Category: Complacency

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

The Way The Constitution Dies

This is a repost, but one that has some meaning to me on the start of Memorial Day weekend.  Please, all of you be safe.

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Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence.  As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us.  My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America.  It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area.  Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily.  Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before.  I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did.  They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade.  These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal.  Bastogne.  Chosin Reservoir.  Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944.  His sister was a friend of my father.  As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math that I would later learn, though he was doing it decades before I was born.  He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18.  No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name.  Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

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Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism.  The value of the Constitution.  The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church.  Those boys who traveled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving.  The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them.  And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny?  Yes.  

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when.  A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built.  There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms.  These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years.  It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

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Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens.  Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population.  A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American.  10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night.  The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there.  I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by.  She spoke no English.  One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?”  I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.”  It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States.  I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers.  Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom.  This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark.  I love England.  I love Denmark.  I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee.  Or Amerikansk in Denmark.  My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English.  They wouldn’t be Danish.  They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.”  Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish.  I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria.  One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060.  The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp.  These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity.  They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government.  Division is the strength of these politicians.  “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?”  “Abolish ICE.”  “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.”  “Living wage for all.”  “Common sense gun laws.”  Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take.  They don’t get any of this from their family, either.  Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.  It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

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Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution.  It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text.  On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all.  But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four.  Change that number?  Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything.  It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it.  The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

The Alice Cooper Economy

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.” – Used Cars

I apologize – I didn’t mean to rehash a potato joke.

I had saved my money. It was near my birthday, and we finally went on a trip where I could spend it in the most elementary school way possible.

Living on Wilder Mountain, as I have noted before, we were a good 45 miles from the nearest movie theater. We were so remote, there was only one escalator (at the JCPenney’s®) within at least 120 miles of us. At that time, I think there was only one elevator (on a two-story building, no less) within the same range.

But on occasion, Ma and Pa would get a wild hair and we’d drive into a nearby largish city. What was large? More bars than churches. We only did that a few times a year, and I was excited. I stocked the backseat with comic books and off we went.

I took my few dollars ($10?) and bought a cassette. It was the first music purchase I had ever made with my own money. My music collection until that day consisted of three handmedown cassettes from my older brother, who for legal reasons I’ll call “John Wilder” since that’s his name, too. Turns out my parents got me in a poker game with a band of outlaw bikers. Their ante? An old Slim Jim® beef stick.

It was a rough day for them when they lost that hand.

Yes, this was one of the cassettes. I’ll never forget, “I’m leaving, on a small single engine plane, I don’t think I’ll ever be back again.”

All kidding aside, my brother’s first name really is John Wilder as well, but he gets a bit upset when I call him Juan, too. I think it’s because he’s older than me and all.

Anyway, the cassette I bought was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. After the clerk pulled off the big plastic “don’t steal me” antitheft device, I was thrilled. I poked my fingernail under the cellophane wrapper and skillfully slit the clear plastic open. The ride home was going to be over two hours, and I had a fresh set of C-cell batteries in the cassette player (mono) which was also a handmedown from big brother John.

Yup, that’s Groucho on the album cover. How he got there, we’ll never know.

As I slipped into the back seat of the Chevy® Impala™ coupe that was Pa Wilder’s 400 cubic inch pride and joy, I shared the backseat with the cassette player and Alice Cooper.

The Sun was bright as the pavement slid underneath the Impala™’s wheels and as Pa put his foot into it in the mountain air.

I hit play.

I don’t think it was quite seven minutes into side one of the tape when the cassette player stopped making noise. I hit “eject” and saw the carnage. The cassette player, which had never, ever eaten a single tape, had not only feasted on my brand new tape, but had also . . . broken it. No rewinding it.

The tape was dead. Oh, sure, I tried to resurrect it for a month with all manner of ideas that came to my fevered elementary school mind, but not one of them worked. $10, a fortune to me, gone.

I still liked Alice Cooper, though.

Yes, officer, that was the one that did it. I’m sure.

Eventually, my finances improved and I managed to get several Alice Cooper albums, and I had learned. I bought the album on vinyl and then copied it onto a blank cassette tape. I bought the album for Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits for myself the second time with my sixteenth birthday money.

Although it wasn’t on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, the song Generation Landslide by Mr. Cooper was always a fun one to listen to. It also has these lyrics:

Sister’s out till five, doing banker son’s hours
But she owns a Maserati® that’s a gift from his father
Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

Give it a listen. Good stuff.

As a banker’s son, (even from a small farm bank) I liked to imagine what a Maserati® might be. There was no Internet, so it was obviously Italian, but yet not made of pepperoni.

Even though I was a banker’s son, I ended up driving an old GMC™ pickup with the most gutless engine that GM© ever dared put under the hood of a pickup, vinyl bench seats, and rubber floor mats. It wasn’t a Maserati™, but the local fräuleins didn’t seem to mind too much.

I loved that truck.

But in 2021, I think of these lines from the song:

Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

I think about this couplet a lot. It’s not great poetry, but it has always brought to my mind a system, out of control. Everything is moving along, as fast as it can. And then?

Stop.

High speeds bring energy. A lot of it. The kinetic energy of a moving object in a non-relativistic reference frame (trust me, the readers of this blog will call me on that if I don’t mention it) is equal to the mass of the object times the speed of the object, squared.

KE=1/2mv2

That means that an object that is going twice as fast carries four times the kinetic energy.

So, speed matters.

A lot.

And the primary policy of the economic wizards that try to “manage” the economy of the United States is: putting the pedal to the metal is the easiest way to keep the party going. Whatever it takes to keep the economy growing and accelerating in that growth is the policy of the day. Who needs booze when you have meth?

If the economy seems to falter? The only answer is from both our government and the Fed® is, “faster, faster, put more gas to it.”

As most drivers know besides a Biden driving a car, the faster the car goes, the more vulnerable it is to any imbalances. Prudent drivers know when to slow down if the road is wet. Even fools know to slow down when the road is glaze ice. The main thing I try to keep teaching Pugsley and The Boy about driving on icy roads is this: turn or (brake/accelerate). Choose one. Otherwise, things tend to get spinny. Sometimes very spinny.

And it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.

I wonder how this plays out? Who could predict it?

Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:

  • Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
  • Rampant money printing.
  • A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
  • An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
  • Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).

One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.

What’s next, a $50 ribeye?

