systems, and brought them down in such a way that they couldn’t restart. To make it even better, once a fix was found, it had to be fixed computer by computer. Why? Because they didn’t test the patch.

Right now, the estimate is that this caused at least $10 billion in financial losses, though a communist would tell you that it was a good thing since all of those computer techs had something to do other than play Tetris™ and Minesweeper© while listening to Dan Fogelberg.

I think Boeing® should adopt a “no slippers” policy.

Datapoint:

Boeing’s© Starliner™

The Starliner® is anything but, more resembling a large orbiting bucket filled with cash than a spacecraft, it sits, useless, stuck against the side of the ISS. If it were the only failure to Boeing’s©, name, that would be one thing, but it’s not. Their planes regularly either fall from the sky due to poor programming kludges, or have random spontaneous partial disassembly of their planes in flight due to spotty manufacturing quality control.

Boeing™ had a pretty good reputation for decades as a company that took engineering seriously – the name of the Boeing® 707 was rumored to be an engineering joke – it’s one over the square root of two. It kept showing up in their calculations, so they decided that was a good omen for naming their (then) flagship airliner. In reality, it sounds like it was just a product number, with the 7 series being jets, and they liked the sound of the end 7.

Regardless, they didn’t call it a “Dreamliner™”.

NASA refuses to send a giant duck into outer space – they say the bill would be astronomical.

Datapoint:

NASA

I loved NASA when I was a kid. They were generally seen as a triumph of competence and coolness under pressure. They did real engineering, and also were great at managing the integration of multiple complex systems in a manner where they worked pretty well, Apollos 1 and 13 notwithstanding.

They literally wrote the book on getting man to the Moon using the very limits of known technology at the time. Getting to the Moon was so hard that it was barely in our grasp, yet they did it, time and time again. They even managed to get the ISS built.

But now? Barrack Obama stated that the primary goal of NASA was Moslem outreach. During the eclipse of 2017, they even spent NASA resources to make a Braille book about eclipses. What was that meant to do, taunt the blind kids? And, yes, the Webb Space Telescope has been pretty cool. But the Space Launch System costs about $4.1 billion per launch, and each launch takes about six months.

I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.

Datapoint:

COVID-19

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 was horrific from an economic and medical standpoint. From an economic standpoint, the government response was to blindly throw as much cash in as many places as possible as quickly as that could. This was a bipartisan effort.

The panic and hypocrisy weren’t limited to the economic response, no. The medical response was just as inept, as Fauci now admits he just made things up as some sort of medical theater. Ventilators appear to have killed more people than they saved. The abomination of the “Vaxx” has led to an excess mortality that many reckon has a body count higher than COVID itself. I, for one, really hope that everyone who took the Vaxx® recovers, but can we forget a government and its accomplices who tried (and in many cases, succeeded in forcing people to take it?

I can’t, though the GloboLeftElite surely hope you forget. But remember, there are no refunds.

I was wondering if this was going to be too dark, but then I realized it’s all under two and a half miles of water, so of course it’s going to be dark.

Datapoint:

The Titan Submersible

In one sense, I certainly admire the guts that it took to build a submarine from a pressure hull and off-the-shelf parts like an X-Box™ controller, but the hubris of the owner remains: the CEO didn’t “hire 50-year-old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational”. I wonder if we would have made it to orbit if Von Braun had a similar philosophy?

Well, I guess he paid the ultimate price for his hubris and disregarding competence in favor of the “inspirational” stories. Most CEOs just lose their shareholder’s money, like Disney™, which I could write an entire post on.

The crisis we face is one where we’ve lost the capacity for competence and will to achieve that we had as recently as the 1960s even as our systems grow far more complex. Again, one software update cost $10,000,000,000, NASA doesn’t produce spaceships that can fly with any reliability, and Boeing™ went from making some of the most reliable airplanes in the world by the thousands to a company that survives on government contracts, accounting errors, and inertia.

Maybe, though, this crisis will do what the Cuban Missile Crisis couldn’t do:

Free us from The View. Wonder if they’d like a trip to the Titanic?

Gen X, Gen Z, And The Crisis Of The Soul

“And then we’ll all have a Christening for Rosemary’s baby.” – Last Action Hero

They call me “The Exorcist” at the liquor store. After I leave, all the spirits are gone.

