Complacency – Page 16 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

1990s Movies – Because I Said So

“Flores! Flores para los muertos!” – Quick Change

Someone said the next Bond should be a woman – imagine he car explosions and wrecks, and that’s just when she’s parking.

Movies. I grew up with them – it was where I took my girlfriend on a Friday night before we went to the pizza place and then, um, drove to look at the stars. I once took a date to go see one of those graves that have a constant natural gas torch, but it turns out that is a bad idea – you should never take a date to go see an old flame.

But more than Friday night fun, movies were our cultural mythology. As man 20,000 years ago told stories around the fire to establish and share the history of the tribe, our history was told with movies. In essence, movies and television became our campfire, our shared cultural experience. When people say that the United States has no culture, or is guilty of cultural appropriation, they’re wrong and I want to punch them. But I can’t, because I’m not Irish.

As our shared culture, however, movies have always had a huge power to change our minds. As propaganda, they changed our culture, many times not for the better. Movies were also a huge opportunity to change our culture, change our lives, nearly as much as early metallurgy – after all, those who smelt it, dealt it.

I hear when you eat aluminum, you sheet metal.

I used the term “were our mythology” intentionally. The world has changed. The ‘Rona took movies and fragmented them further. Now, to see a big movie you can still go to the theater, but streaming now allows people to focus on narrow interests. Heck, even Putin watches Nyetflix®.

At work, unless we have the same streaming service, we’re not watching the same things. Better Call Saul? I asked people sitting at a table today if they’d seen it. No one had. It’s a gem, and probably the best thing on television today. But no one else had seen it.

There went a shared conversation, a shared moment.

And, like I said, movies are fragmented and not a part of common culture. Why was no one watching the Oscars®? Because no one cares. The Academy Awards® don’t reflect anything about America anymore, since the moves . . . suck. Even as late as four or six years ago, the movies were better. Now, many are simply unwatchable mainly because many have been infected with “woke” culture.

So, for today’s post, I thought I’d go back into history, to the 1990s. Why? It’s my blog. And movies in the 1990s were far more fun than movies today.

I tried to research LGBT stuff, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.

I’ll say that I tried to pick movies that weren’t propaganda, but were, rather, just fun. So, without any further nonsense, here are my favorite movies of the 1990s, year by year. I probably missed some, but this is the list I’m going with at 1am.

The structure? My favorite movie in each year. My criteria? The one that mattered to me. So, let’s get into the time machine and hit. . .

1990:

Quick Change.

I’m a sucker for Bill Murray. I even watched him in Razor’s Edge, which made me think of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters as a hollowed-out shell of a man after World War I. Yeah. That movie didn’t work at all. That being said? Quick Change is funny. It has monster trucks, a heist, and mistaken identity.

In a (very) distant second place is Joe Versus The Volcano. Tom Hanks wasn’t so serious, and there was a quirky fun with watching him go to work – we’ve all had that job. Would I recommend it or change channels to watch it? No. But I do remember it. Hula girls, unite.

1991:

1991 was a MUCH better year for movies. Hands down, Silence of the Lambs wins. It’s tense. It’s 100% related to the book, and Hopkins and Foster never have had better roles. Ever. This is obviously a movie that couldn’t be made today because the character that was the baddy was a mentally deranged person. You know the plot. It’s a movie that you can watch once and the writing is branded into your brain, and it’s perfectly cast, perfectly delivered.

I guess we now understand what Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health was doing in the 1990s.

In second place is Hudson Hawk. I am, perhaps, the only person besides The Mrs. that loves this awful, awful movie. It’s campy. It’s silly. The premise? Ludicrous. Whatever. I loved the stupid movie.

1992:

Reservoir Dogs was amazing, though I didn’t see it until 1994. Wow. There are no reservoirs or dogs in the movie, but despite that, the movie is amazing. It is (perhaps) Tarantino’s best movie. The acting and pacing and tension are amazing.

As honorable mention is . . . My Cousin Vinny. I rewatched it last year with Pugsley, and it was a hoot. Perry Mason crossed with Green Acres. When a movie hinges on the cooking time of grits? Good stuff.

1993:

Army of Darkness is campy fun. Okay, it’s really like the Three Stooges meets H.P. Lovecraft. If that sounds good, watch it. If you hate either of those things? Run. Really. It’s a movie I love because it’s horribly stupid cosmic horror. It also has multiple endings, depending on the version you watch. I can’t pick which one I like best, but I don’t have to.

