The Erosion of Trust: The Secrecy State Sucks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does that remind anyone of the Russian Collusion Hoax?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paging Epstein, anyone?

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

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

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

Do we need to end secrecy entirely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt Slavery’s Long Game: From Sumer to Goomer With A Detour to Ginger And Mary Ann

“If you erase the debt record, then we  go back to zero.” – Fight Club

If Electric Avenue is closed, where are on Earth are we going to rock down to?

I can’t remember the first time Pa Wilder said “There’s nothing sure but death and taxes” but I couldn’t have been any taller than former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who I believe is about three feet tall.  But I’m sure that while Pa was quoting Benjamin Franklin accurately, he did miss one big point:  although death was really old, for most people in the history of the planet, there was also debt.

Some of the earliest records we have are records of debt, baked into Sumerian clay indicating that Goomer owed Abadabaduu 12 sheep because he borrowed 10 sheep.  And debt was a pretty serious thing back then.  If Goomer couldn’t pay, he might even be sentenced to become Abadabaduu’s slave.  If Goomer’s kid, Jenzie, had the misfortune of Goomer getting a bad sunburn and dying, well, Jenzie now a lifetime of debt slavery himself to look forward to as he pays off Goomer’s debts.

This stuck in my mind when I was listening to a conversation between a guy who owned a *lot* of apartments and some kids.  The kids were in the middle school age bracket and the landlord was trying to teach them about finance.  The landlord said, “You know, having apartments is a lot like having a slave.  They go out and work for me, and give me money every month.”

Keep in mind that this guy wasn’t what I would normally call shady, but that’s the sort of nightmare fodder that GloboLeftists use as propaganda when they want to burn down capitalism.  A much better way to describe the situation is that the apartment owner does such a good job at building and maintaining his properties that people want to engage in a voluntary transaction with him to live there.

Describing them as slaves?  Eeek.

What did Yoda™ say when he saw himself in 4k?  “HDMI”

And, I generally wouldn’t describe the situation where a willing lender and a willing borrower make a loan.  I’ve taken out several loans, and have (so far) paid them all back, as far as I can recall.  Now, people who have borrowed from me?

Not so much.  I suppose Shakespeare had it right when he said,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
“for loan oft loses both itself and a friend,
“and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry [thrift – JW]”

Though, in truth I remember this best when the Skipper was singing it in the musical version of Hamlet that the castaways put on in Gilligan’s Island.

To be clear, I’ve made the argument as recently as Monday that we shouldn’t goof around with systems that work, and compound interest has been with us longer than bourbon and syphilis, so I give up.  Just like herpes, we’re stuck with it.  But that also means that we’re stuck with the problems that debt causes.

If debt were just limited to cocoanuts on an island where adolescent me was stuck with Ginger and Mary Ann, well, life would be swell.  Really swell, as in now I understand why they never made it off the island:  Gilligan was sabotaging any real chance of escape on purpose.

But it isn’t Gilligan’s Island, and debt it has longer term impacts than that glue the professor made out of that pancake syrup.

Why not both?

Let’s talk about Rome.

Debt played a significant part of the Roman Social Wars, a period of ten years where essentially everyone in the Roman sphere was fighting everyone else.  This led to Rome taking the unprecedented step of cancelling 75% of all debts.  Those that remained were restructured.  This was brought about because debt-based economies become unstable.

It happened in mediaeval Europe, when III defaulted on his debt and forgave noble debts so the nobles didn’t slit his favorite throat.  Oh, yeah, the peasants still owed.

It happened after the industrial revolution, when the Napoleonic Wars jacked the British government det to 50% of the budget by 1820.  That was okay, because the British were in peak expansion mode, conquering the roughly 7,522 “nations” that made up India so that they could set up call centers.  Then the British were forced to fight when they found that the Boer were sitting on all that British gold underneath the country the Boers had founded.