Speaking of printing, some people are now 3-D printing guns. That’s nothing. I’ve had a Canon® printer for years.

Maybe we can bring it back under control. I don’t know. But I do know what Alice said:

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

La da da da da, indeed.

Woke Military Kicking Out (More) Officers

“When I use the Constitution a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” – Alice in Wonderland

That’s a (then) Captain Lohmeier teaching a recruit to use solitaire.  Note the clever use of camouflage.

A Lieutenant Colonel, Matthew Lohmeier, in the United States Space Force (“Starfleet”) has recently been relieved of command.  As far as I could tell, his job was being in charge of the people who look at screens all day seeing if there are incoming missiles.

I supposed it is an important job because if there were incoming missiles, well, we would have to shoot missiles back or something.  And, so they don’t mistake a snot fleck on their screen for an incoming Soviet-era RT-2PM Topol strategic missile inbound with up to four MIRV warheads, well, I bet they go through an awful lot of screen cleaner.

What did this particular Lieutenant Colonel do to be relieved of command?

Well, first, he wrote a book:  Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.  It’s doing very well – the print version is sold out on Amazon®.  For the record, I bought it on Kindle® just to put some money into Lohmeier’s pocket.  If I have time to read it between now and then, I’ll do a review next Monday.

To the litterbox, and beyond!

If you buy his book, it won’t do anything but make people crazy who disagree with statements like this, which was from a quote from Lohmeier in a recent podcast:

“Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is and should be. That wasn’t just prolific in social media, or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature.”

Members of the military don’t lose their free speech, but they are prohibited from taking part in “partisan” political activities.  Lohmeier was removed for taking part in partisan political activities, even though he noted in a statement to Military.com:

“My intent never has been to engage in partisan politics. I have written a book about a particular political ideology (Marxism) in the hope that our Defense Department might return to being politically non-partisan in the future as it has honorably done throughout history.”

We’ve all seen this taking place.  All branches of the military have been ideologically swapped out during the last 12 or so years.  The fact that Lt. Colonel Lohmeier was willing to (very likely) give up a job that pays somewhere between $95,000 to $140,000 a year with a guaranteed retirement and medical for life says that he is likely committed to what he says.

There’s probably a kernel of truth to that.

And it’s not like he came from nowhere:  Lohmeier is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and was an F-15C driver.  He calls out “diversity and inclusion training” and “critical race theory” and the New York Times® 1619™ Project©, rightly, as Marxist in nature.  The podcast is where he does that here (LINK), so you can listen to it and decide yourself.

There is no way that I could interpret anything that Lohmeier said as politically partisan, unless critical race theory is partisan.  It clearly is not.  It is ideological, not partisan.  I mean, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an ideology, right?

Lt. Col. Lohmeier took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.  Clearly, Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution as it is currently written.  I would argue that any officer would have the duty to call it out, but some of them must have taken the hypocritical oath.

And to The Mrs.:  I promise I’ll fix the problems around the house.  You don’t have to keep reminding me every other year.  That gets old.

But not many would turn down a career that pays pretty well, and also has a pretty good retirement.  The goal is to not rock the boat until it’s time to become hired to a lucrative job by a defense industrial giant like Boeing or Lockheed and make money based on their connections.

Lohmeier won’t do that, since those doors will close pretty quickly.  If his goal is to be a grafter on the system, he’s not doing a great job of it.  Sure, he’ll make money from this book, but I bet it won’t be a lot of money.  Also, Lohmeier might get hired on by Fox® to be a commentator, but that seems unlikely unless he sells out his convictions.

Time will tell.  Oh, and if you buy this, I’m still not gonna make a dime.

But the scarcity of officers resisting the ideological destruction of the United States military tells us volumes already.  When officers are punished with career-ending sanctions, well, the word will get around.  The next officer will be less likely to speak up.

There weren’t any subtitles for the last 15 minutes of Titanic – that makes sense.  I guess a good caption goes down with the ship.

Lohmeier got sacked from command for the biggest sin of all in a Marxist world:  telling the truth.  Of course the new goal of the military is diversity rather than their old goal of killing people and breaking things.  Recently, a recruiting commercial for the Army had as a focus a young woman whose “parents” were two gay women.

Huh?  Just watching this cartoon commercial, you’d get the idea that the mission of the United States military was to be a hiring program for children of gay people.  As I recall, that’s exactly what the guys who hit Omaha Beach were fighting for, right?

Meanwhile, if you look at militaries around the world that actually have a mission that includes killing people and breaking things, well, they have commercials of muscled men doing hard, difficult training to do nearly impossible missions.  Or of jet fighters and artillery pieces creating massive explosions.

Flannel footed pajamas and warm (not too hot!) cocoa – it’s the new Biden military!

Everyone in the United States can sleep more easily now.  The mean guy who cared about the Constitution and rule of law is gone.  We can have people who were hired for “diversity and inclusion” purposes scanning the heavens for incoming missiles.  I mean, only troops that have been through diversity and inclusion training could do that well, right?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Preparing For The Commissar

“Ottoman, there’ll be no Justice of the Peace for you, just a big piece of justice.” – The Tick

6:30 is the best time.  Hands down.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

April had increased violence.    None that I could see was from the Right, which appears to still be stunned that the Leftists are actually doing all of the things that they promised that they would do.

I’m holding April at 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.  If I were betting?  July or August will take us to a 10.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) only creeping up at around 700 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Chauvin And Justice – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index –  Leftists Destroy GATE – Links

Front Matter

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

Chauvin And Justice

Derek Chauvin, a former officer with the Minneapolis Somalia by St. Paul Police Department, was convicted on three counts (at least two of them mutually exclusive) after minimal jury deliberation.  There are many articles that talk about the injustice of the decision.  I wasn’t in the jury room so I can’t say too much about the decision.  I guess my only question is how much fentanyl does one have to consume before it becomes listed as a suicide if three times a fatal dose isn’t enough?

The fate of those two men, Floyd and Chauvin, tells us a tremendous amount about the justice system in the country.  But the Derek Chauvin trial showcases a much bigger agenda involving the justice system.

What is the message that was issued to every police officer in Minnesota and in almost every Leftist-controlled state?

Don’t do your job.  If you do, and you take down the wrong junkie, you’ll be fired.  If you’re lucky.  Instead, just show up.  If you want to arrest someone, just make sure that they’re not people you can get in trouble for policing.