Honorable mention? Demolition Man. Which isn’t a great movie, but 1993 wasn’t a great year for movies. It takes place in 2032 after Political Correctness takes over the United States. It is not a good movie, but it is fun.

1994:

I would pick Pulp Fiction but I’ve already picked a Tarantino movie so instead I’ll pick Pulp Fiction. I believe this is the only movie on the list where a co-worker said, “Oh, you’re the guy from Pulp Fiction.” Which character was I compared to? The Wolf. That’s me, when I’m at my best.

Mmmm. Good coffee.

I can’t believe this movie isn’t older, but honorable mention is . . . The Crow. If you’re gonna die after one movie, this is the one. Brandon Lee did an amazing job, and the movie would have made him a star, if Alec Baldwin hadn’t been in charge of props that day.

1995:

Wow. I had a big list. 1995 had a raft of great movies. I’m going to pick a movie I hated the first time I watched it: In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness wasn’t what I expected, but every time I watch it, it gets better. Sam Neil in a Lovecraftian (see a pattern yet?) horror by John Carpenter? Yeah.

I have five other movies on my list from 1995. I’m going to pick 12 Monkeys. 12 Monkeys is weird. It bends reality because it involves time travel if Monty Python designed the universe. It’s not funny. It’s also the first time I saw Brad Pitt, and I definitely can’t get the charge nurse to make it yesterday.

1996:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Movie. That would mean something if my hands were made of metal.

Hamlet, honorable mention. Mel Gibson chews the scenery as the mad prince of Denmark. Alas, Yorick, I won’t give any spoilers, since this plot is only 400 years old.

Reminder – never go on another vacation with Sam Neil.

1997:

Event Horizon. Sam Neil. Check. Lovecraftian. Check. Yup, I’m a junkie. This is not an easy movie to watch, and the story of how they made it is hilarious – they did second unit filming on weekends when the executives weren’t watching and that’s when they filmed all the disturbing stuff. Not for kids. I mean, not for your kids. Mine are made of sterner stuff. Also, Sam Neil is known around our house as The Evil Sam Neil.

Second place? Fallen. I liked it. It’s a one-trick movie, but I enjoyed the one trick.

1998:

So, this is a tie. Vampire$, which is a great movie with guys who hunt vampires for money directed by John Carpenter and BASEketball, which is (early) South Park mixed with Airplane. It was too tough – but if I had to pick one I’d pick BASEketball because it is so very stupid.

It was losing the truck that really made them mad.

An honorable mention is: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s rough, but so is the original source material. Johnny Depp captured the manic intensity of Hunter S. Thompson, but my guess is that’s what Johnny Depp is really like, 24 hours a day. Beware of bat country.

1999:

The best year on the list, easily. Bowfinger. Galaxy Quest. The Matrix (wish they made a sequel, right?). Office Space. Fight Club. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I’m not picking. Of these, though, I’d probably (if I had to pick one to watch tonight) pick Fight Club or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but that’s probably just my mood tonight.

The 1990s was a decade before The Narrative took over, and you can tell – the movies themselves were more innocent than today. We’ll look at more decades in future months – you can bet the 1980s had the best teen comedies. Better Off Dead, anyone?

So, what did I miss? Which movies from the 1990s had the biggest impact on you (assuming you’re not Johnny Depp)?

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin. “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place. No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®. No, it is something that normally people are happy about. I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question. I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order. Okay. Restraining orders. My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

a lack of ambition,
waking up with amnesia
too much success, or
having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one. I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot. Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden? Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have? Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition. In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want. And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore. At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week. I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first. One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”. When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza. It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago. I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner. The charm of traveling went away. The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that. There are compromises that I’m not willing to make. And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know. I need to borrow chairs.

What about family? Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver. But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take. Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent. That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers. The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions. No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay. Work was fine. Family was fine. What now?

That’s what I was struggling with. What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years. Talked to him last week. I’ve mentioned Joe before. Pure genius. Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job. So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace. If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst. They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either. The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial. It didn’t make Joe better. It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body. Now what?”

So, I thought about it. And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough? What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place. That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts. Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing. And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes? Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®. Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good. I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within. Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

Regret And Dread – Two Problems You Don’t Really Have To Have

“I have people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, they never will. They’re protected. But I do what I do so they can have a better life. And if I live or if I die, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they have what they need. So when it’s my time to go, I will go knowing I did everything I could for them.” – Better Call Saul

If you press your gas and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.

I tend to like writing my Friday posts the most. Why? Most generally, I get away from the reality of the present situations that we are living in. That’s nice.