Indians in call centers make teams to see who can scam more Americans.  I don’t like them or their call leagues.

And when the Imperial expansion stopped?  The British Empire crumbled because it could no longer sustain itself and had to change its name to the United Kingdom.  And the UK was stuck with a capital city (Londonistan) sized for a world-spanning empire, not for a country that would have to have US help to take back the Falklands and now has a navy that contains more admirals than ships.

Briefly, Great Britain saw prosperity beyond their debt burden when the North Sea oil began flowing, but as it has ebbed, Great Britain has started to ebb as well.  The UK has an external debt of 66% of its total wealth.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?  Smallpox.

Sure, that sounds bad, but let’s look at the United States:

In 1980, the United States was the largest net-creditor in the world.  Take what we own and subtract what we owe, and we were, by far, in the best position on the planet.  Only six years later, the US was a net-debtor.  How bad is it in 2024?  The United States has more net-debt than . . . every other country that is a net-debtor.

Combined.

How long does that last?  I’ll ask Grok® and he’ll opine here:

My Opine: How Long Does U.S. Net-Debt Dominance Last?

The Take

  • Short Term (5-10 Years): The U.S. can sustain this—barely. Web data (Visual Capitalist, 2024) shows U.S. debt at $36.1T (Dec 2024), 124% of GDP (CEIC, Dec 2024), projected to hit 166% by 2054 (PGPF, 2024). Japan’s at 254.6% (Visual Capitalist, 2024)—they’re fine, because they hold their own debt (90% domestic). U.S. has a buffer as the world’s reserve currency (Visual Capitalist, 2024), but foreign holders (22.9%, $7.9T, USAFacts, 2024) like Japan ($1.09T) and China ($768.6B, Investopedia, 2025) could pull back—X’s “China dump” fears hum. Interest costs are the killer—$1.126T in FY 2024 (GAO, 2024), 14% of federal spending (Wikipedia, 2025). If rates rise (CBO projects 3.1% average, PGPF, 2024), or if China tariffs spike (Visual Capitalist, 2024), the U.S. could face a reckoning by 2035—debt-to-GDP at 118% (PGPF, 2024).
  • Long Term (20+ Years): Cracks show. Web data (PGPF, 2024) warns of 172% debt-to-GDP by 2054—unsustainable. X’s “dollar crash” doomers aren’t wrong—foreign selloffs (USAFacts, 2024) could spike rates, tank the dollar. If the U.S. loses reserve status (China’s yuan push, X’s “dedollarization” buzz), it’s game over—think Britain post-empire, your “Londonistan” vibe. I’d say 2040-2050—25 years max—unless spending cuts and growth (not GloboLeft “stimulus”) kick in. Carl’s X: “Debt’s a PEZ® trap—U.S. chokes in 25.”

Why It’s Shaky

  • Interest Costs: $1.126T (FY 2024, GAO)—set to hit $1.7T by 2034 (Visual Capitalist, 2024). That’s 3% of GDP (Wikipedia, 2025), highest since 1996. X’s “interest bomb” memes nail it—unsustainable.
  • Foreign Pullback: China’s down to 5% of U.S. debt (2018, Wikipedia)—sanctions, tariffs (Visual Capitalist, 2024). If Japan follows (X’s “yen rise” buzz), U.S. rates spike—GloboLeft’s “forgive it” won’t save.
  • Structural Mess: Spending outpaces revenue (PGPF, 2024)—23.1% GDP outlays vs. 17.5% revenue (2024). X’s “cut the fat” roars—GloboLeft’s “spend more” is Rome’s 86 BC rerun.

See?  Grok® likes PEZ™, too.

One thing you can credit him for, he stepped down as CEO when he was in his Prime®.

Unless that debt gets written off, it certainly won’t be paid off, and Jenzie will be turned into a wage slave because who is left saying:

“Okay, Goomer.”

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

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

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

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

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

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

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

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

Yeah, a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never eat a Monopoly® board.  It tastes gamey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

What Will Come From The Current Recession?