Well, it’s not like the Unitarians believe anything.

The goal is:  cops cease to police.  If cops cease to police, the justice system will simply break down.  I’ve covered multiple times why the justice system is the cornerstone of Western Civilization.  The justice system is a stroke of genius that takes vengeance from the hands of individuals, and puts it into the hands of a “just and impartial” system.

Is the “just and impartial” system flawed?  Certainly.  But the thing that’s required is the faith in the system, even though it has flaws.  If we believe that justice is real, it keeps the scourge of vengeance at bay, even when there are occasional lapses.

Perhaps that’s what the jury was thinking.

Perhaps.

But the message to them was clear.  The demonstrations.  The dead pig’s head on the defense expert witness’s (former) front yard.  Maxine Waters agitating the local community to “keep the pressure on.”

Thus, the verdict.  This is a single case, about two men whose lives intersected.

Long term though, the goal isn’t about this case, the goal to remove the cops.  This will destroy the “just and impartial” system.  That’s clearly the plan now.  Look at recent “protests” in Portland and Plano.  The police are there to protect the protesters and put in jail any who resist the protest.  And if a mob shows up at a house and damages it?  If the mob points weapons at those who protest?

The only crime will be self-defense.

But this removal of police is in the script.  This is act one.  This will:

  • Increase crime, because the police are being pressured to not do their one job: arrest criminals.
  • Increase actions of vengeance, because the criminals aren’t being punished.
  • Vigilantes, of course, will be punished far more harshly than the criminals.

What happens when crime increases and vigilantes increase?

A solution from the Left will arise.  They won’t call them Political Commissars, but they will be.  Social Justice Police?  Equity Enforcement?

I hear that mummys like wrap music.

The “just and impartial” system, then envy of the non-Western world, will soon be gone.

All by plan.

And who will be left to look to?  The Left.

Violence And Censorship Update – Turbo Magnum Edition

Item 1:  Rudy Giuliani is a high-profile political figure in the Untied (yes, that’s intentional) States.  He also looks like he smells like a combination of gin, Vicks-Vap-O-Rub®, hair cream, and mothballs.  But Rudy is also a lawyer, specifically the lawyer for President Trump, representing him in several different matters.  This is important since an attorney’s work is uniquely privileged – an attorney provides guidance through the legal system for people who aren’t familiar with it.  It’s like when The Mrs. explains to me that other people are human beings that have things called “feelings” that I should pay attention to.  Pfft.

The attorney-client privilege isn’t absolute, the privilege doesn’t cover ongoing fraud, attempts to intimidate witnesses, destruction of evidence, et cetera.  But it’s a really big deal.  It’s one of those protections that was put in place so everyone can trust the system, even those the system is attempting to punish.

Recently Rudy’s office was raided, and not by the St. Pauli Girl t-shirt squad to give him an atomic wedgie followed by tequila shooters.  Rudy’s a political figure, but he’s also a lawyer.  That should be an amazingly high hurdle to stop a raid, but in 2021 America, it isn’t.  Just like Chauvin’s conviction – Rudy’s raid was meant to suppress speech and protection that the Left doesn’t agree with.

A truck of Vicks Vap-O-Rub® wrecked during rush hour last month. There was no congestion for a week.

Imagine if it had been Podesta or Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton or even Satan getting raided during the Trump administration?

The howl from the Left would have been deafening.  And, yes, the Church of Satan members voted 99%+ for Biden.

Item 2:  Nick Fuentes is a twentysomething (22) kid that runs something called America First™ which is a political movement focused around views of the Right – he even makes fun of the pure economic conservatism of Turning Point, USA®.  Nick used to be on YouTube®, but they banned him.  And so did most private apps where he could make money or get publicized on.

Libertarians and Leftists will agree:  it’s a private company and the terms of service matter, not the Constitution.  I’ve made my arguments about that, and had some good ones with friends who are as impartial as I can find.

But.

Nick Fuentes was put on the No-Fly list recently by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.  The Federal Government’s No-Fly list.  The worst that I could say about Nick (from what I’ve seen) is that he’s annoyingly smug.

Smug is not a crime.  The sole reason that Nick could be on the No-Fly list?  He says things people in government don’t like.

This is not a “bake my gay cake bigot” moment.  This is the unfettered use of government power to destroy ideas.  Sure, the FBI spied on Martin Luther King.

Think they’re not looking at you and me?  Laugh at the wrong meme?  Hope you can drive.

Item 3:  I track the website traffic and where it comes from to Wilder, Wealthy and Wise©.  Okay, I don’t do it personally.  Some nameless small gnomes that live inside of computer chips count the visitors to this place.  Whatever.  They don’t ask for vacation.

A small (but significant) number of visitors to this site came from Google®.  Millions?  No.  But thousands every month.  By any stretch of the imagination, this site is easily in the top 20 most-linked to site on the Internet about Civil War 2.0.

And these are quality links from pretty popular sites.

But I don’t show up on Google® under that search.  I can understand that.  But what if I look for the entirely novel phrase (my own invention thanks to Cory Hamasaki, R.I.P.) Civil War Weather Report?

I get links about weather during the Civil War.  I once got links to current weather forecasts for Gettysburg, PA from Google™.

If I go to DuckDuckGo®?  With that phrase, I’m number one.  With Civil War 2.0?  I’m still in the top results.  I get more hits from DuckDuckGo™ many weeks than I do from Google™.  DuckDuckGo® has 0.5% market share.  Google® has 92.26%.

All things being equal?  I should get about 180 times the number of hits from Google™ as I do from DuckDuckGo©.  And it used to be about five times the traffic, if not ten times the traffic.  Not now.  Some days, I get more traffic from DuckDuckGo™.

The nosedive started in:  February, 2021, right after a certain person was inaugurated.

Hmmm.  I’m not the first site “de-tuned” by Google® and I won’t be the last.

Now all my devices use DuckDuckGo®.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is down slightly in April.  I was expecting it to go up, but I was also expecting Chauvin to be found not guilty.  The state-media propaganda of “homegrown terrorism”  drumbeat is ongoing, even as protester violence and inner-city violence is going through the roof.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability dropped this month.  I expect it to increase next month, but the Left keeps pushing for more control.

