Competence – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Violence: The Starting Point Of Civilization

“I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a businessman.” – The Godfather

I tried to be an architect, but they didn’t like my library design. It only had one story.

Violence is something that society has been built to avoid. Historically, violence has been much higher – I recently wrote about the Yanomami people and how half of their men died in combat up until recently. This is an ugly fact.

One of the myths that has been force-fed to us is that native peoples are nice and peaceful and reverent. I had heard that people like the Blackfoot tribe “used ever part” of the animals they killed. But that same tribe would kill them by making a herd stampede over a cliff, mashing themselves as they fell – it’s what’s called a “buffalo jump”. Yes, I imagine they used a lot of the buffalo, but I’m fairly certain that practice resulted in a lot of waste just by the sheer nature gravity and the rocks below.

Likewise, the Aztecs were worse: they sacrificed 4,000 actual humans for one party in 1487.

I know the Aztec priests worked hard, since the high priest said, “I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to get where I am today.”

Yet, now the world is much safer, though places like the United States are getting less safe by the day.

Why?

Not enough violence. At least, not enough violence in the right places.

While Western Civilization certainly didn’t start the idea of laws, they’ve been embraced wholeheartedly since laws work. Although the number of laws in our current system far exceeds the number we need for a functioning society, laws are still important.

But laws are just words. Ultimately, enforcement of the law means that someone has to be willing to employ violence to follow up on the law, up to and including killing the violator. That’s where the sheer number of laws gets silly. Should we really face imprisonment for a broken taillight?

Yes, I know that’s not the penalty, but try not paying the fine and see what happens. Eventually, people with guns will come and put you in jail and if you resist, they will shoot you. The reason I think we should consider very carefully what laws we as a society have is that ultimately the threat of violence is what underpins them all. The Feds ended up putting dozens of people to death at Waco over novelty paperweights.

That is, of course, a ludicrous overuse of force, done by bureaucrats so that they could justify their funding at the congressional level.

I think we can agree, though, that laws are necessary. And laws gain power through their enforcement. If a law isn’t enforced, it loses all of its power. If the penalty is too small, then the law will be ignored. As I read once, “If a law is only punishable by a fine, that means it’s legal for a price.”

If you stop a Catholic service with a squirt gun, does that make it a Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Likewise, if attempted murder is punishable by six months in the slammer (I recently read about a murderer who was out after that length of time for attempted murder), the penalty is less severe than the fifteen years that a man received in Iowa for burning a pride flag.

If there is no penalty for crossing the American border and then taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, why, people will do exactly that. And why stop at one apartment building? Martha Raddatz of ABC® seems to think that five is a perfectly acceptable number of apartment complexes to be taken over by criminal Venezuelan gangs.

This is the outcome of the propaganda that “violence is never the solution”. Violence, or the threat of violence is often the only solution to many problems. An example is if a thief is attempting to break into my house and do Heaven knows what. My answer isn’t to politely state that what the thief is trying to do violates the laws.

I bought a substitute thesaurus, and it’s really bad. Really bad. Just, bad.

Nope. In order to protect my house and family, I may have to use violence at that point. Certainly, it will be a reluctant use, but the reason why homes don’t experience much burglary around here is because people have guns and burglars know that, and also know that juries around here are made of people just like me.

The law doesn’t keep houses in Modern Mayberry safe, the threat of violence keeps people safe.

But all the world isn’t Modern Mayberry. Places like Chicago or Baltimore have ongoing violence levels that are at multi-decadal highs. Why?

The criminals have gotten the message that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And if someone tries to step in and protect citizens? Well, like the Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny, who restrained a potentially dangerous man in a way he thought would keep everyone safe, they’ll be put on trial.

Yes, and the trial is expected to take six weeks. At $1,000 an hour for lawyers, that’s $40,000 a week. Or $240,000 for all six. Maybe he’s got a coupon?

Is a lawyer required to name his daughter Sue?