“No tomorrow?  That means there’d be no consequences.  No hangovers.  We could do whatever we wanted!” – Groundhog Day

An economist falls off a cliff.  During the fall, he notes, “So far, so good.  It’s different this time.  Soft landing ahead!”

Note:  no podcast this week.  Hoping to have a new computer that can hear things as soon as my staff gets the specifications together.

Last week I let on that I thought a recession was coming.  I mean, I always think a recession is coming, so that was no big surprise, but it looks like from preliminary data that the economy is actually contracting this quarter, so, if we match it with one more quarter of contraction that’s the textbook definition of a recession.  Or maybe the economy is having a baby.  I slept through that part of health class.

It is a long-used trick of sitting presidents to treat the economy like a 1980s high school kegger in order to get re-elected.  The plan is generally simple:  lower interest rates, make great big troughs of money available, and, bada-bing, the economy is bada-booming on election day and the cheerleaders are doing keg stands.

Nixon mastered this with his re-election bid in 1972.

Well, add the hangover from Nixon’s economic Everclear™ to the crude oil embargo (thanks, Israel) and the result was the miasma of suck that was the 1970s economy – stagflation.  Every president has done some variation of this act since then, with varying degrees of success, but since 2000 or so, each president has tried to avoid all of the consequences of the Boozing.  How?  Boozing some more.

And I heard they were banning cheese in Great Britain.  Or at least extra sharp cheddar.

I’m guessing that one can avoid a hangover by staying drunk all the time, though I don’t have personal experience in attempting that strategy.  Although it is probably more enjoyable than a hangover, there are always consequences to replacing all of your blood with ethanol.

There is a difference with this current economic hangover that we’re working on because, first, we’ve been drinking soooooo long.  Like I said, this has been going on since at least 2000.

So, there’s that.  But that’s not the only thing impacting the economy right now.

Another major factor is Trump.  I think, like many people, Trump sees the size of the national debt and knows that this can’t go on.  He’s also a guy who has nothing at all to lose.  He can shoot the Moon and try to go for all of it.

He’s doing exactly that.  Tariffs?  As I’ve written before, when the United States had tariffs, we were a strong economy with manufacturing.  Post WW2, when we went away from tariffs to help the rest of the world rebuild out of the rubble?  Not so much.

If Trump puts tariffs on Canadian goods, no one can say he has ties to Poutine.

Trump’s America also (so far) is an America that wants peace.  For decades we’ve been shadowboxing against Russia, which is like Hulk Hogan™ attempting to defeat a room full of kittens.  I mean, jeez, Hulk®, their eyes aren’t even open yet.  Russia is not a threat to the United States.  Except for the nukes.

Others want war, though.  The neocons and people like Victoria Zoolander want war the in the Ukraine, probably because Russia gave them a wedgie in the 1980s or because they have Raytheon© stock.  I saw one Canadian tweet, “Well played, Americans, look at all of the billions of dollars in weapons you won’t get to sell.”

To be clear, I’m all in favor of weapons, just ask The Mrs. when I make goo-goo eyes at a .50 cal.  I think every father should be given their choice of an M2 or an M60.  But to try to mock the United States for not getting profits on weapons that are killing people, right now?

That’s . . . disturbing.

Also as a factor, in Trump’s America government is likely to be D.O.G.E.’d into shrinking for the first time since we demobilized from World War II.  When that happened, we transitioned more-or-less seamlessly into the economic boom of the 1950s, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the world was like Sergeant Hulka:  “All blown up, sir!”

This shrinking government sector will take the heat off of inflation in many things, but tariffs will raise prices.  Where it ends up is uncertainty.

Who doesn’t like uncertainty?  Wall Street®.

Physicists should never look down at their speedometers.  If they do, they’ll have no idea where they are.