Economic:

I expected this number to be less positive.  It’s not.  As I predicted, April is the month that we find that inflation moves from a thought to a widely-felt reality.  What’s next?  It won’t be better.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for this time of year.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Leftists Destroy GATE

Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) is a pretty cool program.  The idea is that smart kids can work on material that challenges them.  That’s good.  Really smart kids, when bored, cause a lot of problems.  How else do you explain the Crusades?

But of course, the biggest problems in our country (sorry Aesop) seem to emanate from either D.C. or California.  The newest push is an “equity” focused math program.

The framework draft starts with the biggest lie published in the English language in 2021:

“All students are capable of making these contributions and achieving these abilities at the highest levels,” and, “evidence that shows all fifth graders care capable of eventually learning calculus, or other high-level courses , when provided appropriate messaging teaching and support.”

No.

Not at all.  And what the hell is “messaging teaching”?  Sounds like a crack-addled mail-order diploma-mill Doctor Of Education (looking at you, Jill Biden) theory.

Inequality is rampant in the human condition.  No matter how much I wish that I could be taller, I can’t think myself taller, and no amount of Social Justice Warrior Equity Cheerleading could make me taller.

No amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make me even a millimeter taller.

And no amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make a dumb kid smarter.  You can make a Lamborghini® out of duct tape and cardboard, but the only way it’ll make 50 miles an hour is if you drop it out of an airplane.

My parents told me I was a gifted child.  Turned out they meant that I was left on their doorstep in a box.

What this statement means is simple:  smart kids, according to the educational establishment in California, don’t exist.  They even say that explicitly:  “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”

Guess we’ll have to page Harrison Bergeron (LINK – read it if you haven’t – it’s short).

It’s trivial to prove that some people are talented and some are not – in fact, it’s fairly commonly known now that 60-90% of all of everyone’s attributes and abilities are inherited.  Everyone.  There is no mystical person who has attributes that are Play-Doh® in the hands of the schools or state.  Is it nature or nurture?

It’s nature.  Nurture can mess it up.  Nurture can get the best out of what’s there.  But you can’t get a ribeye steak out of a cat.

This denial of reality is 100% required by the Left, however.  The idea of anything be unequal is an idea they cannot accept, even when it’s real, which is why untrained women have to win fights against Navy Seals in movies, and why Leftists pretend that Caitlyn Jenner ain’t a dude.

LINKS

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

READY ON THE RIGHT

 

 

READY ON THE LEFT

 

 

READY ON THE FIRING LINE

 

 

READY FIRE AIM

 

Culture Wars: The Boy Scouts And Hollywood, Including A Bikini Graph

“Envy the country that has heroes, huh?  I say pity the country that needs them.” – Reign of Fire

My book on the Nordic nations is really difficult to write.  I’m not sure I can Finnish.

There are institutions in this country that are fundamental in shaping it.  Two, in particular, helped define the 20th century in the United States of America:

  • Hollywood®
  • Boy Scouting

Both were a product of the American expansion between 1850 and 1940, and both were forged in the American West.

Boy Scouting?  American?

The official story is that Boy Scouts was brought to the United States from Great Britain.  In the immortal words of Jules, “Please allow me to retort”:  Sir Robert Baden-Powell was the guy who “officially” started Boy Scouting, but given his aristocratic upbringing, Baden-Powell’s idea of camping was spending an afternoon on the patio with only one servant and no ice for his gin.

The truth is much more American:  Baden-Powell based Scouting on Frederick Russell Burnham, who was born in Minnesota and crossed paths with outlaws and thieves as he learned the tricks from old cavalry scouts that served in the Indian Wars.  Once all the Indians were killed or in a reservation, Burnham got bored and hitched a ride to South Africa to kill and conquer that continent, too.

In South Africa, Burnham was eventually made Chief of Scouts of the British South African Army in one of the Boer Wars.  The Boer Wars were that time when the British found out that the Boers were sitting on the biggest gold strike in the world, and decided that all that was required was to get those pesky Boers off of all of that obviously British gold.  I first heard of Burnham while reading this amazing true story (LINK).  It’s long-ish, but amazing because it’s true.

Why do Scoutmasters wear that hat?  This guy.  This picture was taken after he was personally decorated by the King with the second-highest award given by Britain to soldiers, and given a permanent rank in the British Army.  Also given personally by the King.

Why do Boy Scouts wear neckerchiefs?  Because Burnham wore a neckerchief.  In Baden-Powell’s estimation, the goal of Boy Scouts was to turn boys into men like Burnham.

Scouting was built on just that American ideal – individual ruggedness and preparedness.  Baden-Powell said it very well, “A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when something unexpected happens.”

Scouting, in one quote that I read sometimes back, was based in the preparation of an ideal citizen – one that could contribute, one that could learn, and one that was not reliant on the government.  It created capable, rugged boys who in turn became capable, rugged men.

Scouting found very fertile ground in the United States.  Very soon there was a shortage of little old ladies to escort across the street, and they had to take shifts so the Boy Scouts could assist.

I kid.

But there are very few organizations (outside of churches) that have done as much good for the United States as the Boy Scouts.

Sadly, Boy Scouts is essentially dead.  The last decade killed it.

Well, you can’t say the Left isn’t good at something.

It had already been on life support.  The peak number of Boy Scouts was in the early 1970s at about five million boys.  To have a similar number today would mean that there would be ten million Scouts.  There aren’t.  I expect that the number (when it is announced later this month) will certainly be less than two million, and probably closer to one million than two.  The graph I put together (there are many conflicting sources, and I put this together using the most accurate numbers I could find, along with some guesswork and interpolation) shows that the number of Scouts is consistently declining.

I guess that nobody asked the Scouts what their opinion was.

This utter collapse in the number of Scouts is despite the tricks that the national leadership has employed to keep numbers up:  they added kindergarteners, the glue eating set, to a new program called Lions.  Since the name “Boy Scouts of America” wasn’t clear to them, they decided to add girls to the program and rebrand it as Scouts BSA® where BSA™ doesn’t stand for anything really.  It was all an effort to keep the numbers up.

I don’t have high hopes for the girls involved in Scouts BSA™.  One local Scouts BSA© leader took girls out camping.  One of them snuck a spare cell phone, called a boy with a car, and disappeared with him for a week.  Somehow, that didn’t make the local papers.

If you look at the graph, the Boy Scouts had been in trouble before.  In the 1980s they realized the program had deviated from what made it popular:  being rugged.  They reintroduced the old-school methods, and popularity surged.

In 2014, they admitted homosexuals as youth.  In 2015, they admitted open homosexuals as leaders.  In 2017, girls who think they are boys were allowed to join.  Deciding that none of that mattered anymore, in 2019 girls could become Boy Scouts Scouts BSA™ members.  At every point, the Left made the point:  it’s not enough.  Now they want atheists to be able to join.

The Boy Scouts® used to stand for something.  Scouts BSA™ stands as just the latest conquest by the Social Justice Warriors.  Note that commies throughout history have hated the Scouts.  Now that they own it, they can finally kill it.

This is just one story.  You can find attack after attack on the Boy Scouts from the Left since the Scouts were founded.  Why?  Boy Scouts until 2010 was the thing that scared Leftists the most:  strong individuals who were responsible for their own actions.

Hollywood© is a similar American story – rooted in the West.  About the time that Burnham was killing his way across South Africa and unwittingly starting a youth movement that would transform the 20th century, the movie industry cranked up in California.  Why?  Well, Edison owned patents, and California was a very long way away from Edison’s lab in New Jersey.  The bandits that Burnham knew in California didn’t disappear – they just turned into businessmen.

See?  I can do a transition!

Hollywood™ has been a similar success story, though with a few twists and turns.  For a large number of years, films coming out of Hollywood© mirrored (in many cases) the Rightist views of the American public.  In the height of the Vietnam War protests, John Wayne starred in The Green Berets.  Even as late as 2002, Disney® put out Reign of Fire, which was staunchly Right in attitude.

I’m not ashamed to say that I love movies.  There are those who say that’s silly, and you’re more than welcome to your opinion.  I see them as a way to thrill to bravery and watch as Good defeats Evil.  It is a myth-making process that can showcase the very best of what we, as humans, can be.

Duty.  Honor.  Tradition.  Cannons, pistols, and swords.  French people being shot.  How can you not love this movie?  Did I mention French people being shot?

Now, in Current Year, Hollywood™ has managed to mangle several amazing film franchises because they had to inject either gender or identity politics into the films, and not in a light way.  The latest Star Wars™ films?  Pretty bad, like eye-rollingly bad.  It wasn’t the effects, mind you.  Those were amazing.  It wasn’t the actors – Hollywood© is a consistently ruthless meritocracy of talent.

It was the stories.

Once upon a time, movies were fun.  Really fun.  Some, of course, still are.  But what happened to the funny teen comedy?  Well, comedy requires that someone is made fun of.  So?  Comedy is out.

No, today movies have to be “woke” and parrot the Social Justice Warrior line and teach an important moral.  It’s funny when that moral isn’t what China likes, so that Hollywood™ has to change their picture, or change posters to minimize black cast members so Chinese people will go to see the movie.

Hmmm, I wonder if BLM® approved of the poster change? Think they speak Chinese?

Perhaps the reason for the injection of the Leftism is the studio executives wanting to placate their talent or their audience?

It doesn’t matter.  It failed horribly.

Sure, it’s a Wilder Bikini Graph®.  I was so very not going to do a bikini graph for the Boy Scouts.

Just like in Boy Scouts, now that the Left has fully taken Hollywood®, the rot has set in, and it begins to decay.  People don’t want to tune in to see what Leftist fantasy has won this year’s Leftist award.

Neither one of these losses of the Left is a win for the Right.  The world was better when we had Boy Scouts.  The world was better when we had more movies with better heroes, and comedies that made fun of everyone.

Thankfully, I have a sea of old movies that I can watch.  Also, thankfully, something will come to replace the Boy Scouts in time.  Politics is downstream of Culture, and Boy Scouts and Hollywood® are part of a culture that no longer exists as it did for nearly 100 years.

That’s okay.  We will rebuild.  We will create institutions that will renew our culture.

Just like Burnham taught us:  we will never give up.  We will keep the flame alive, and fight when the odds are stacked against us.

Why?

Because we are so very pretty.  We are just too pretty for God to let Western Civilization die.

If The Market Is Being Gamed, Why Not Cheat?

“Well, if you could cheat for $84, you could cheat for $800.” – Green Acres

I had a scam caller the other day threatening to put me in jail for tax fraud.  Heck, I don’t even pay taxes.

First, I’m not a financial advisor, so please consider this commentary by an Internet humorist entertainment – you shouldn’t trust me since I lost $75 betting that Oprah would eat weight watchers in 2008.  Not the food from the company Weight Watchers®, but actual people who were watching their weight.

I’m willing to bet that the people who give tips to sitting Congressmen aren’t, financial advisors, either.  They’re insiders.  Sure, a law was passed in 2012 that was supposed to ban insider trading.  But Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped $1.7 million in travel stocks (in 33 transactions) on February 13, 2020.

I like Mongolian poetry, but it has prose and Khans.

You know, in February.  When he was getting classified Corona briefings where the CIA admitted that they’d have to overthrow the United States government instead of the Russians because of the planned travel restrictions.

But Senator Burr got those briefings before travel stocks tanked.

If it was me who sold that stock right then, you can be sure that the Feds would wonder where I got the psychic ability to make trades.  After all, the Feds put Martha Stewart in the slam after they investigated her for insider trading.  (Yes, I know that Martha went down for lying to the Feds and not insider trading, but that just generally results in an additional term in Congress for most people.)

But not Senator Burr.  Nope.  The FBI investigated him, and the Department of Justice concluded that what he did was just awesome sauce, and awarded him six more terms in the Senate.

I met a baker that was a natural at stock trading – buy dough, sell pie.

The financial performance of sitting Congressvermin is amazing:

  • Representative Collin Peterson, Minnesota, started in 2008 with $123,500. In April of 2020?  He was worth $4.2 million.
  • Representative Judy Chu, California, was worth less than $100,000 in 2008. By April of 2020?  She was worth $7.1 million.
  • Senator Roy Blunt, Missouri, went from $602,000 to $7.1 million in the same time span.

How did these people do that?

I’m sure it was careful investing and not at all sweetheart deals that aren’t available only to powerful members of Congress.  I mean, it makes sense that Barack Obama entered the White House worth $1.3 million and today is worth somewhere between $70 million and $140 million.

Biden is busy in the White House – he spends most of the day watering his hair.

Where did he make that money?  Books.  Public speaking fees.  Netflix® opening up a truck and shoveling money down his mouth.  Certainly, none of this sounds like a payoff, does it?