Regardless of if Penny is found guilty or not, his trial sends the same message as New York has always sent to its citizens: you’re not allowed to protect yourselves. Criminals threatening violence have the upper hand. Just ask Bernie Goetz, who decided he refused to be a mugging victim again.

We’re at the point where the criminals will start using violence – not because they have any political objective, but just because no one is stopping them, and those who would attempt to stop them are punished very visibly.

The way forward is obvious. At some point, decent people will have no other place to flee, and will have to stand and fight. When I review history, the pattern is pretty clear that civilization does return, though it does take the reestablishment of violence to get us there, and probably a few more buffalo jumps.

I had a bison steak the other night, and asked the waiter for the buffalo bill.

And it’s been 200 years since the last organized buffalo jump, I here. I guess that makes it a bison-tennial. And maybe Penny can get an Aztec lawyer – they get right to the heart of the problem.

The Competence-Free Economy, The Cargo Cult, And Control

“I’ve only been out of the United States twice. A handful of times in Mexico, and then the second time I left the country, we went to Salem, Oregon.” – Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Do you think she prefers “colored-hair person” or “person of colored hair”?

I was reading Mark’s blog over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) the other day and he had a story about a “pink-haired DEI trainer” who had managed to get the deputy head of the Oregon Department of Forestry put on administrative leave. His alleged crime?

Well, besides being a Chad that the “pink-haired” tattooed circus freak of a DEI trainer could never in a million years manage to get a glance from (she is beyond coyote ugly), his crime was that he wanted to hire “candidates most qualified for the job”.

Yes, that was his sin. He wanted to hire people who could best do the work that the taxpayers of the state of Oregon were paying them to do. I mean, Oregon has a lot of trees. They have so many trees that I hear that in order to keep track of the ones they cut down: they make their lumberjacks keep a log.

The comedian Bill Burr has a brother that’s a lumberjack. Tim.

What was the DEI circus sideshow reject’s solution instead of hiring competent people? According to the Daily Mail (and every other paper that I can find), it was to pick people via an “ ‘intersectional lens’ whereby applications from people of marginalized backgrounds are given greater weight. Since the head and shoulders shot of the DEI trainer is all we have, I’m unsure of how she could be given greater weight since I’d estimate that 400 pounds is long in her rearview mirror.

Why is a blue whale called a blue whale? It’s not fat enough to be called a diversity trainer.

Her other complaint was that a colleague made a joke that she, “puts in in a really good lunch order.” Which is somehow sexist? Because guys don’t order lunch? Maybe this person was striving to make a nice comment about a person whose job it is to be perpetually offended by everyone and everything. Oh, wait . . . .

Speaking of which: she/her was also upset that she was carved out of the regular executive meetings of the Department, but, in my view, it’s simply because absolutely no one wanted to be in a meeting where decisions about forests and trees were made with a whiney GloboLeftist who cares more about pronouns than pine. She was as necessary as Joe Biden at a Cabinet meeting.

Does my description of her sound mean to the “pink-haired” gravity well in question? Probably. But I’m not going to apologize, since it is people who say the things that she does that are ruining it for the entire world, especially her “marginalized communities.”

They wanted Samuel L. Jackson in this commercial, but they couldn’t get him to say “nature” after “mother”.

The bigger point is that to the GloboLeftist and GloboLeftistElite, there are only two possibilities on how they think about economics.

First, the GloboLeftist, the rank and file – the DEI hires and DEI trainers – think that wealth and prosperity is something that simply exists. They don’t view the world as a place where people work and strive to create that wealth and prosperity.

Instead, they view that that wealth and prosperity is their right, merely by having been born.

They have no idea where wealth comes from, and in this are like the Cargo Cults that came to their greatest prominence after World War II. This is a cult where the native population was suddenly overrun by great armies in motion across the Pacific. These armies would move in, create an airfield, and suddenly planes would appear.

What would be on the planes?

Most everything. People. Ammunition. Fuel. Guns. Food. Simply the most amazing wealth the natives had ever seen.

These people had nearly no understanding of the world outside of their island – to them the airfield was magic. The white people who built it summoned great gods from beyond that brought them amazing wealth. Then those same white people took all that wealth, which was obviously meant for the natives, and left.