The final big factor in this recession is that the insiders who have been putting the Bacardi 151™ into the punch bowl for all these decades don’t want to help Trump.  That’s probably a good thing.  The more government meddling into the economy, the longer it normally takes to shake itself back into order.

I want the recession to be:

Short.

Sharp.

Cleansing.

Like hangovers, recessions are painful.  They can wreck lives.  But they are required to clean out the economy from time to time.

And the economy hasn’t been cleaned out in forever.  Some areas where it really does need a bit of sprucing up:

  • Government.
  • Banks.
  • Real Estate.
  • Manufacturing.
  • Education,

These spring cleanings will be painful.  A lot of people in these industries are out there doing the important work of going to Zoom™ meetings and making PowerPoints©, rather than engaging in useless tasks like growing and making food, or fixing potholes, or picking up the trash.

So, yes, this is probably a recession coming.  The Government-Media-Education complex will certainly try to blame Trump, just as they tried to blame him on day two that he hadn’t yet fixed all of Biden’s booby traps.

Is the most popular red wine in prison Penal Noir?

To be clear, Trump will be partially at fault, but if the result is a true cleansing of the economy?  It will be worth it.  Now, where’s that black coffee?

Trump’s Axe

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

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

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

But it might be necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

That changes a guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

Guess that makes me the pot.

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

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

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

The axe is required.

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

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

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s simple. They read the memo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

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

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

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The result?

Color.

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

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

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

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

Hmm.  Proud.  Pride month.  Got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who abuses it?

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

How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India: It’s Worse Than You Think

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

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

So, like indentured servants?

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

As found.

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

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

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

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

I like 2016 Trump.

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

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

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

High Trust Societies, Wealth, and PEZ

“These are volatile times, Your Highness.  The American Revolution lost your father the Colonies, the French Revolution murdered brave King Louis, and there are tremendous rumblings in Prussia, although that might have something to do with the sausages.” – Black Adder the Third

What was Bismarck’s favorite Queen song?  Under Prussia.

The world that most of us grew up in was far different from the world that we’re seeing today.  Among the biggest differences is that the United States was unequivocally the strongest economic power in the world.  Couple it with the “Western” bloc of non-Soviet Europe and Japan, it was amazingly dominant. The United States even stood next to smaller nations at the urinal, right next to them even though there were other urinals open, just to show that dominance.

When people today talk about cultural appropriation, they seem to forget that it’s largely American and British Commonwealth culture that was appropriated throughout the world.  Blue jeans?  Not invented nor popularized by Commiebloc nations, nope.  Nor rock and roll.

In that Western world, there was actually a stunning lack of diversity.  Want rock and roll?  Sure you could listen to the Scorpions® from Germany, AC/DC™ from Australia, Iron Maiden© from Bongland, or Dio™ from the United States, but it was all the same root.  The western world was a very homogeneous place, filled with trust due in large part to that shared sense of purpose and values.

A Catholic friend gave up cleaning the dryer filter.  For Lent.

The level of trust probably peaked in around 1965 in the United States.  In 1965, 77% of people felt that most people in the country were trustworthy, and now it’s down to 58%.  We lived (well, those who were alive in 1965) in a high trust society that rivals the top levels of trust in the world today, sort of like Denmark but without all the smørrebrød, bicycles, and yurp-de-yur sounds.

The thing about a high trust society is that transactions are easy when we have trust in one another.  If you show up to buy a 1884 Iron Chancellor Bismarck® PEZ™ dispenser that I’ve got for sale, well, you trust me that I own the PEZ® dispenser, that it’s real, and I trust you that the check you just gave me will clear or the cash you just gave me isn’t stolen.

And if the check doesn’t clear, you trust the local cops will solve the problem for you.  They’re not corrupt, or if they are, they’re not so corrupt as to ignore crimes, especially when they involve the Franco-Prussian War Limited Series PEZ® dispenser set.  A belief that crime is low and corruption is low is the key to creating the social trust to make a high trust society.