The kids today have a lot of challenges. Generation Z and Generation Alpha have had a very significantly different childhood than most people reading this post.

For me growing up as a Gen X kid, we were very, very free. I regularly came home to an empty house when I was in kindergarten. The first time I let myself into my house with my own key, I was in third grade. The first time I stayed overnight by myself (in winter, no less) I was in fourth or fifth grade. By the time I was in high school I didn’t even see a parent three or four nights a week most weeks since I was going to school in an apartment about fifty miles from Wilder Mountain.

I certainly didn’t raise myself, but Gen X was pretty free range. We left the house when we got up, and got home, dirty, muddy, and sunburned when the photodetector turned the yard light on because that was Ma Wilder’s definition of ‘dark’ in the ‘be home by dark’ direction.

Life is like a warranty – it runs out at the worst time possible.

I certainly used several of my free hours to do things that were things my warning label said not to do, and certainly would have voided my manufacturer’s warranty had I goofed up.

We were also pretty awful to each other, at least in middle school. I have long maintained that kids in middle school are the worst people on the planet: they have learned how to bully people by digging at their deepest insecurities, but they haven’t learned enough empathy to not do that. See? Absolute worst people on the planet. I know, I was one of them.

I won’t dwell much on my specifics for this post – this isn’t about me, but about a generation that was given great independence from the start. Many, many generations had it far worse than Gen X, since at no point when I was 8 did Pa Wilder seriously mention selling me off to the mines to move explosives so that valuable miners wouldn’t be injured. Again, he may have mentioned it, but not seriously.

You’d think that being the first generation born after the pill was invented and abortion was entered into the sacraments of the Left, that Gen X would have been the most wanted generation in history.

No, not really.

What’s Gump’s password? 1Forest1.

Many parents that were often more interested in themselves during the “Me” decade of the 1970s. In fact, Gen X was born at the intersection on a great societal upheaval of Woman’s Lib convincing women they didn’t want to be mothers. Or wives. That was also the beginning of the cult of the no-fault divorce as well.

Society’s feelings are often transmitted in the media, and let’s look at the roster of Gen X villains:

The baby from Rosemary’s Baby was a Gen X baby.
So was Damien from The Omen
So was Regan The Exorcist.
Although Michael Myers from Halloween was technically a Boomer, when he first appears he’s a kid, the same age as Gen X at the time. Same with Jason Voorhees.
Who opens the door in Poltergeist? Gen X.
The vampires in The Lost Boys? Gen X.
Everybody in Scream.
Oh, and when we grew up? The Faculty.
I think the shark from Jaws was a Boomer, so we’re off the hook on that one.

I started downloading Jaws the other day, but my computer keeps dying after one megabyte.

I don’t know what it was about Gen X that made people think of Satan when they thought about us. I’m pretty sure that other kids weren’t quite as bad as I was. Except Damien.

I can’t speak for other generations, but I’m not going to complain about my experience being a part of Gen X. Yes, I was bullied, but I got tougher. Yes, my parents gave me a lot of freedom, but Pa Wilder missed very few wrestling matches and rarely missed a varsity football game, even when a three-hour drive was involved. I knew I was loved.

Coming out of high school, I felt (and still feel) that the limiting factor to my life is . . . me. I feel the ball is in my hands.

From observation, kids today (on average) don’t have near the opportunity to be free range that we as Gen X did. And, at least around Modern Mayberry, they aren’t bullied. People are nice. The kids are nice.

Maybe . . . too nice?

The best thing about taking money by bullying kids is you can buy yourself something nice.

We have created a fundamentally different generation with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Heck, what’s the best way to ground a member of Gen Alpha? To make him go outside and hang with his friends in real life, away from his electronics.

I sense (and I could be wrong) that a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has never had to face real adversity. Instead, they’ve lived their lives with a sense of impending dread and massive confusion amidst the greatest material and information wealth the world has ever seen. Starvation in the United States, and, for the first time ever, in the world, is virtually unknown.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem. There is more than enough food for everyone in the world right now, and the only starvation that occurs happens in war zones or is politically motivated.

Yet the GloboLeftElite has put into the minds of the kids today that the world is doomed. They’re feeling higher levels of depression than kids from the Great Depression. Suicide is their second highest cause of death.

Gen X had “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have “All Good Girls Go To Hell”.