Why do I feel like I can do this?

Because nothing is done yet, and nothing is settled yet. I’ve written posts about regret. I still feel that regret is a wasted emotion – the past is done. Of course, I try to learn from my mistakes. But I can’t spend my life being upset about them. The real question is how can I incorporate the mistakes so I have a better future? I even told The Mrs. that she should embrace her mistakes, too. She was so happy she hugged me.

Especially of note are those mistakes I made that weren’t mistakes I made based on a lack of virtue. If I did the right thing, for the right reason, the result is the result, and I will live with the consequences. Sometimes bad things happen when you do everything right. I mean, when the doctor told me I had a rare disease, I asked, “How rare?”

“Well, you get to pick a name.”

Those are the breaks.

Firefighters in Athens have it tough – you’re not supposed to put water on Greece fires.

A similar emotion is dread.

I read a quote when I was a kid – Heinlein? Twain? A fever dream while on laudanum writing about Xanadu? – that stuck with me. “Worrying about what might happen is paying interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet.” It’s a good quote.

Regret is looking at the past, dread (or its cousin, fear) is about looking at the future. But they’re the same. Neither of those two things are real. One once was real, and one might be real.

I’ll admit that when I look out at the future, I do see dark days ahead. But right now, I’m sitting in my basement, The Mrs. had gone upstairs for sleep, the basement is perfectly comfy, and all is right with the world. Something might happen next week. Next month. Next year. The price of tires is up. The price of gasoline is up. Heck, Hunter Biden can’t even find decent meth nowadays. It will get worse.

So?

I fell down at the airport once. Almost missed a flight.

I think that often we are more upset by the thought of potential future discomfort than actual, present discomfort. It can be consuming, and all for something that hasn’t happened yet.

And, it used to be me. I used to do the math – how many months could I make mortgage payments if I lost my job? How many days could I feed my family? And, it’s one thing planning for that, but I was also sometimes scared.

Until one day I just decided to not be scared – I’d go through life and do my best, and let the chips fall where they may. I decided that it was fine to plan, it was fine to economize to save money, but it wasn’t fine to worry.

So I stopped.

It was weird – one night I was worried, and the next night I decided that I wasn’t going to worry anymore. I just made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to worry anymore about that. It was the last significant worry that I gave up. I also worried about my short attention span, but that problem seems to solve itself.

The Kamikaze instructor to his class: “Now, class, pay attention because I’m only going to do this once.”

And it’s not like I live in a world where bad things don’t happen. I know bad things happen – horrible things. But today, I can choose not to worry about them.

Heck, I can pick something that is real and we can be certain that is going to happen – death. The shadow of death looms above us all. But to be consumed by it so that it causes a life lived in fear? That’s like already being dead.

It might surprise some people, but death is something that isn’t new. Seneca, the (very dead) Roman stoic philosopher, said:

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

Kelvin and Celsius interviewed for a job, but Celsius got it. Kelvin absolutely didn’t have a degree.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours? This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

Today is pretty good. Enjoy it. Skip the regret, the worry, and the dread. While you’re breathing, live.

What can you make happen today?

Inflation: Crowding Out The Real Economy

“You don’t? Well, you don’t have to understand what it eh, it eh . . . It was printed in eh . . . Washington. Well, and when they print something in Washington, they know what it means.” – Green Acres

“Never trust an actor with a gun.” – Abraham Lincoln

Like the beginning of a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin, you know one thing: the pain is only starting.

The pain I’m speaking of is inflation, though. I’d love to be the bearer of happy news. I’d love to say, “Nah, as soon as things straighten out in (spins wheel) China West Taiwan, things will be better. Nope.

Let me explain.

The Federal Government is really good at exactly two things, and one of them is spending money. Since they already donated a few billion bucks worth of stuff to the Taliban, they decided to go for a few trillion to everyone who was breathing.

What’s the difference between a rake and an AK-47? Don’t ask me, I just fly the drone.

The spending has been amazing, and it has created the expected result: inflation. It’s not done, though.

As I said, the Federal Government is good at spending money, but it’s slow at spending money. Although it looks like the Federal Government is just willy-nilly stuffing the money it just printed into the mouths of anyone nearby, it’s much more complicated than that.

First, a bureaucrat has to invent the program. And that means?

Paperwork. That has to be reviewed and approved. And every buzzword of sustainable and underserved and economic equity has to be mashed into the program and form. Once complete?