In a high trust world, this works well.

Is a sketchy Italian neighborhood called a spaghetto?

A high trust world, though, is not an anonymous world.  Conmen from Nigeria and India use the anonymity of the Internet to create situations where they can create the relationship required, the “confidence” that is the “con” in conman.  They then prey on people based on the residual trust from their high trust past.  There is a reason that the elderly are primary targets – they remember an America where predation was not the norm.

Right now, oddly, one of the highest trust cultures in the world (according to the Integrated Values Surveys, 2022) is China.  There are certainly several reasons for this.  First, the government will kill bankers for fraud.  Second, they’re almost all actually Chinese, which makes them a nation, not a country.  They (mainly) share the same culture, values, genes, and language.  That goes a long way – blood is thicker than water is a cliché that exists for a reason.

Generally, the higher the trust in a society, the greater the level of GDP per capita.  Denmark has the highest trust on the world, and is fourth in world GDP per capita.  It’s not perfectly correlated, though, the Chinese are high trust, they are low income.  But compare with India, which is close to the worst country, with a trust level of 17% and an annual GDP per capita of a used 2000 Nissan® Xterra© with a broken air conditioner.

I hear that Biden has just signed an order to combat global warming on his way out.  He sent three battalions of Marines to invade the Sun.

It doesn’t take much, though to turn a high trust world into a low trust world.  Basics like faith that elections are fair, and that only valid votes are counted go a long way toward maintaining stability.  You’d think that would be easy in 2024, but it’s not, since at least a third of the electorate wants any vote cast to be counted, rather than just valid ones.  But a conflict of visions like that lowers trust in our basic systems.

Additionally, trust that criminal prosecution will be fair and unbiased has to be held very highly, otherwise gangs of people seeking a justice that the courts didn’t give them will replace the system.  I’m thinking the political prosecution of the January 6 protesters is a horrible indicator.

In turn, this will lower the amount of wealth that can be created in society.  Trust is a form of wealth, but it’s also (mostly) a precondition for a country getting wealthy.

When I was born, I had four kidneys.  But as I grew up, two turned into adult knees.

But trust in society isn’t the same at every single place in society:  in Modern Mayberry, trust is pretty high.

Crimes are rarer here in Modern Mayberry, especially major crimes.  Mainly, we all know each other, and so except for drifters and tweakers, people are (mostly) honest.  People even drive more politely and more forgivingly in small towns because, if you’re a tool, sooner or later everyone will know.  Oh, and we have guns and constitutional carry and crime rates are much lower in places where people aren’t walking victims.  And the local prosecutor won’t charge a store owner with shooting a robber if the robber was armed.

Here in Modern Mayberry, it is still pretty high trust.  My kid drops off our car to get fixed and picks it up when the tire’s been replaced even before I pay.  The guy knows I’m good for it – I’ve been going to his business for over a decade.  Commerce is easy here, and so are most transactions.

Part of that, I think, is that the world here is still mainly local.  We don’t have a big-name chain bank, instead we have a few local banks run by local people that already know the families that live here.  For a farmer getting a loan, it’s much more about reputation than credit score, and a banker giving a loan that might wreck a borrower . . . won’t wreck the borrower.

There’s a moral implication when we work together as a community, a moral implication.  Huges systems are efficient, but the rob us of something

As we become more atomized and less homogeneous, trust is replaced by systems and barriers.  Our relatively homogeneous culture is replaced by a disingenuous god of diversity, where the beliefs of every culture but our own are celebrated.

Not all jokes about agriculture are corny.

A low trust culture is part of the definition of those “bad times that are brought about by weak men”.  And we have seen countries around the world be low trust for millennia.  That, though, has never been the fate of the West, at least not for long.

As I have long said, none of this will be easy.  But there is one problem – in a low trust society, how can I be sure my Limited Edition® Franco-Prussian War Commemorative Series™ PEZ© dispensers will be authentic?