Where do you punch mythical horse/man hybrids for the most effect? In the centaur of mass.

After that, these natives would build airfields, towers, bamboo airplanes, and hold mock military drills like they had seen the soldiers do.

Their expectation? That, regardless of their competence, regardless of their understanding of the way aircraft and modern commerce worked, that they would get the wealth because they deserved it. Now, they resent the white man for taking the wealth away, and spend their time building lonely airfields, waiting for the wealth to come back.

That’s the GloboLeftist:

They fundamentally hate those that have achieved more than they have, and are driven by envy, hate, and fear. Yes, this “pink-haired” monstrosity is only one species of this type of life form.

There are others. They are the type of people that if they cannot possess a thing, they want to destroy it. They revel in it. The orgy of the George Floyd riots is simply one example.

On the other hand, the GloboLeftistElite want to crash everything and really doesn’t care about competence since I assure you, Larry Fink and Bill Gates don’t hire their pilots or security staff based on intersectionality, unless one axis of that intersection is “amazingly competent.”

Kamikaze use as a weapon? Now that was a one-hit wonder.

A prosperous middle class that has a culture, tradition, and roots can stop them from doing as they please. This is dangerous to them.

How better to facilitate the end of this class, the end of broad wealth, than to encourage incompetence through nonsense like DEI? Why else would BlackRock® want to buy houses and then rent them back to the people that used to buy them? Why else would services like Übëŕ® be held at as a way that the middle class can rent a car, instead of owning one?

To the GloboLeftistElite, the assets a member of the middle class used to take as normal – a house, a car, a farm, a business – are assets that they want to buy, own, and use so that no aspect of a life in the United States (or anywhere else they control) isn’t subject to a cut off the top for them. They really don’t care if you live in a pod, as long as you pay your cut to the house.

So, we have two goals that are being followed by two groups. The first group, the GloboLeft, consists of AntiFa®, the “pink-haired” activists, the kindergarten teachers that just can’t wait to teach children about pronouns and gay sex, and their hangers-on. Why are they in it? As we’ve discussed again and again, they hate what the world has done to them, they feel powerless, and by destroying the system, by making it as ugly and incompetent as they are, they get power.

The second group is the GloboLeftElite. The GloboLeftElite loves, loves the GloboLeftists because they’re the willing footsoldiers that take common, hardworking men of competence and force them to hire people based on their particular fetish, mental condition, or other random factor. The GloboLeftElite is pushing these people into organizations everywhere, so they can defang the last opposition to them: the middle class. Those 17,000 jobs that Boeing® just lost?

DEI, baby.

I hear that 25% of the crew was named Juan. I guess that’s a three to Juan ratio.

I think the Department of Forestry Chad will be fine, since, well, he’s a Chad. And, he’s on paid leave right now, which is a vacation. I’m sure he’s got some pension vesting, and I’d be willing to bet he could get a job in a variety of states that don’t take the word of “pink-haired” DEI trainers who are offended when people are hired based on their competence.

And, if Oregon persists in DEI hires Forestry Chad will want to move out of the state, soon enough the forests will be deserts. Won’t that be diverse!

Prepatude.

“No harm in being prepared.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

If a detective solves a murder quickly, is that a brief case?

(most clips/memes from here on out are as-found)

Prepping is a subject that has been near and dear to my heart since I was a kid.

The Wilder family would frequently go on long hikes and snowmobile trips into the backcountry. Likewise, we’d go hunting and fishing. Before most of those trips, Ma and Pa would talk to me about the dangers on the trip, what to do if I got lost, and what to avoid. I’m still at a loss as to why they covered me in honey when we were in bear country and referred to me as “Hansel” but I did pay attention.

Our spot of land on Wilder Mountain was 15 miles to the first town, which was a metropolis of about 800 people during the school year. It had a grocery store, and a doctor’s office that was open (I believe) two days a week because the doctor went from town to town. It was a time and place where, when I was bitten by a local dog, the doctor asked me to describe it.