Yet, my generation had Mutually Assured Destruction while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have Climate Change. At least the Soviets were the bad guys in MAD, but in Climate Change? Every human is the villain, oh, and we’re deeply in debt, robots and immigrants are going to take their jobs.

Gen X is so old our Social Security number is in Roman numerals.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been taught to hate themselves and humanity, and it’s so bad that they don’t want to have kids.

More than anything, this is a crisis of the spirit. My generation was vilified as the Anti-Christ incarnate, and we responded by getting married and having children and getting by in life.

Did we make it? Yes, I think we did. Will they make it? I think so, though, for many, their road is tougher than ours. Weak men make hard times, and I think that’s where we’re at.

But, hey, think of all the great memes they’ll make!

It’s Joever. What next?

“And after your glorious coup, what then?” – Gladiator

I hadn’t planned on tackling the Fall of the House of Biden today, but, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. As it is, I think that the world has provided a rich set of memetic information that will more than cover the situation. All of these are “as found”.

First, do you think Joe knew he’d be stepping down today? Here’s the foreshadowing:

That brings us up to the end of the campaign. How did that go?

The results seemed to catch even those close to Biden by surprise:

Lots of folks seem to think the nomination is a done deal for Kamala. Obama, pointedly, did not endorse her.

Why did Obama not endorse Kamala? Well, reasons, probably including that she is likely the stupidest person to ever run for Washington, with more baggage than the Lusitania, all combined with all of the charisma of ¡Jeb!:

I think she thinks the quote above is profound, because she keeps repeating it.

The pain . . . !

But what are the other complications?

Not gonna lie, it would be funny to start this program:

What if Joe doesn’t remember?

And what if Darth Clinton returns? I’d say never get involved in a land war in Asia or play a game against a Clinton when power is on the line. That does leave me with one question:

How Big Corporations Ruin The Economy, One Town At A Time

“I still say genetics are stronger than will, and blood is thicker than altruism.” – Andromeda

Should we rejoin Great Britain? It’s not like we mind taxation without representation anymore.

At the turn of the century, in 1900, that is, 25% of the people who worked had jobs for “larger” companies, think “something someone would say a robber baron owned”. These were things like railroads and steel mills and PEZ™ factories.

Most people worked for themselves or for smaller businesses. People farmed, which was a very big deal, taking up around 40% of the country’s labor force. The remainder worked for themselves or for small businesses, being a lawyer, working for the butcher, or delivering home-grown artisanal PEZ©.

The result was that the majority of the profits stayed local. The owner of the bank that loaned for the mortgage for Farmer McWilder didn’t ship the interest payments back to New York: those profits stayed in the community. People were more independent: the local optometrist didn’t work for Opti-Co™, a Ramtron© company, which is a division of GloboChunk®.

Introverts hate being optometrists. They have to make eye contacts.

When BigDrugStore® moved into Modern Mayberry, what did they do?

They bought the local pharmacies from the local pharmacists. They hired (then fired after a year or so) the local guys. Now, profits that used to go to funding the local little league team are funneled to investors in New York where they buy part of a bathroom renovation in the Hamptons.

Likewise, the local manufacturers have dried up, too. There used to be at least seven little widget factories that made various doo-dads and thingamajigs that now are produced either in People’s Liberation Army Factory #323 or in Whamco’s™ huge factory in Pakistan.

I guess that’s an everlasting jobstopper.

Big businesses have two impacts: they suck profits out of communities, and they make everyone less independent. There are several factors that have led to this:

Allowing corporations to live forever and do anything.
Having combined huge corporations making huge purchases so that the combined purchasing power of all of the (for instance) Wal-Marts® can be used to put the pressure on suppliers to lower every cost, including labor,
Burden small companies with exactly the same regulations as large companies, giving large companies the incentive to seek out stronger regulation to keep competition down, and,
Realizing that every dollar pulled out of the community is an extra dollar of New York profit for putting in that new pool house.

This did reduce prices, at least enough to put small businesses out of business, but it has hurt America by taking profits that were local and nationalizing them to the existing GloboLeftistElite. Yes, there were benefits, but each of these communities is now (over time) poorer for having these larger businesses in them.

DNA is like Taco Bell® – same four ingredients, nearly infinite results.