The program has to be announced, and various states, counties, alternative bands, and alternative energy providers then pounce on the paperwork to ask for buckets of cash. Biden’s grants for free crack pipes won’t figure out what communities they need to go to by themselves!

This process takes months. Then, once awarded, people need to order the crack pipes from China Terre Haute. Why not China? This is the Federal Government, and we know it is charged with protecting the American Crackpipe Maker Equalitarian Sisterhood (ACMES). So, all the crack pipe materials will be locally sourced from approved Wiccans.

How to cook crack and clean crabs: step one – use commas.

If it stopped at crack pipes, it would be fine, probably. But it’s not just that. It’s concrete for a burst of road construction. It’s rebar for the concrete. It’s plywood for the forms.

There was already price pressure on almost everything. Now that some of the largest steel (around 100 million tons of production) works in the world are shut down or sanctioned due to Vlad’s Spring Vacation, (not to mention fuel costs shooting up higher than a T-72 turret) that rebar is now much more expensive.

If that were the only problem, these sort of crushing cost increases would probably be something that we could live with. But whenever the government wants to buy a cubic yard of concrete to make a new office to process paperwork for Build Back Better Bux applications, well, that increases the cost.

For everyone.

In Denmark, they tried to repave a street with Legos®. They ran into a lot of roadblocks.

It makes the cost of building or expanding a business higher, unpredictable, and perhaps unattainable. Government spending – trillions of dollars of government spending that came from money that was simply wished into existence – crowds out private spending.

That means the new Pizza Hut® can’t be built because concrete is too expensive. That means the new PEZ™ factory can’t be built to keep up with the PEZ© demand because steel for the machinery costs too much. The alternatives that create a productive economy are walled off due to increased costs.

So, it’s happening now.

A little.

I’m telling you now, the big waves of Fed.Gov spending have yet to hit. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than the usual printing are hitting the economy – each month. The pressure from printing has yet to stop. It has yet to slow. It is still increasing.

I don’t think my doctor likes me. I called him and told him that I took a bunch of sleeping pills. He told me have a few drinks to relax.

The economy of every country that hyperinflated did so because of one simple reason: the leadership seemed to not understand that printing didn’t lead to prosperity. They had some sort of belief that money was a magical totem so that they could print more, and people would be happy.

In small quantities, it works. Home prices go up. Prices go up. People who save (as always) are the ones that get burned as their saved cash lowers in value.

Germany hyperinflated in the 1920s because they wanted to print cash. Lots of it. They didn’t have the good fortune to be able to create all they wanted with computers and the press of a button, so they had to hyperinflate the old-fashioned way: printing.

How bad did it get?

That certainly didn’t lead to any sort of social upheaval.

They managed to double the capacity of the printing press by only printing on one side.

I bet we can match that: I bet we can start making electronic money with only four bits per byte. I guess I can be the bearer of glad tidings and report there is good news, though:

We don’t have to watch a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin. We’ve got that going for us.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part IV: Grooming A Society

“I’m sorry, I believe in good grooming.” – The Simpsons

I was outbid trying to buy a shopping center. I guess the old saying is right: you just can’t win a mall.

The biggest part of a dictator’s ability to control a people is the control of their thoughts. Sure, a large supply of bullets is nice, but if you use that method, sooner or later you run out of people to control. How, then, is that sort of mental crowd control done in a nation that once staged a rebellion over a tax on whiskey? The answer is simple –a little bit at a time.

The first step in that is to program the people. The easiest way to do that is to control their education and their entertainment. In the modern world, it is that combination of education and entertainment that form our modern-day mythos – the very definition of who we are and what we stand for.

Education was the easiest part, and, by necessity, the first. The problem (from the standpoint of those that would set the world up for dictators) is that educators aren’t swapped out yearly. No, educators often are in a classroom for decades, watching hundreds of their children move from grade to grade. I think my kindergarten teacher was old enough to have known Moses personally, though in her defense I was probably more of a handful than those James and Younger brothers she told stories about.

True fact: They charge a $6 entry fee to see Karl’s grave.

That’s why the real Leftism (as far as I can tell) didn’t start showing up in the classroom until, perhaps, the 1960s. That had given them time to infiltrate the colleges and begin to sway the way that teachers were taught. I knew something was up when I told one teacher I was struggling with a class.

“Who, the Bourgeoisie?” she asked.

An aside – teachers often slant Left/Globalist anyway – they work for a government, after all. The teacher unions are strongly Leftist in political leanings. Educating a group of teachers and then placing them in the schools only changes the schools slowly. But after a while, a critical mass is achieved, and government schools become indoctrination centers for Leftist thought.