But every Senator and Representative can’t be shoveled money like that.  I’m betting that in many cases, the payoff is just a tip here and a tip there.  That’s not protected, but remember that Congressparasites can just decide to not pay their taxes and not suffer any significant consequences.

There is, however, an idea that I’m thinking of doing.  I haven’t done it yet, but at some point (maybe next week?) I was going to start checking out trading ideas from here (LINK) or here (LINK).

They had to bribe my brother to be good when he was a kid.  Me?  I was good for nothing.

Yup.  People are now making it easy to track the trades of the people getting paid off in Congress.  Are all of the trades going to be winners?  Of course not.  But the stock purchases by Congressrats outperform the market by between 6% and 10% per year.

Maybe the Congressswine are just picking stocks that are already doing well and jumping on the bandwagon?

No.

The stocks that senators bought had zero abnormal performance before the senators bought them.  After a year?  Those same stocks had abnormal positive returns of 25%.  This is a rock star level of performance – put any of these people at a hedge fund and they’d be billionaires in less than a decade.

This is not chance.

They’re cheating.

Does it matter how they’re cheating?

When Warren stopped running for president, it was the second race she left that year.

Probably not.  As long as they consistently do it, though, who cares?  There does seem to be a skew to it – Senators in their first term seem to do the very best.  Perhaps that’s when they take the ticket and sell out their principles for high returns so they can be blackmailed later?

Nah.  That’s silly, right?

Regardless, although you and I can’t get book deals and have people sell us real estate for ludicrously low prices, I’m going to check to see if I can’t cheat like the pros.

The Biggest Lie Of The Left: Guns

“It’s ridiculous. Invisible? Whoever heard of anyone being invisible? Unless, of course, you have the ring of power.” – Soap

I told Pugsley the other day to sign my name for a note for school.  At least he’ll be in practice.

I once heard some psychologist (I think it was a psychologist, it was a very long time ago) on a television show say:  “Children are naturally truthful.”

With that one statement, I knew that the psychologist had no children.  As a child, I was a horrible liar.  My lies were horrible in every sense of the word.  I told lies that couldn’t possibly be true based on laws of physics that even I knew at my age.  And I told them in ways that weren’t convincing even to casual observers.  As a parent?  Oh, my, I assumed anything any of my kids told me before the age of ten was a lie.

I do recall telling one other little kid that I could turn invisible – I think I was five.

Why?  I have no idea.  But if you tell someone that you can turn invisible, eventually they’re gonna want to see some sort of proof, even if they’re five.

Now, however, our politicians and media are teaming up to tell a lie that’s just as stupid as my “I can turn invisible” lie.  That lie is this:

Mass shooters with AR-15 weapons are a national problem.

Well, no, they’re not.  At all.

Last year, about 364 people in the United States were killed with “long guns” – rifles.  More people have died from vaccinations than have died from AR-15 style weapons this year.  More people died falling out of bed (450) and over 2,500 left-handed folks die using right-handed items incorrectly.

People who are left-handed score higher on standardized tests than people who died as infants.

Yes.  More people die from being left-handed than from the dreaded “assault” weapon.

The odd obsession of the Left (not the left-handed) to take assault weapons, in particular, has long fascinated me.  Here is a gun that is provably twenty times safer than doctors with bad handwriting scrawling out prescriptions in what appears (to me) to be some sort of script that only a retarded (yes, I’m taking it back) chimpanzee with shakes from palsy could produce.

Honestly, for a device produced to expel a projectile at around 3,000 feet per second, the AR-15 is about the safest invention ever.  It’s like the ten million or so AR-15 shoot Nerf® darts if they only manage to kill 364 people a year.  So what’s the deal?

Let’s dissect the idea:  what really scares the Left about guns?

  • First, most gun deaths are Leftists shooting other Leftists.

Washington, D.C., had 920 people shot last year.  95% of the people in Washington, D.C. are Leftists.  People shooting each other isn’t a problem for the people on the Right, it’s just Leftists shooting each other.  People on the Left don’t understand why people on the Right aren’t upset.

Well, it’s because we’re not killing people and we’re not being killed.  Duh.

In fact, if you took lawful gun owners on the Right and their homicide rate (using guns) it would be among the lowest in the world for any country, including those that ban guns outright.  The gun homicide rate of people on the Right is similar to people on Mars, and Elon Musk hasn’t killed anyone recently.

People on the Right don’t shoot each other.  Generally, the only time people on the Right shoot people on the Left is when the people on the Left are trying to kill people on the Right.  Sure, you can come up with a few oddball examples where somebody on the Right shoots someone, but they are really the “man bites dog” stories because they are so unusual.

People on the Left killing each other?  That’s what you call “Friday” in Chicago.

What did the German say when he went into the French bread store?  “Gluten tag!”

So, when the latest shooter (FedEx shooter in Indianapolis) showed up, the Left pounced.  It was and is the man bites dog story that they’ll use to prove their lie.

To prove the point:  the Left was ecstatic when the Boulder killer showed up.  They were even more thrilled when it appeared that he had an AR-15.  Then reality hit.  When the killer proved to be an “intersectional” member of two of the Left’s worshipped classes – an immigrant and a Muslim, the Left was quite sad.

How to get out of their lie?   Blame it all on unfounded claims of “white supremacy” for the killing of nine white people.  If that’s white supremacy, the guy, just maybe, is doing it wrong.  Now if the goal was to kill white people in Boulder, well, he got that part just right.

NPR® had a lovely story:  “Why Boulder Is Trying To Keep The Focus On The Victims And Not The Shooter.”  See, if it’s a Muslim, they can’t even call him what he is – a killer.  This was all so that the story could be properly memory-holed.  It was the story they were looking for, but just the wrong killer.

Betcha $5 that NPR™ doesn’t run a similar story about Indianapolis.

Now, after half a dozen fizzled attempts to get the narrative they were looking for (someone who wasn’t a Leftist shooting other Leftists), they found it.

  • Second, individuals with guns scare Leftists, because Leftists love the State.

Leftists love statist solutions.  To them, the State is power.  It’s power for their ideas.  Leftists don’t see a world where they can go and create and change things they don’t like.  Nope.  Leftists see a world where the State has to exist to right all of the wrongs that have been done to them.

Go and create a business that serves thousands or millions of people?  Or wait for the State to forcibly take money from other people to give to you as reparations for a crime that occurred decades or even hundreds of years in the past?

Are the hieroglyphs in the pyramid hard to read because they’re encrypted?

The second one seems ever so much more fun.

But people forget that the Second Amendment was specifically written to prevent tyranny that the People wouldn’t put up with.  An armed populace are citizens.  An unarmed populace are subjects.  A stoned populace are Oregonians.

Leftists want subjects, not citizens.  Leftist want masses who vote for collectivist politicians so they can take power, and never let it go.

People on the Right?  Mainly they just want to be left alone.

  • Finally, Leftists politicians are scared because armed citizens limit what they can do.

January 6, 2021 was quite a surprise:  a group of people petitioned their government for redress.  Was there violence?  Yes.  Was it less than nearly any of the 2020 Some Black Lives Matter protest?  Certainly.  Damage was minimal.  The only death due to violence was one girl in a red hat who was shot by a cop.

That wasn’t the damage.

The damage was to the minds of the elite.  They realized that, as I’ve said before, the governance of an armed nation requires the consent of the governed.

Prior to this, the biggest fear of Congress was chlamydia.

I’ll take a second to make an aside.  People keep talking about “majority rule” as if there is some sort of magical win that comes from 50% plus one vote.  Let me ask a fairly simple question:  if a law or rule is so repugnant that 20% of the country finds it intolerable, is that a good law?

Probably not.

Here, however, the elite have figured out Wilder’s Law:  20% of the people, if armed, can stop 100% of the laws, if they are committed enough.  And it scares the elite to death.  An armed populace always scares tyrants.

My prediction is fairly simple:  Americans will continue to own guns.  Lots of them.  Legally or not.

The Left lies like a group of five-year-olds.  They say that “assault weapons” are a problem.

They’re not.  Provably not.  The left is lying.

Okay, if I really was invisible for a day?  I’d kick a mime nearly to death.

Children are not naturally truthful.  And neither is the Left.  And the Left is certainly not invisible, even when they try to convince you they are.

Welcome To Being An Outsider

“Now, I didn’t start it, but be sure as Hell I mean to see it through.” – Shooter

If you boil a clown you get laughing stock.

We’re Outsiders.

Well, not all of us.  But when you look at the system, most of the people reading this post are Outsiders.

I happen to live in a place filled with Outsiders.  Here in Modern Mayberry, you’re ten a hundred times as likely to see a Gadsden flag on a flagpole as a Bernie® bumper sticker.  Besides the Bernie supporters around here have now all been kicked out by their roommates, you know, “Mom and Dad”.

That’s why it’s Modern Mayberry.

It’s not paradise.  There are some thefts.  There are some drugs of the most destructive kind.  There’s even a hipster who was an outdoorsman before it was cool – you’d call him a homeless guy.

But yet . . .

People here still remember the United States that was, or at least the United States we remembered from our dreams.  One where the Constitution was the rule.  One where the dream wasn’t one of dependence on handouts.  One where you could ignore it when the government called you at home – you could let freedom ring.

A friend of mine used his stimulus check to buy baby chickens.  Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

Tonight I drove home along Main Street, and I saw people out and about.  In one block I saw six people that I personally knew, and most of them made it off the sidewalk in time.

Yet all of us in Modern Mayberry are really Outsiders, and I think that we know that.  And I think we cherish it, just like the EpiPen® my friend gave me as he was dying – I know I’ll always cherish it.

I watch the news stories of places that seem alien to me.  I know that California in 1980 was overwhelmingly what we now call a Red state.  Now?  It’s alien even to many that were born there.

The politics that created what would have been one of the most prosperous nations in the world have given way to politics that has made California one of the most impoverished states in the United States.  I know Gavin Newsom tried to fight poverty, but he kept losing.  Homeless people can be deceptively strong when you try to wrestle them.

Sure, I’d love to have California back.  I’d love to have Disneyland® back and the American Dream Vacation™, too, with bonus points for stops at the Grand Canyon and Uncle Eddie’s place.  But the beliefs that I believe most readers here have aren’t shared by most voters in California in 2021.

There was a person who saw the California ban coming:  No-Straw-Domus.

I don’t blame the native Californians – they voted against this insanity again and again, but were overruled from activist benches.  We know what sort of trash is on the benches, but what is on the table for the United States?

  • Individual Rights – these are being replaced by group rights. Reparations for crimes committed nearly two hundred years ago?  By the descendants of people who moved here from Germany in 1880?
  • Freedom of Choice – this is being replaced by coercion, explicit and implicit. Want to do business?  You can have whatever opinion you want – as long as it’s the right one.
  • Due Process – this is being replaced by guilt by inference. Red flag laws, anyone?
  • Right to Keep and Bear Arms – this is being replaced by the right of approved people to potentially be allowed to purchase a limited number of weapons and keep them locked in a safe at home. As long as we know the weapons are kitten-safe.

Propaganda for collectivism has long been in the offing.  For all of my life the programming has been in place to change attitudes to accept this – Leftists have monopolized the major networks since I was a kid.  Society has changed in ways that promote collectivism.  People move from location to location or live in monolithic cities or sterile suburbs that actively discourage people from acting together in the spirit of real community.

What is it replaced with?  City governments.  Homeowners’ Associations. Neither of those build community – those are, in larger cities, the expression of power and control.  The Mayor of Chicago holds more power than governors of many states.  That’s not any semblance of community – when is the last time you heard of anyone holding up Chicago for the face of election fairness?

What part of the mayor of Chicago weighs the most?  The scales.

That’s the downside.  But it gets better from here.

The first part of winning as an Outsider comes from knowing that you are an Outsider.  There is power in being an outsider – it only took a dozen Outsiders to eventually change the entire Roman Empire from people who worshiped Funko Pop® figurines to Christians.  Well, a dozen people and a few years.

Ideas are powerful.

Likewise, Outsiders are powerful.  Once a person realizes that they’re an Outsider, entire routes open to them.  This is a special type of freedom:

  • Freedom from the system. The system was built not to reward me, but to keep me in line, to keep me fearful.  To keep me compliant.  Recognizing that is everything.
  • Freedom from caring about the opinions of the world. Do I care about what France thinks about me?  Do I care about what Google® thinks about me?  Most (not all, but most) of the people whose opinions matter to me know it, and they all have excellent posture and dental hygiene.
  • Freedom to set my own goals. What is it that I value?  What is it that I want to accomplish?  This is mine, and mine alone.  Oh, wait, except for trash day.  I have to remember trash day.
  • Freedom to not apologize. When I make a mistake and I agree I’ve made a mistake, I own up to it, proudly.  When I don’t, I don’t apologize.  And I won’t.  Especially not for the bad jokes.
  • Freedom to change the world. And I will.  I’m going to keep going so I can inject my ideas so deeply into the Outsider psyche that the mRNA shot from Pfizer® will seem like a non-invasive procedure.

Kamala Harris is very concerned about COVID.  She heard that super-spreaders were the problem.

One piece of the puzzle, interestingly enough, came to me from crappy Star Wars® movie, The Force Awakens™.  The movie was horrible.  One thing that I couldn’t figure out was why, after killing the Emperor®, that the Rebels™ were . . . the Resistance©?

The movie was awful, partially because it was poorly written and choked with social justice.  But it revealed the mind of the Left in ways that I hadn’t realized before:

  • The Left wanted to identify with the Resistance© because they rely on powerlessness. Powerlessness is necessary to recruit Leftists – the core of Leftism is self-hate.
  • The Left is about power, but it refuses to admit it has it. That’s why Leftist professors from Leftist colleges complain about insufficient Leftism from Leftist politicians and Leftist media.  And vice versa – it becomes self-reinforcing.

Leftists rely on powerlessness as a route to power.  It is their foundational myth; it is their unifying element.  They are downtrodden, even as they control every major corporation.  They are disenfranchised, even though they control nearly every major media outlet – if there’s a cure for that, it’s unTweetable.

Twitter® is like a Leftist bank account – after you enter the wrong opinion five times, you’re locked out.

Given all of that, why am I so happy?

Because I’m free.  I’m free of my illusions.  I’m free to be an Outsider.

I’ll enjoy seeing the Gadsden flag tomorrow.  After all, there were another group of Outsiders a few years ago who seemed to like that flag.

And you remember where the Gadsden flag first flew?

On a pole.

Welcome To The Exponential, Including One Bikini Graph

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country For Old Men

When I went to Ireland I met some shy people, which surprised me.  No one expects the Irish inhibition.

I had noticed it some time ago a strange mathematical relationship – the National Debt (sort of) doubles about every eight years.  Is it an exact mathematical relationship?  Nope.  It varies a bit based on which eight years that you pick.  But the relationship is simple – the national debt is growing faster than yeast in AOC’s armpits, at about 9% per year.

It wasn’t always like that.

I also looked at the national debt between World War II and 1970 or so.  During that time period, the national debt was as flat as Joe Biden’s brain activity scan.  Hmm, whatever could have happened around 1970?

You’ll be happy to know that my search for “Richard Nixon bikini” came up empty.

The reason for most of our problems is that understanding the idea of exponential growth is difficult.  Our minds are (mostly) made for understanding linear things, or things that happen slowly.  No one really expects that, no matter how badly they eat, that they’d double in weight overnight, or even over the course of a month or year.

Yet, a lot of natural processes do follow exponentials, at least for a limited amount of time.  Take a baby.  Please.  I really have no use for them anymore.  Even the thought of a baby makes me exhausted.

Babies start with one cell, then two, then four, and then eight, and so on.  The initial growth of a child is exponential.  Thankfully, that levels off, or else there would be no way that I’d be able to afford to feed Pugsley.  If that exponential growth rate had continued, he’d be the size of the Solar System and need to eat cheeseburgers the size of Saturn just to make it to lunch.

Want fries with that Saturn?

No.  He’ll settle for the rings.

So, exponentials can’t continue on forever.  Math proves that.  If exponentials could continue forever, by the year 2032, the only blog left on the Internet would be this one, and everyone on Earth would have to spend 18 hours a day reading it.

Ahhh, I can dream.

But our national debt is following that trend.  Here’s a graph I put together:

Actual conversation with The Mrs.:  I said, “I promise I can make this [economic idea] interesting.”  The Mrs. responded, “Bikini graphs aren’t interesting to me.”

One of the lines is the actual national debt.  It’s the red one.  I just picked actual national debt data every eight years going into the past from today.  The other one?  I extrapolated back into the past from today: I just assumed that the national debt doubled every eight years.

How accurate was I?

In 1973 the actual national debt was $466 billion.  My backwards approximation?  $438 billion.  Close enough that a snake that was 3.14 feet long could be called a πthon.

Sure, in the middle, sometimes I was higher, sometimes lower.  But in general, I stuck the landing.

That means that in 2029 (if the United States is made of math) that we’ll be seeing a national debt of $56 trillion.  And in 2037?  $112 trillion.  Jeff Bezos sometimes works a whole year and doesn’t make that much money.

I heard he didn’t want to be CEO or president, just Prime® minister.

Does it make sense to anyone that the world will still keep accepting a doubling of debt every eight years and still keep sending us oil and steel and copper for the dollars that we print?  Sure, it worked for a long time.  Having an unmatched military and all the nukes gives a lot of room to dictate terms.

But how many people remember back to 1980 when the winner of the Cold War was in doubt?  The United States couldn’t print all of the dollars it wanted to without inflation.  The rule that the dollar followed changed, though, when the Soviet Union decided that it wanted to retire and spend the rest of eternity in Boca Raton in a retirement community gumming applesauce.

After that, the United States printing press could go wild.  Inflation?  Well, why bother with that?  The United States could print all the money it wanted and ship it overseas.  What else were people going to want?  Rubles?  Marks?  Rupees?

No.  The way that international trade was done was with the dollar.  We could print them up, and the world would soak them up and then the inflation could be exported all over the world, since the demand for dollars was now the entire world.  The United States could, in essence, tax the entire world to allow them to use the good old dollar.

I heard my chiropractor owes back taxes.

It was a good ride.  Need oil?  Print a few billion and send it to the Saudis.  Need copper?  Print a few million and send it to Chile.  Need cars?  Print a few billion and send it to Japan.

There are good things that happen when you win it all.  You get a trophy.  You get a party.  You get oil and copper and cars.  But if you have too much fun at the party?

There’s always the hangover.

Exponential growth can continue, and it can continue for quite a long time.  Without it, life itself wouldn’t be possible.  But life proves, again and again, that there is only so far that growth can go.

But, hey, it’s different this time, right?  The national debt can go on forever, right?