An aside: this process has funneled huge amounts of money to the GloboLeftistElite. Who are they? They’re the people who run and own the largest corporations, yet are Marxists. Don’t believe me? Look at all of the class struggle propaganda that shows up from their typical GloboLeftist company in a year. Trotsky would blush, I mean, if he hadn’t been killed with an icepick.

This has hurt rural America, which was built on individuals working and creating wealth locally. I look at small towns across the United States at their aspirational city halls and libraries, and think, “Could any of them afford to build those structures now?”

No, they couldn’t.

Why not?

Because the locally created wealth has been siphoned off.

In the end, what can be done? Here’s a modest proposal:

Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
Restrict corporations to a specific line of business.
Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
Ease regulatory burdens on smaller companies, making it easier to form and grow them.
Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.

I could probably think of more changes that would actually return more capitalism to the country. Yes, Apple™ isn’t fond of competition or capitalism or even the United States. GloboLeftBigCorp© companies that have done their best to concentrate capital and economic power while at the same time being overtly Leftist.

You should respect people like me who wear glasses. I paid money to see you.

Feel free to attack any individual points above, but the constant concentration and combination of economic power has to be stopped – inherently, it is anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, which leads to the failed ideology of group altruism. Besides, those were the result of five minutes of thinking and I avoided thinking about creative uses for lamp posts.

Why is group altruism bad? When .gov takes your money and gives it to another person it likes better than you, no one gets to feel the inherent power of helping people. Helping people is great on an individual level, because it reinforces the idea of humans helping humans. Helping people voluntarily is virtuous, especially if the help changes the path the person is on so in the future they don’t need the help. Those that help go from anonymous people who are tax farmed to people who have actual skin in the game in helping people succeed.

On the other hand, group altruism creates a situation those who are most in need become the most despised because they are seen as the irredeemable bit of society. Group (.gov) altruism doesn’t want to make people independent, because dependent people are dependable voters for more .gov and more regulations and money transfer, and .gov loves a divided people. Also, since people pay taxes, many of them feel no obligation whatsoever to help anyone. They’ve farmed out their virtue.

I read that a big company helped blind kids. But they meant the verb, not the adjective.

Want to know why Reparations for slavery from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves is popular? It’s the GloboLeftElite’s mechanism for creating a feeling of entitlement that will never go away. How much is enough Reparation? There is no answer, because the GloboLeftElite has said that there will never be enough Reparation. Never. That’s the result of group altruism.

Do I want people to not starve and also stay in Africa, or India, or (insert country name here)? I do. That doesn’t mean that individual organizations can’t help them, but to do so should be voluntary, and not the power of the government to take wealth and allocate it around the world or, through action or inaction, bring an unending supply of immigrants to our shore.

The solution in the future is to create a society where commerce is human scale, is focused on maintaining and encouraging the family (which is the atom of the nation) and is based on the nation, not on every person on the planet.

Anyone else ready to party like it’s 1899?

The Best And Funniest Fourth Of July Post You’ll Read Today

“What do you do when you’re not buying stereos, Nick? Finance revolutions?” – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

I guess the taxes were too steep.

In honor of the holiday, here are some facts that I made up about the Declaration of Independence:

John Adams felt that July 2 would be the national holiday, but just to spite him because he was a tool, it was changed to July 4.
The Continental Congress could not afford air conditioning, so Thomas Jefferson used his sweat as the liquid in the ink.
The original Declaration of Independence was stored at the Pearl Harbor naval base until 1941 in a rusty footlocker, but was moved back to Washington, D.C., because John Wayne told “that pinko” FDR to bring it back.

They were going to name a street after John Wayne, but then realized that no one could cross John Wayne and live.

Thomas Jefferson was originally going to have the Declaration printed, but because his HP™ printer kept flashing “replace black ink cartridge” and because Office Depot™ would not exist for another 200 years, he wrote the whole thing out by hand.
The Declaration has a secret message written on the back, that, when translated said, “D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E. No one knows what that means.
Disney® tried to buy the rights to the Declaration in order to make a cartoon, and then a live action version of the document, replacing Thomas Jefferson with Jada Pinkett Smith.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, and their bodies regenerated in a secret lab of Benjamin Franklin’s where they were combined with parts from a cotton gin to become MechaAdamson who took the lead in opening trade relations with Japan, and whose portrait is on the $1500 bill.

Okay, on to the more serious bit.

It has been 248 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. Obviously, it was written the night before, because Jefferson was cramming for the final. We often think of the Founding Fathers as Old Dead Guys, because they are, but let’s go back in time to 1776:

Thomas Jefferson was 33. In 2024, that would mean that in 2024 he would still be saving for a downpayment on a house, but when he was 13, he inherited nearly eight square miles of productive farmland.

Jefferson wasn’t very old, but I think he did the job of writing this amazingly subversive document very, very well. John Adams, who was 40 at the time, convinced the committee (yes, the Declaration was the result of a committee) that Jefferson should write it because everyone liked Jefferson, and everyone thought that Adams was a tool. Adams said that.

“The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished. – Benjamin Franklin”

So, if a Jefferson would be alive today to write up a new Declaration, he’d have been born in 1991 and would be younger than Teen Spirit.

Jefferson was a genius, but how big a bag did they have to pick from to find him? 2.5 million people were the total number of citizens in the colonies. Today, all but fourteen states each have more people than the colonies did, and yet they produced a Franklin, a Jefferson, a couple of Adams boys, and a Washington.

The point I’m trying to convey is that even though we look back at the bravery and genius and learning of the Founding Fathers, we sometimes overlook the fact that they were ordinary men in an extraordinary time. I would bet that in any population of 2.5 million Americans of similar stock in the United States today that you’d find men of Washington’s bravery and ability; Franklin’s learning, cunning and sense of humor; Adam’s stoic stubbornness; and Jefferson’s erratic brilliance.

What was Thomas Jefferson’s father’s name? Thomas Jefferdad.

Keep in mind, too, that the whole proposition of “standing up to the world’s biggest empire” was pretty risky. War had been ongoing sporadically with Great Britain for the better part of a year, but up until the Declaration, the idea and hope was for a reconciliation with the Mother Country, although one built upon respect for the Colonies.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Once the committee tasked with drafting the Declaration was done, Congress itself edited the document, word by word, and sentence by sentence. This chopped a bunch out, and Jefferson was miffed. Regardless of Jefferson’s butthurt, on July 2, the Declaration was adopted on a 12-0-1 vote, with New York being in a dither, as usual that finally changed its vote due to peer pressure from the cool kids, eventually making it 13-0.

When it was time to check out of the empire, they all checked out.

I have said before that the United States of our forefathers, even the United States of my youth is dead – heck, one wag even said, “we all die in a foreign country”. But I have also said, and I will stand by that, although we may not live to see it, we stand ready for the seeds of a new, and hopefully more glorious Republic in the future.

It will require the burial of nearly 200,000 pages of federal regulations. There will certainly be depravation, and likely more than one horrific battle. It took decades to get the United States into this mess, and digging out will be the task of generations: keep in mind that from 1775 (the real start of the Revolutionary War) to the first presidential election was 13 years, and that we’re not even to 1775 yet – I peg us at somewhere between 1765 and 1773, and I think the Revolutionary War will look easy in comparison.

I accidently signed up for the company 401k – I don’t think I can run that far.

Along the way, a new form of government will be born, hopefully with an eye to the freedoms we have lost and with sure prohibitions (I can think of another dozen amendments today of what government should never be allowed to do) to keep government in check and make it take at least another 200 years before the rotten edifice of regulation and emanations and penumbras can be reconstituted. Maybe we’ll add a third house of Congress that can repeal any legislation with a 33% vote, I mean, if 33% of the country hate a law, why keep it?

America is dead, but also waiting to be born. Come with me.

Let us go and find her.

The Best And Funniest Debate Post You’ll Read Today: Read It For The Salty Tears

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Whelp! All memes from X, and I didn’t even have to scroll more than three times. This is an implosion.

I had very different plans today for this post. During the debate, I had no fewer than 1200 words worth of notes, and had penciled in no fewer than nine really funny jokes on the first pass. It would have been hilarious. I guess that’s just me, pining for the humor of the situation.

But as the debate ended, I realized that wasn’t the post I was going to write. It couldn’t be.

I have predicted that Joe Biden would not be the DNC candidate for the 2024 election on these pages months ago. When the debate happened so very early, I began to wonder: why?

Someone on Team Joe® convinced him (which doesn’t appear to be hard right now) that he needed to debate Trump in June. Why? The conventions hadn’t occurred, and Joe wasn’t even the official nominee, merely the presumptive one.