“Meh. Probably not rabid. I wouldn’t worry.”

It was a different world back then and Gen X kids, who were pretty free-range.

Got arrested for smuggling books into Washington D.C. Got off on a technicality, since no one there can read.

The winters on Wilder Mountain were cold at -40°F (-40°C) being a regular low, and with snowfall that could total to over three feet in a single night. There were no natural gas lines, or even artificial gas lines, and we heated the place exclusively on firewood. There were times the road was closed, and when the power was out, it was out for hours while the power company scrambled people from nearly 50 miles away to come and fix whatever had broken whereas fire always worked.

Ambulance? Forget it. When I was young, the closest ambulance (I believe) at least half an hour away. The ambulance was whatever car you had and the State Troopers told people to put their emergency flashers on when speeding to the hospital. Did I say State Troopers? Nah, there was just one within 45 miles.

There is an official denial that this is a true story. More info will come out.

And, obviously, no cell phones. Heck, our first line was a “party” line which was shared among four houses, and all the phones would ring for an incoming call. You could tell which call was for your house because each house had a distinct ring pattern, sort of like Morse code for Martha.

From a very young age, I knew that my safety wasn’t coming from some distant location. I was responsible for myself. Our family was responsible for our family.

As the slogan goes: no one was coming to save us, and we knew it. We also lived it, having provisions of food for more than a month at any given time, a freezer full of meat, and enough firewood to last two winters. When the power went out, we had candles, and Ma Wilder had the wax to make more.

I was raised with prepping as a mindset. We lived it.

I could go into more details, but you get the point – nearly everything we did was predicated on the idea that if things went tango uniform, we’d likely have to do all the digging out ourselves, which we did on more than one occasion.

When you don’t feel like physically preparing.

Looking back on it, that was a wonderful way to grow up. It’s really the opposite of being a victim. If I had gotten into a situation that I couldn’t have gotten out of while maintaining a 98.6°F (-40°C) body temperature, I knew it was my own fault.

It taught me this lesson: I’m never a victim.

This is also the story of the founding and conquering of our nation: people setting off to far lands across a sea, and then finally crossing the continent with everything they owned in a wagon, a little island of humanity that would sink or swim.

I’m a descendent of those that managed to swim, and probably, you are, too.

Well, that’s embarrassing for FEMA.

This, really, is the opposite of city life.

For someone in New York, they depend on other people for almost everything. Trash. Food. Heat. Water. Safety. Security. Elevators. Like I said, almost everything. They exist as a cog in a technological machine that uses them for a specific purpose and then puts them to rest in the off hours so they can complain about how alienated they feel to psychiatrists that charge $400 an hour.

GloboLeft prepping aisle.

To them, prepping probably means avoiding scary people on the sidewalk, but even that isn’t any sort of guarantee of safety. Nor is a guarantee that the systems that work to punish those who will do Evil is in any way functional. It looks like those are breaking down at a rapid pace, and that will do nothing but increase the level of violence and corruption already inherent with large numbers of people from divergent cultures living close to one another.

Such a vibrant big-city culture!

For them, prepping isn’t an attitude, prepping is something other people do, because the stores are always open, 24/7.

More than anything, however, preparation is a continual situational review of what you have and what you have to have. I write this now because I sense we’re in a greater degree of danger than at any time during my life, with the possible exception of 1983 when things almost got extra-spicy with the Soviets, who were nearly finished with updating their weapons from World War I.

Now is really the time to assess where you’re at, what you’re doing, and what you would do without things that are “essential”.

Essential is relative: 2 minutes without air, 2 hours without shelter (depending on conditions), 2 days without water, and 2 weeks without food (though lots of folks including myself are pre-prepped for that contingency). How many GloboLeftists could last an afternoon, though, without the warm affirmations of their fellow travelers that they’re on the Right Side of History®?

Why wouldn’t they want people reporting on this? Embarrassed, or wanting to kill opposition voters in a swing state?

No, prepping isn’t about a day or a time or an event, it’s a way of life, because of the horrible things that have happened to me have been none of the ones I expected, like that time I nearly ran out of beer. But since I had prepared generally, well, I was prepared. I have 200’ of rope in my truck. Why?

I have no idea what specific episode I’ll need it, but experience shows that in the next decade someone will say to me . . . “I have no idea why you had the rope, John, but it sure stopped that runaway nuclear reactor meltdown!”

I mean, most people only stop one nuclear reactor meltdown. But two?

Know their priority. It isn’t you.

My prepping background is my parents. We lived near the wilderness, and lived like it. One thing that neither Pa nor Ma would accept, at all, was a victim.

Having a proper prepping attitude, or prepatude is all about that – setting yourself up so that being a victim isn’t in your future. Then?

Lists.

The Debate

“Mr. Rooney, Ferris is home and he’s very ill. I debated even leaving him.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Who won the presidential debate last night? People who didn’t watch.

As my father said when the cows got into the marijuana, “Son, the steaks are high.”

That’s how I’d describe the Trump/Kamala debate. Apparently, they’ve never met, so her charge that Trump put a wet finger in her ear and said “Wet Willie Brown” is certainly false. One of the rules is that Kamala has a two-drink minimum.

I decided I’d just blog about the debate instead. Since I’m going to get into the hot tub later with a cigar and maybe a scotch, today’s post will be, unfortunately, written while sober.

Notes: I like the muted microphone idea. It stops the debate for being a shouting match, though I wish they would give the candidates an array of condiments they could throw at each other. Regardless, here is my (partially made up) transcript.

But she’d be happy to force you to take it.

My biggest hope? That Trump says, “Be quiet or I’ll spank you, you disrespectful little turnip.”

Showtime!

Kamala walks to Don. I think she would have peed on him to show dominance, but she couldn’t lift her leg up, or Hindu tradition prevents it.

First question:

Are people better off than four years ago?

Kamala: “I understand the problem and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m going to say absolutely nothing, but then attack Trump.”

Trump: “No sales tax, other countries will pay for the wall, took billions and billions from Chi-nah. We’ve had a terrible economy, worse than ever seen since ever. We’ve had people stream into this country from mental institutions, and even Baltimore.”

Kamala: “Worst epidemic, worst unemployment and personally burned the Constitution after farting on the Statue of Liberty.”

Trump: “Cut taxes, make the greatest economy, ever, and then Kamala ate a baby. Alive. At Central Park. I was there.”

Kamala: “I’ve memorized a thing about the economy. Here it is.”

Trump: “She has no plan. It’s four sentences – run spot run.” I wish I had made that up, but that was Trump’s line, it’s hilarious.

You want to add tariffs, and that might cost more money. Why do you hate America?

Trump: “They kept my tariffs, because I made the best tariffs, and now people can’t afford bacon.”

Kamala: “There was a trade deficit, and Trump sold chips to China, and the United States should win the race against China.” It really didn’t say anything in the answer, but it was well said, much better than her normal word salad.

Trump: “Taiwan sold chips to Chi-nah. Immigration is bad. She’s a Marxist.” (Actually, one of Trump’s passionate answers, and pretty articulate and less hand-wavy than usual.

President Trump you were against abortion and then for abortion and why do you hate women?

Trump: “Six Supreme Court justices got Roe v. Wade out of the states, and now states can make a decision and people can make a vote. Ohio and Kansas were okay with killing kids.”

Kamala: “Trump is a liar. He’s the devil. Women have to leave a state to kill a baby, and can’t even do it at their home state. I might sign a bill making baby killing legal everywhere.”

Trump: “Kamala’s a liar. And stupid. And incompetent at government.”

Kamala: “Any woman should be able to kill any baby whenever. Perhaps up until college.” Kamala is making it personal, and looking at Trump as an accuser. Trump doesn’t fall for this.

Trump: “She’s a liar. Everybody knows it.”

The microphones are not always turned off during the answers of the other candidate.

It’s hard to make a good abortion joke, but leave it to the Left.

Why did you let just a few illegal people in?

Kamala: “I want to stop drugs from coming in.” She starting to slur her words. “Trump didn’t approve the bill and that’s because he hates you and you should go to his stupid rally.”

Trump: “There’s no reason to go to her rallies. People don’t leave my rallies. People want to take their country back. What they have done with allowing millions and millions into our country, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets.” This has happened, but ABC News disagreed.

Kamala: (first giggle) “Talk about extreme! The very worst republicans love me.” Kamala is actually effectively getting under Trump’s skin at this point.

Trump: “I fired them.”

Perhaps he’s upset because that was Fang-Fang’s dinner?

How can you send all of these illegals back?

Trump: “They allowed terrorists, drug dealers, criminals and Venezuelans in. Their crime is down. But they’re destroying the fabric of our country.” (no humor added on this comment)

Kamala: (next giggle, more slurring) “This is rich! Trump is a criminal and awful, and I have answers, I promise.”

Trump: “It’s a political prosecution.” Really good answer here.

Kamala: “Trump would kill your children if he were back in the White House.”

Kamala, you flip flop, so please explain why you have such a good reason to flip flop?

Kamala: “After I was against oil, I was for oil. I want everyone to have houses, because that won’t increase inflation, but we’ll need to need to import labor to make them. And this friend I had in high school who is totally not made up was sexually assaulted. I want to help people not be mean like Trump.”

Trump: “I am so very rich. Fracking? She’s been against fracking and the police (even Sting) and – I’m talking now – does that sound familiar? – and wants to turn do transgender surgery on illegal aliens.”

Transgender surgery for even alien-aliens, would be my bet. But ALF as a woman?

Mr. President, why did you start an insurrection and why do you regret it?

Trump: “Peacefully and patriotically. You left that out. When are the illegals going to be prosecuted? When are the people who burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted?”

Mr. President, why don’t you say you regret this?

Trump: “I didn’t do anything to regret.”

Kamala: “I was at the Capitol. The President wanted to desecrate the nation’s Capitol because he hates you and Donald Trump hates Jews.” Trump does not take the bait to stare back at her, which people would take as threatening.

Trump: “Why is she now doing anything on the border? Biden can close the border, he’s not.”

Mr. President, why won’t you say you lost the election we stole fair and square?

Trump: “The illegals are trying to vote.” Kamala does not look remotely happy and ABC pulls away from the split screen.

Why does Donald Trump want to stop illegals from voting?

Kamala: “Donald Trump should accept the fact that we stole the election fair and square.”

Trump: “Victor Orban – why is the world blowing up? The most respected and most feared president was Trump. Kamala didn’t get a single vote. She failed.”

Israel and Palestine aren’t getting along, tell us a made-up way that you’d solve it?

Kamala: “War is bad. We shouldn’t have one. I really like Israel, though.”

Trump: “It never would have started. Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Kamala hates Israel. But, Kamala also hates Arabs. And probably hates kittens.”

Kamala: “I love Israel. Trump is weak and loves dictators.”

Trump: “Putin endorses Kamala.”

Commercial Break – A commercial for feminine products. Who knew women were filled with blue liquid?

Mr. President, you could solve Ukraine in 24 hours?

Trump: “We’ve spent $250 billion in Ukraine because Biden won’t ask Europe. I can call Putin and Zelinsky and settle it. I’ll do a deal. It would be a great deal. We could have World War III.”

Kamala: “You’re running against me. Putin wants to take over all of the Starbucks™ in Europe. No cappuccino for anyone. And Poland. You want to give up Poland.”

Trump: “Quiet, please. Putin would be sitting in Moscow, and don’t forget he has nuclear weapons. Kamala was sent to negotiate peace, and three days later? War. She’s worse than Biden. She is a horrible negotiator.”

Kamala: “I’m going to say a lot of things about Trump, to avoid talking about how I failed negotiating in Ukraine.”

Trump: “I got Europeans to pay for NATO.”

Kamala was a lot more prepared than she was the first time around.