To be clear – government schools have always been indoctrination centers. The previous versions prior to the 1960s had (in my opinion) more innocuous indoctrination, putting memes like these in the heads of the students:

The United States is a force for good,
Christopher Columbus was alright,
The Inalienable rights are: life, liberty, and the pursuit of PEZ™,
Hard work is important,
If you pee on the playground you have to go see the principal,
Religious values are one of the things that make the United States strong, and
There is a morality beyond mere legality that keeps society cohesive.

I could keep going on this list. But the values that the kids were programmed with led to a prosperous society that, generally, was also a society where you trusted your neighbor and, even though he might have voted for the other guy, was still on the same team. Was it perfect? No, of course not, and a lack of skepticism led to all manner of government shenanigans being ignored – MK Ultra, I’m looking at . . . what was I saying?

Is it just me, or is that glowing?

The change in schools was the vanguard of that Leftist. Ideas were infiltrated that began to chip away at the idea of values. Equity in education became a buzzword even in the 1970s, decades before managing the equality of outcomes became the goal. Heck, you could even teach math and give grades back then.

Of course, the Leftist ownership of education wasn’t the only thrust at that time. Movies and television began to change as well. I didn’t see first-run episodes of Leave it to Beaver nor All in the Family, but I could see the shows couldn’t have been more different as I watched them on reruns.

Leave it to Beaver was a show about kids going through typical kid problems, and also dealing with that oily Eddie Haskell. That also led to the Funniest untrue rumor ever: Eddie Haskell was played by a young Alice Cooper. It would have been far more interesting if Eddie had a guillotine.

I did hear that Rob Halford did move to a Tibetan monastery. I guess that makes him a Buddhist Priest.

All in the Family, though, was a show that could have been called All in on the Narrative. All in the Family was simply a tool to move the narrative to the Left, plus it showcased that family-dividing character – the ever-bumbling incompetent father. Later shows in the 1970s moved the father to a position of irrelevance: single-parent households became a staple of sitcoms.

Sitcoms were used because nothing is better at attacking power than comedy, since it allows the comedian to poke fun at the weakest parts of their enemy. I wonder why comedy is out of style . . . hmmm. Oh, wait. Amy Schumer.

I could go on about movies, but they were playing their role in pulling the narrative along. There’s a reason that The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th all had monsters that were young – essentially the monsters were all children (or, started out as kids in Halloween or Friday the 13^th). . . Gen X age. No wonder my kindergarten teacher called me a little monster!

The propaganda in both television and film was the same: show the most sympathetic case of (insert movement – divorce, abortion, gay rights, et cetera) and then milk it for everything that it was worth. It didn’t matter that the case represented the very edge of reality, that small 0.01% of cases – no, publicize it and create an emotional backstory.

Why? To program people. When I look back at many (not all!) movies from that time frame there are places I can see the Narrative Programming being implanted. Heck, when I was a kid I wondered why people on the Right couldn’t be funny. They can be – P.J. O’Rourke taught that to the world.

I saw one bee I thought was drunk. Turned out he was just buzzed.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that church attendance started to go down in the 1970s. I don’t have a lot of data on why – perhaps single-parent households are less likely to go? Regardless, there’s plenty of data that shows when. The 1970s.

The Left focuses on identity and has since before the 1970s. The big reason for this focus is that class never really existed here in the United States in any sort of formal fashion. We never had Lords and Ladies and Kings, just rich people and poor people. And most poor people think there’s at least a hope that they’ll become rich people, which is why the lottery is still a tax on people who can’t do math.

So, that left only identity. The playbook on the Left was to let every identity group know that they were a victim. Women’s Lib. The 1967 riots. Certainly, there were legitimate grievances in some cases, but the Left wanted to create division between groups – and it’s possible to show how every group has been treated unfairly. Except for the Dutch. They had it coming.

Their answer was simple: normalize the victim status of nearly every group in order to fragment society. What is normal changes, first slowly, then all at once.

Joe walks into a bar and sees a hot woman and asks her, “So, do I come here often?”

Joe Biden in 2008 was against gay marriage. Joe Biden in 2022 wants to make it illegal for states to stop kids from getting hormone blockers. Yes – the same man who said that “marriage is between a man and a woman” only fourteen years ago now wants minors to receive powerful hormones that will unalterably change their bodies. On a whim.

What is normal now changes in a heartbeat, which is easy once the fixed morality of religion is gone. Then, the only standard becomes the law: if it’s legal, it must be moral. And in a dictatorship, who makes the laws?