Now I understand. Having these debates in October would have assured a Trump landslide. Even the deepest blue GloboLeftist couldn’t even salvage this monstrosity in a real manner after an October showing like today. It would not be possible.

To expose him.

Joe is done. He’s finished. His political career is finished, and his candidacy is in shambles. Reports are that his team are in tears, and “25^th Amendment” (the one that allows for the removal of incompetent folks as president) are trending on X.

I had predicted that either Gavin Newsom (whose wife allegedly willing banged Harvey Weinstein) or Big Mike Obama would be the candidate months ago. I’m pretty sure I predicted it in the blog, but certainly did so in conversations and it’s too late to check – Ricky might help me here! – that Joe would not be the candidate.

That is now certain. There is another, like they said in Star Wars™: Hillary. I don’t think she’s physically up to the task, but she’s still in the running.

It won’t be Joe. So, here’s my take on the night, along with a few memes. I’ll respond to previous post comments tomorrow (like I said, it’s late). Python, Monty® predicted this years ago. Note, I hope that Joe Biden lives a long and pleasant life, this is in reference to his chances on being elected in November:

A voter watches a debate.

Voter: ‘Ello, I wish to register a complaint.

(The DNC does not respond.)

Voter: ‘Ello, Miss?

DNC: What do you mean “miss”? Are you assumin’ me gender?

Voter: (pause)I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

DNC: We’re closin’ for the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

Voter: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Candidacy what I decided to vote for not half a year ago from this very DNC.

DNC: Oh yes, the, uh, the Scranton Joe…What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?

Voter: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. This Candidacy is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

DNC: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting. He has COVID.

Voter: Look, matey, I know a dead Candidacy when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

DNC: No no this Candidacy’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable Candidacy, the Scranton Joe, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

Voter: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

DNC: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

Voter: All right then, if he’s restin’, I’ll wake him up! (shouting at the Candidacy) ‘Ello, Mister Dark Brandon! I’ve got a lovely fresh 10% for the Big Guy for you if you show…

(DNC hits the cage)

DNC: There, he moved!

Voter: No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!

DNC: I never!!

Voter: Yes, you did!

DNC: I never, never did anything…

Voter: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) ‘ELLO JOE!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!

(Takes Candidacy out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)

Voter: Now that’s what I call a dead Candidacy.

DNC: No, no…..No, ‘e’s got COVID!

Voter: COVID?!?

DNC: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin’ up! Scranton Joe stuns easily, major.

Voter: Um…now look…now look, mate, I’ve definitely ‘ad enough of this. That Candidacy is definitely deceased, and when I decided to vote for it not ‘alf a year ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged ice cream.

DNC: Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for Corn Pop.

Voter: PININ’ for Corn Pop?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got ‘im home?

DNC: Scranton Joe prefers keepin’ on it’s back! Remarkable Candidacy, id’nit, squire? Lovely hair plugs and replacement teeth!

Voter: Look, I took the liberty of examining that Candidacy when I watched the debate, and I discovered the only reason that it had been standing by the podium in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

DNC: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that Candidacy down, it would have nuzzled up to that podium, bent it apart with its strong arm, and VOOM! It would have talked about String Theory in six languages!

Voter: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this Candidacy wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts and a gallon of Adderall® through it! It’s bleedin’ demised!

DNC: No no! ‘E’s pining!

Voter: It’s not pinin’! It’s passed on! This Candidacy is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the podium it’d be pushing up the daisies! It’s metabolic processes are now ‘istory! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, It’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-CANDIDACY!!

(pause)

DNC: Well, I’d better replace it, then. (he takes a quick peek behind the counter) Sorry squire, I’ve had a look ’round the back of the shop, and uh, we’re right out of Candidacy, except for Big Mike, Hillary, and Gavin.

Voter: I see. I see, I get the picture.

DNC: (pause) I got a Kamala.

(pause)

Voter: Pray, does it talk?

DNC: Nnnnot really. Slurs quite a bit like it’s drunk.

Voter: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT, IS IT?!!???!!?

DNC: N-no, I guess not. (gets ashamed, looks at his feet)

Voter: Well.

(pause)

DNC: (quietly) D’you…. d’you want to come back to my place?

Voter: (looks around) Yeah, all right, sure, it is the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

DNC: (to the audience) Well! I never wanted to do this in the first place. I wanted to be… a lumberjack!