Do you regret what happened in Afghanistan?

Kamala: “We got out of Afghanistan. Trump’s deal in Afghanistan was the worst. Trump invited terrorists to Camp David, America’s most holy place.”

Trump: “My agreement was good, the Afghanistan withdrawal was horrible.”

President Trump, why are you a racist?

Trump: “I’m not.”

Kamala: “He is.”

Trump: “She’s horrible.”

Kamala: “He’s horrible.”

Trump: “She’s horrible.”

(Hosts utterly losing control)

President Trump, how are you going to fix healthcare?

Trump: “I saved Obamacare, but it wasn’t great, but I’m trying to find a better one.””

Oh, wonderful Kamala, how can you say something about healthcare that conforms to the answer you memorized?

Kamala: “I’m not going to take your guns. And I know people who have been sick and we want Obamacare to get even better. And healthcare is a right.”

Trump: “Kamala wants everyone on government insurance.”

What would you do to stop climate change?

Kamala: “Climate change is horrible and I have invested $1 trillion in clean energy with my donors and opened factories around the world.”

Trump: “Kamala loves Chi-nha. They’ve destroyed business and manufacturing, and Biden got paid off by China and Ukraine? They are crooks.”

Commercial Break – Debate sponsored by Crazy Z’s Unpainted Ukraine, for the best in discount barely used weapons.

Closing Statements:

Kamala: “We’re not going back to low prices. I’ve never had a real job. We need me as a president.”

Trump: “Here are the wonderful things she’s going to do, but she hasn’t done it. Why hasn’t she done it? I can rebuild America. I can make it better, faster. I’ll call it the six-million-dollar country.”

Overall, Trump was Trump, and this was probably his best debate of all of them during three elections. Kamala, however, didn’t look like the blithering idiot that she is, since it looks like they got her off the sauce long enough to do debate prep.

If you liked Trump, you still like Trump. If you liked Kamala, you’re probably not a regular reader, but you probably still like Kamala and are relieved that she didn’t Biden-out with disjointed word salads. I think Team Kamala will be happy enough with this performance that they’ll trot her out for a few very carefully scripted interviews.

There will not be another debate.

How will the normies take it? Not a clear victory either way, and the undecided mainly don’t watch these things, so it’ll be decided by what news they hear between the “top hits of the 80s, and more” and what they’re paying for gasoline.

Or, by the people who count the votes in big cities in swing states.

Stay tuned, and I suggest spending election night at a mountaintop restaurant, where the steaks will be high.

Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics

“Baseball. Cold showers. Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.

It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat. In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.

However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids. Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked: at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.

That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system. The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output. Which is also their minimum output. My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off. Period.

What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster. Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach. Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.

If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.

Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.

The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward. As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”

After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.

That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.

I think step five is the hardest.

But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy. Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates. So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.

Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time. Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response. But soaring oil prices?

Responding to those requires time and investment. First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases. After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.

Then, pipe is needed. And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera. This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales. That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.

The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.

Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results. Now. Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.

The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located. They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”

I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?

The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them. They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:

John Wilder: “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder. With me?”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “Huh? Why are you in my house at midnight?”

JW: “Let me try a different approach. How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”

AOC: “Oh, like 40 or 50?”

JW: “Good. Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”

AOC: “I don’t know? That they smell like my feet?”

JW: “Well . . . . okay. But is it hard to keep them organized?”

AOC: “OH! Totally! I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”

JW: “Right! The amount of disorder increases!”

AOC: “Oh, I get it!!! Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”

JW: “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there. Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”

AOC: “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner. Instead? Only Fans®.”

I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.

Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.

Longer term decisions include:

tax policy which drives investment decisions and can kill industries,
Social Security and Medicare, in which cash is taken, spent, and then the next generation is saddled with the repayment obligations,
immigration policy, which changes the population and workforce over decades,
tariffs, which determine winners and losers, and
many other things that you or I could name if we just spent 10 minutes thinking about it.

Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades. The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.

I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.

Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.

But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time. I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.

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:

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?