Next Up: There’s more to come in this series, but I’m waiting on some reference books to show up. See how hard I work for you?

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver. All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic. It’s not like I work for ESPN or something. No. This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008. Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple: print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008. I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop. Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them. I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen? Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t. The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting. Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything. The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust? Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books. The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road. We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road. Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough? Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple. As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices. Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more: food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first. Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices. And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable. Bare shelves show up. People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market. Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt. Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made. Which requires fewer workers. Which increases unemployment. Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets. The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index. Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole. I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow. That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis. How bad is it? Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.” I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate? They’ve been through that before. And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet. Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet. Think construction is expensive now? Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months. That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons. What will be on the other side? No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency. Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase. There will be unemployment. But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless. I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain. But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it. Those are really the only choices I see in the economy. We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken. Why? This graph, for one. Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty. It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter. I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision. I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice. When inflation gets worse? My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone. Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic. But I wish I was a remote viewer. I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult. I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible. We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese. I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more. And safe? Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school. I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson. Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me. I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls? Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football. This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was. We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school. And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of. And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility. That being said, I started to research a bit deeper. What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday. Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother. One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK). I didn’t think the article was great. But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

Control of the Media: CNN®? Leftist think CNN™ is centrist. Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box. The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less. It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court. All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act. Snowden, anyone?
Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting. Also: say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts. As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6^th. End of story.
Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person. It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee. Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019. It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system. Trump didn’t restore law and order. Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly. But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan. The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy. There are two problems with this:

There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny. The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“The historical cycle seems to be:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy,
from apathy to dependency; and
from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them. All they have to surrender is control. And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator? They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now. He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time. It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt. It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?). No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative. Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan. Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man. It won’t be a woman: the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered. Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not. The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government. In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record. I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well: The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds. Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident? Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

Food
Money
Pharmaceuticals
Media
Politics
Culture
Technology
Communications
Family Structure
Energy
Immigration
Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch. All for the greater good, of course. Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas. I’ll close with this happy thought: Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty. And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people. Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us. Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next: (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone? He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series. Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War. The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
Legalized disco, and
Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact: It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.© Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget: in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional. War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty. His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today. As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready. It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer. It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse. It makes me so mad: if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste. He created power structure after power structure in the country. Social Security. Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only. Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency. And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued. What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator. In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs. The easiest way to do that? Dispersed knowledge. Incentives. Voluntary cooperation. In short, capitalism. The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States. It’s ironic: the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here. They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

Colleges and Universities
The K-12 educational system.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The American Medical Association.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho. How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society. It rots society from within. The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough. The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary. Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®. I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States. We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency. This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing. In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture. Now? Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy? That’s a lot of hungry people. A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope. A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions. The Strong Man.

The response? That’s Friday’s post: The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us. The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating). This last one deals with the essence of the modern world: Money.

We are being farmed. For money. For time. For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s. I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman. To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee). Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921. Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough. Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car. Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies. You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff. Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me. The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction. Then they (generally) fail. I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required. Example?

Car insurance. There was a time it wasn’t required. As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding). Before 1956, no states required car insurance. Is it a good idea? Yeah. But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird. The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking? The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

Cable TV,
Subscription streaming,
Internet,
Elvis impersonators,
Property taxes,
Mortgage or rent,
Trash,
PEZ®,
Water,
Water soluble dog wax,
Sewer,
Johnny Depp, and
Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going. Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes. Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory. It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association. And Johnny Depp? Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse. It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income. Then, enter feminism. It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®. Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s. Help the Clampetts? I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday. I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce. So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result? Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much. The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress. The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me? Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up. And government dependency went up. Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes. How can the Left keep winning like this? That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money. The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™. The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business. But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school. But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan. This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school. I don’t think I can ever repay you. I kid. But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013. I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts. More students plus higher tuition led to more loans. This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000. The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go? To climbing walls. To cool dorm rooms. To spring breaks. To new buildings. And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have? Part C.

Yes. Medical care. In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can. Eat healthy food. Get exercise. Stay hydrated. Wash your hands. Try not to get crushed under heavy things. Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry. Healthy people are lousy customers. Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea. No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight. No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes. And they actually want you to get cancer. This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report: “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm. Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now? If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event. Does that sound sustainable? I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites. The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset. According to their thoughts: We’ll own nothing, and like it. Then, our time could be farmed forever. Our desires could be controlled and programmed. We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed. And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable. Don’t believe me? Listen to them, in their own words: