Corona – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Exactly Who Is The Enemy?

“That is not a healthy internal narrative.” – Andromeda

I wouldn’t take a job in Seoul – I don’t think it would be a good Korea move.

I decided last night to shift everything over by a day this week. Why? Christmas.

Christmas Day was pretty mellow. We are Christmas Eve package openers, so there weren’t many surprises. We had a nice ham dinner starring mashed potatoes, gravy, sautéed mushrooms, and great company. After that?

A chess game broke out. It turns out that Pugsley decided he wanted to learn to play, and has been on chess.com playing games. We played a couple, then The Boy (on college break) and I split a couple of games, and then The Mrs. was even coaxed into playing a game, too.

So, you can see why I skipped out on writing Monday’s missive.

Christmas is over for this year, so we can begin to return to dealing with the problems at hand: The Narrative. First: who, exactly, is The Enemy?

Oh, sure, the Ultimate Enemy is obvious to folks like me who are Christian. That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the minions.

My evil clone was planning to attack me, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

One thing that’s become very clear is that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is simple: the good guys want government and economic system to work for the people, and the bad guys want the people to work for the government and economic system. I’ve used the terms Left, Leftism, and Leftist to name them, but it’s a clumsy, inaccurate term.

I think I’ll keep using the term, but I just wanted to recognize that it is an approximation.

In the real world, the actual Commie left has been co-opted. The goal has been to remove the economic from the political. That has been hugely successful. When is the last time that either party actually did something real on the economic front? The latest spending bill was nearly 4,200 pages, and most legislators had only a few hours to review it.

What’s in it?

Who knows? It’s certain that economic policy isn’t debated, and the Federal Reserve Bank® isn’t federal, yet makes decisions that widely impact the nation and the world. Without meaningful oversight. Without significant debate. If politicians don’t control economic decisions, what chance does an individual have to change the system?

Economics have been pulled from political control. And what’s the goal?

I hear janitors keep their houses at broom temperature.

Whatever makes folks work for the economic system. As the World Economic Forum® stated, the goal is that nothing is owned, and everything is rented. Need a frying pan (to cook your state-approved dinner)? That’ll just be a rental fee of $1.50 for the night. There’s a cleaning fee if you don’t return the pan clean.

And the food? Bugs. It’s not like there’s a great technology that turns bugs into human-friendly protein, called, “a chicken”.

I bought a deck of cards from Amazon® that never showed up. Amazon© says they’re dealing with it.

The Far-Left (think the actual committed Commies in Antifa®) have been co-opted into being race warriors and fighting for “rights” based on fetishes. When they do this, they are no threat to the economic system, at all. The George Floyd riots weren’t about solving racial inequity. The George Floyd riots were about reprogramming the Left into something harmless to the system.

But even those fetishes are being sold as products. Think about the profit opportunity in just one sex-change surgery. The average transsexual is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy. That’s the goal – a society that looks like a pyramid, with just a few at the top.

What threatens the system? Anything that offers resistance. Anything that wakes people up. Anything that makes people upset at a system that is designed to transfer wealth out of their hands can concentrate it into the hands of a global elite. I understand that this is Evil, and wonder how many of them have actually made the decision to be Evil themselves. Ghislaine Maxwell went to jail over a client list that had to be sealed.

Why is that?

I would like to get to the bottom of what happened to him, but I’m afraid I’d be left hanging.

To those not in the inner circle, it probably looks like people trying to create control, to make a profit. To do this best, you need international treaties that people can’t see or control, that are made without their knowledge or consent. This creates a structure that allows every important decision to be made outside the realm of politics.

See? No politics in the economics. And to do that properly, it has to be done so people don’t care. Trump was a surprise to them. Trump was always focused on the deal, yet he (either intentionally or by mistake) created a situation where tens of millions of people “woke up,” at least for a little while, to the system that was set up beyond their control or even knowledge. He was a glitch in the matrix, a spelling error in the Narrative.

I was recently reading a book, and in it, the author indicated that the reason that German propaganda failed in the Netherlands during World War II was that the Germans didn’t mindlessly repeat the same slogans like a Korean War Era communist concentration camp. No, they tried to appeal (according to the author) to reason. And when you appeal to reason, that leaves room to think and to choose something else.

That’s why COVID-19 became the litmus test – everyone was supposed to listen to the slogans, repeated endlessly. The slogans were calibrated, repeated endlessly from every source: “safe and effective,” “free and easy.” If there weren’t side effects on millions of people, it would have been bad enough. But it shows just how easy it is to control a population.

Noah’s diary, day 48: “Unicorn steak is delicious!”

That’s also why Trump was dangerous. He certainly didn’t accomplish much, outside of several Supreme Court picks, but from the beginning, there was a hard push-back against him. Why? He wasn’t like ¡Jeb!, just another controlled candidate from the system-loving uniparty where the only decisions politicians make are the unimportant ones.

And the only thoughts you’re allowed to have are those that don’t interfere with the Narrative.

Credentials: Costing Trillions

“Credentials. The only credentials I have is that I’m the only pilot willing to fly you up there. You don’t like those credentials? Walk.” – The X Files

Biden doesn’t think of those kids as hostages, just a captive audience.

Warning up front: I’ve got family obligations on Thursday that involve traveling late, so I might not have time for any sort of post on Friday. If so, be back in full force on Monday.

The Mrs. went into the hospital last year for “having lungs that were as useful as used party balloons”, which I think was the technical definition. In reality, one doctor said he thought she had Legionnaires’ Disease, which is weird because she never hangs out down at the Legion even though she likes mustard and bologna (one of you will get this joke and really, really laugh)*.

The reality of the care The Mrs. got was that she sat in a bed, they gave her some antibiotics, and then sent her home until her lungs looked less like they were filled with Jim Beam® bottles that had gone through a wood chipper. The care was just fine. Then the bill showed up – for two days in the hospital, the cost was about $16,000, which included a (I kid you not) $2,000 COVID test, which was negative.

But it was $2,000.

No, I don’t dress that way.

Again, the staff was nice, the doctor competent, but the real hero was the antibiotics that The Mrs. took. I don’t recall the line item for those, but I assure you, it wasn’t the food that caused her lungs to allow sweet, sweet, oxygen to once again saturate her hemoglobin. It was the antibiotics. I tried to get her to take my homemade antibiotics made of lead, some of the fuzzy stuff I found in the fridge, and several unlabeled vials of chemicals that were in the house when we moved in.

She turned me down. But $16,000? What’s up there?

Well, liability and gatekeepers. The idea is that every job has some liability associated with it. And courts have ruled that if I own a hospital and hire the neighborhood kid who mows my lawn to do brain surgery, that things might not go well. Well, in 2022, they wouldn’t go so well.

In the past, however, being a doctor was a state of mind. The Mrs. gave me a nickname over 20 years ago: John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon. Most of the operations that the members of my family have had, from splinter extractions to blisters to the occasional tracheotomy using a ballpoint pen and some duct tape and super glue have been performed by me. I got my medical degree in . . . nowhere.

What was Morgan Freeman called before the Civil War? Morgan.

In a real sense, almost everything I’ve done was just a matter of first aid, most not really complicated, and all really easy once I determined that no matter how much the other person is yelling, it is good for them and doesn’t hurt me at all. That last sentence will amuse at least three of you, so at least the jokes are getting broader as we go along.

I would assess, that at current prices, that I’ve done at least $4,349,209 worth of medical work on my family. So, enough to buy two Happy Meals© and a Big Mac©. Some of it was especially hilarious, like the time Pugsley (then aged three) slid sideways along a wooden bleacher at a wrestling tournament and ended up with three cords of splinters in his butt. Actual conversation from the bathroom while we were in the handicapped stall (the bathroom was filled with people): “Listen, hold still,” (Pugsley screams as I pluck a four-inch-long splinter out of his butt) “It won’t take long if you stop fighting.”

I did like the comfy chair very much, though.

But if anything goes remotely wrong, my family can’t sue me. When anything goes wrong at a doctor’s office, they can get sued. So an entire labyrinth of credentials has been created. This does two things: it makes sure that doctors have achieved a set credential, and it also assures that doctors are in short supply, and thus their cost is huge.

And that’s the basis of credentialism. From doing hair to doing nails to being a cop or a firefighter or . . . a zillion other professions, there are a myriad of professional credentials required. Heck, there are even credentials required to embalm dead people, and it’s not like they can lose a patient.

Credentialism makes sure that every person involved in every chain has a string of credentials a mile long. I’ve been through lots of training courses where I didn’t learn anything, and (in some cases) an “eight hour course” involves a lot (I mean a loooooooooooot) of breaks.

The credentials are required, of course, so that the company doesn’t lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit, even if they don’t have a practical impact on the job. They’re all made so that in a courtroom a person on the stand can say, “yes, I had the eight hour training on not shoving a cotton swab so far into my ear that I could feel my brain”.

Also, a colon can completely change the meaning of a sentence: “Wilder ate his friend’s sandwich,” vs. “Wilder’s colon ate his friend’s sandwich.” See? It’s the small things.

Certainly, there are professions that require more training. The bridge disaster in Florida shows that people should have training when dozens of people can die in an accident. But, whoops! All the people involved did have training. And, yes, I’d prefer not to go to a doctor who got his training at Doctor Bombay’s Surgery School and Meth Laboratory. Yet, Sam Bankman-Fraud was allowed to steal and/or lose billions of dollars based on being weird, something-something crypto, sleeping on a beanbag, and being able to fool Tom Brady.

Maybe he should have had a credential? “Unable to fool Tom Brady”?

But this design of creating every job with a nearly infinite number of credentials is adding billions of dollars in cost to the systems that we depend on, from filling up a car with gasoline (the tank, not covering the passengers) to buying PEZ© at Wal-Mart®. Some of them add a great deal of value, but some just add friction to the system.

Just like $15,890 of The Mrs.’ bill. And I’m not letting her go down to the Legion anymore.

*This is a reference to a song. It’s by “Bubbles” and you can find it if you search for “youtube mustard and bologna bubbles”. Not one you’d want to play if your office is near HR.

The Narrative: Crumbling in 2023?

“Oh, well, please, for goodness sake, narrate me down from here.” – Winnie the Pooh

I guess Scott should learn that in space, no one can hear you meme. (all memes this post, as found)

This isn’t my prediction post for 2023, but one thing that I’m seeing is that toward the end of 2022, the oddest thing seems to be happening – The Narrative is crumbling.

Good. Now do the January 6 Committee.

As you can see from Elon’s Tweet® above, Musk has enough data to realize what most readers here have known for a long time: Fauci has always been on his own side, and was tied into some pretty shady stuff. The Twitter© purchase gave Musk more public power than being an okay car manufacturer for niche cars that are (at least presently) wholly impractical for widespread use or a really good rocket manufacturer that has revolutionized space travel.

If humans ever set foot on Mars, it will be because of the work that Musk started with SpaceX®.

Sure, that might change the history of humanity and eventually turn us into a multiplanetary species, but his purchase of Twitter™ is changing the world, now. As I’ve written about before, Twitter™ is different. It was pumped up by the Left and eventually co-opted by them as one of their means to rapidly reprogram their NPCs.

Diogenes, getting ready to reprogram Plato. Again.

As such, that left evidence. I was a user of Twitter© for a while, and had individual Tweets© that got a lot of response – some of them in the tens of thousands. They weren’t anything in particular, merely reacting against the Leftist narrative.

That wasn’t allowed, apparently. After a year and a half, I noted that my Tweet reach was now very, very limited. That was fine. I could take my ball and just spend time writing here instead of Tweeting®. The Leftist tactic of silencing the Right worked in my case.

Now Musk has the keys to the data, and has already started showing the slime-trail that the Leftists always leave behind. The rot was inside, of course. Leftists tend to try to hire their own, and it turns out that the Federal Government was directing (in some cases) the stories what stories would be told, and what stories would be suppressed.

I’m sure that the guys who put this together said, “The science is settled! What are you, ignorant?” But they would have said it in German, so it would have sounded even meaner.

Wonder what data exists in the private messages of the Very Important? Probably only one person has greater access to that data (outside of the .gov people) and that’s Mark Zuckerberg. Mark won’t be telling anyone, because as Elon heads out to space, the Zuck seems to be suffering a reboot as Faceborg© slowly loses billions of dollars in value.

This makes me wonder if 2023 isn’t the year that The Narrative finally cracks. Disney’s™ stock value has plummeted, and they can’t make movies that people don’t want to see forever. Eventually, they have to have some cash coming in to pay for the LGBTQ+ chat rooms and employee abortions and transition surgery.

When did the Babylon Bee® become non-fiction?

That’s another thing that’s past its sell-by date: the trans (and trans indoctrination) movement. Parents will put up with a lot, but when you start messing with their kids? They push back. And they are pushing back. Parents are pushing back at school board meetings, and the woke can’t stand the light.

This one, in particular, opened a lot of eyes. But, hey, the science is settled that there’s no difference between men and women, right?

The Narrative on the COVID vaxx is also fading. It is now inescapable and proven that the vaxx has killed more people than any vaccine in history, and the long-term effects are unknown. I certainly don’t hope that all the people who took it die, since I know several people I really like that got the vaxx.

I think it’s also becoming clear that a very, very large number of the people who are Leftist activists are . . . crazy. The recent Department of Energy, um, person in charge of nuclear waste is now accused of (spins wheel) lifting luggage at airports. Clearly this, um, person is nuts, and we’re lucky that they were stopped after lifting a few bags, rather than after they went full “where can I bury all these bodies?” But that seems to be a qualification to be placed into high office in Biden’s administration.

You may see a crazy person, but I see someone who could be a Supreme Court justice, or take care of the nuclear codes, or decide educational policy impacting millions of children.

Ayn Rand was really wrong about a lot of things, but she knocked it out of the park with one particular statement: “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” That’s what The Narrative does. And the consequences of ignoring reality are showing up again and again here at the end of 2022. Will 2023

Looks like I’ve found the Biden motto on how to govern.

Even the virtue signaling, when it doesn’t have a basis in reality can lead to failure. When the symptoms of the situation are addressed, but the root cause isn’t, the problem will rot and fester. The sooner The Narrative crumbles and people are brought, face to face with reality, the sooner actual solutions can be found.

I’m sure that some people would rather that The Narrative would have crumbled a few months earlier, and probably would have made other choices. Including losing the “Where’s Waldo” hat. And if you think that’s mean, he called me an idiot first.

2022 In Review. When Is The Next Asteroid?

”I could end this review here, but I’m really just getting started. I do have to go to traffic court soon though, I accidentally ran over a Korean family with my car.” – The Phantom Menace Review

The Romans were really good at killing people. They really nailed the execution.

It’s not the exact end of the year yet, but it’s close enough to look at 2022 in the rearview mirror. Me? I say good riddance. It also marks the sixth year I can’t jog because of my knees. In 2017, no jogging. In 2018, no jogging. In 2019, no jogging. In 2020, no jogging. In 2021, no jogging. In 2022? Again, no jogging.

I guess that’s a running joke.

So let’s run down the events of 2022:

January

January 10 – the first transplant of a heart from a pig to a human was accomplished. I’m not sure what you call a person who has a heart from a pig. But they did also breed a pig with four eyes. I guess you call that a piiiig.

January 28 – the vaxx dose was injected for the 10 billionth time. Kamala Harris declared it an “amateur”. There are several jokes about what will happen to people who took an essentially untested mRNA gene therapy. They never get old.

Looks like lead pipes are back on the menu, boys!

February

February 4 – the Winter Olympics® start in China. The country that brought the most athletes to the games was Brazil. I hear they brought eight Brazilian athletes.

February 26 – Russia commences its Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. It’s scheduled to be concluded in two weeks.

March

March, date unknown – The Democratic Republic of Congo gets its first phone, and prank calls Angola.

March, date unknown – Joe Biden starts wandering around the White House claiming that water is now only legal in three states – liquid, solid, and gas.

April

April 6 – The first fossil that could be tied explicitly to a dinosaur that died because of the impact of the asteroid at the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago was found. He was named “Lucky Larry”.

What do you get if you cross a T-Rex with a human? A T-Rex.

April 24 – The Large Hadron Collider was turned back on and changed its power level from Incredibly Large to Mindbending. Of course, history has been changed, again, and now it turns out I’ve been wearing my underwear backward.

The one on the left? Never existed as a logo according to the world. Not according to me. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that it was on my tighty -whities.

May

May 6 – Monkey Pox discovered in the wild! Panic!!!!!

May 7 – People don’t panic.

June

June 14 – Canada and Denmark end the Whiskey War. This 50-year-old conflict was a dispute over a barren wasteland (see “Hillary Clinton”) that started in 1978. It was called the Whiskey War because the Canadians left a bottle of booze and put up a Canadian flag in 1984. The Danes took it down, put up the Danish flag, (while politely folding the Canuck flag and putting it up) and left the Canucks a bottle of schnapps. On June 14 the island was split between the two countries. Previously, Denmark had one border (Germany – never a good choice) and Canada had one border (guess).

This really happened.

June 21 – I think I had a burger at lunch that day. Tasty.

July

July 11 – the James Webb Space Telescope returned its first picture (see below).

How does Bigfoot tell time? He has a sasq-watch.

July 23 – Monkey Pox still not a thing, since it was discovered mainly to transmit through non-heterosexual relations. Everyone ignore!

August

August 4 – the Chinese military drill Taiwan, and then don’t call.

August 15 – Disney® finds way 7,328 to ruin a movie.

September

September 6 – Liz Truss is now Prime Minister of Great Britain, making the first time two people named Liz are in charge of Great Britain.

September 8 – Oops! Lost one Liz. Spoiler? Pretty soon it’s zero people named Liz.

October

October 8 – Russia celebrates the several hundred-day anniversary of two weeks.

October 28 – Elon Musk buys Twitter® for reasons that no one can really figure out, and seems to have a lot of fun with it.

Oops, he doesn’t have a wife.

November

November 8 – there are 8 billion people now in the world. Kamala Harris is quoted as “Well, that’s somewhat of a challenge, I’ve got some catching up to do.”

November 16 – Several days months years behind schedule, NASA launches Artemis 1. The idea is to launch several dummies around the Moon. Sadly no Antifa® members are in the capsule.

December

Thankfully, no Leftists read here, so I don’t need to remind you what happened in the last 9 days.

We’ll look at the future in my Amazingly Accurate Predictions for 2023 post that’s coming up. I would take some time off and go running, but my knees are worse than Kamala’s.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Elections And Narratives

“False Narrative!” – The Death of Stalin

When he was four, Pugsley asked, “Daddy, why do people make up things that their children have said for social media? Isn’t it just inherently dishonest and indicative of inability to construct a compelling narrative themselves? “

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after the power outage in early December. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Election 2022, Part III – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Anything In Defense Of The Narrative – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge. Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals. The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part III

The entire premise of a society with elections is that the ballots are fairly cast, and fairly counted. It is not that every vote should count, it is that every valid vote should be counted.

Votes should be rejected. If the election was on Tuesday and the votes shows up on Wednesday? Nope. Dead on election day? No vote for you.

This is why I’m against early votes.

Each vote should be in person.
Each vote should be on election day (with provisions for absentee votes for military and those that cannot be in the state with a written excuse).
Votes should be on paper.
Ballots should be equipped with security so that I can’t take them to the copier and make dozens more.
The ballot casting and watching places should be open for anyone to observe.
Counting should be done by midnight on election day, at the latest.
Any vote not counted before midnight is void.
Identification required for a valid vote, along with proper registration.

Sort of simple, and implied. But for whatever reason, every point above is controversial. But only by the Left, because, historically, they have cheated. Sure, the Right has cheated, but the Right typically is less organized and has way better jobs than counting ballots.

The result?

2022 was certainly tampered with. “Dr. Oz” was a horrible candidate, but didn’t look like a mentally-challenged fictional murderer, Slingblade. And Dr. Oz could speak in complete sentences.

If this stands, the Left is slowly going to take over all the mechanisms that make a free and fair election possible.

Everyone welcome Senator Fetterblade.

However.

The Supreme Court is potentially taking a case with huge ramifications: the idea is that the Constitution means what it says, that the responsibility for setting up elections is with the legislatures of the several states. Not courts. Not the governor. The legislatures, and it’s not reviewable.

If so, this is big – it keeps the federal hand out of the cookie jar of state elections and the states just have to deal with bribery, fraud, and corruption. We’ll see.

Violence And Censorship Update

As usual, censorship has been the biggest front. In most of Civil War 2.0 Weather Reports, the trend has been that censorship has been on the increase from multiple fronts. November has seen a small victory as Elon has rustled jimmies all through the Left.

How much? They want him dead:

And if they don’t want him dead, they want him hauled up before a Senate committee to answer stupid questions from geriatric windbags who had their feelings hurt:

But Elon has made journalists seethe. How? He’s taking away their beloved Blue Checkmark© because it turns out, there might have been some shenanigans about how some of them got the Mark©.

I guess they’ll have to check their blue (check) privilege:

In serious news, it appears that several tax preparation software packages sent back email, income, and refund information straight to Facebook®.

Oh, and your phone? The FBI issued “a general warrant” for data on anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Never happened before. Justified based on (seriously) COVID.

The Left will stop at nothing to turn data against you. Remember, your phone is a tracking and listening device, and if it sees something, it says something.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Thanks, Brandon. It sucks that there are so many Kamalas.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly upward this month. Unless there are more blackouts, I’m betting it stays down until March-April at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – November didn’t cause a spike, and I’m not seeing a lot in the next two months to cause increased instability.

Economic:

Amazingly, I think people have become used to the inflation. Wonder what a rail strike would do?

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record. This is a repeat comment, because the border is wide open.

Anything In The Defense Of The Narrative

I’ve been aware of Graham Hancock for decades. He’s a journalist/writer who has been focused on history for quite a while. Initially, his work was pretty normal – writing about hunger and AIDS and poverty. But then? After a three-year hiatus, he published Fingerprints of the Gods, about the evidence that supported a civilization that predates all of recorded history.

Oddly, at least at one place, he was correct. Göbekli Tepe is a site in Turkey that predates the “first civilizations” in Mesopotamia (about 5,000 years ago) and ancient Ur (6,000 years ago) and even your momma (8,000 years old). Göbekli Tepe is about 11,500 years old.

Hancock was at least partially right. Here, after his book was published, was the evidence of a civilization older than the oldest one we knew of. By nearly 6,000 years. They were moving big stones, and getting together. There is pretty significant evidence that they were making beer, too, so they can’t be all bad. Hancock even has a Netflix© special about his work.

Sure, you say, “That’s interesting, John, but this is the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report not a Netflix® special.”

And that’s the point. The entire reaction from the Left has been silly over this. Despite being proven correct on some of his conjectures, Hancock has been attacked ferociously in the media.

Why?

I have only one guess: there is a single narrative on anything. An attack on any “established fact” can’t be tolerated. At all. So, if “science” says something, it simply cannot be disputed. I think this is, at least partially, a reaction to the COVID nonsense where Leftists pulled in the virtue signaling idea that “This House Believes In Science” when the truth is science isn’t a belief – it’s a system for discovering truth.

Nothing is off limits in real science, but the Left has to censor any idea that challenges the mainstream. Evidence? How about Canada?

Well, Justin Trudeau has put himself fully in favor of protests, except when it comes to protests against him.

Strangely, there are rumors that the people who carried a flag very popular in Germany in the 1930s during the recent Trucker’s Protest was a government agent.

Here’s the person in question, carrying the freshly purchased, just unfolded out of the sack flag. Not at all suspicious.

The idea is to paint absolutely everyone who disagrees with The Narrative as evil. No matter what part of The Narrative that’s questioned. And they don’t see the irony.

Thankfully, Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to be the “disinformation Czar” earlier this year has a new job. Working for foreigners.

Since this doesn’t challenge The Narrative, this is fine. In fact, noticing things that challenge The Narrative is Badthink. I’ll just leave this here:

And we wonder why the nation is falling apart . . . .

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/CPD1617Scanner/status/1590858149162274816

https://youtu.be/h_cvFEfpU3g

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1597808974295728128

https://twitter.com/i/status/1591160541829300224

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596490454245089282

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596592437127917568

https://twitter.com/i/status/1591179759228444674

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597196379725914112

https://twitter.com/i/status/1599182109780119554

https://twitter.com/i/status/1596308757151043585

https://twitter.com/TheFilthyTimes/status/1595826090035253248

https://twitter.com/i/status/1590745057224642576

https://twitter.com/i/status/1598109618483625984

https://twitter.com/i/status/1598837217140477955

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1592284803944288256

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597452016305205250

One Guy

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63470

Body Count

https://summit.news/2022/12/02/new-federal-data-shows-73000-illegal-immigrant-gotaways-in-one-month/

https://www.statista.com/chart/28644/rate-of-homicides-that-go-unsolved-in-the-us/

https://www.amren.com/videos/2022/11/latest-interracial-crime-stats/

https://vdare.com/articles/about-28-black-on-white-homicides-including-a-5-man-massacre-suppressed-by-the-new-york-times-october-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america

https://summit.news/2022/11/18/video-thermal-drone-footage-shows-army-of-illegals-entering-u-s/

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/world-premiere-died-suddenly/

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1590083864558727170

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/share-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status-30-jurisdictions-in-the-u.s.-september-2021-to-august-2022-age-18-and-over.png?itok=s40nRW3J

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/covid-deaths-skew-older-reviving-questions-about-e2-80-98acceptable-loss-e2-80-99/ar-AA14DLdb

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

Vote Count

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/SBF%20democrat%20donor_0.jpg?itok=MS58Rkl8

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/120/617/428/playable/9fec9ca3968f76ad.mp4?_=2

https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publications/112322_SocialistWatch2022_3.pdf

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597400282253922305.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/heres_how_they_did_it_realtime_election_fraud.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1590446073213952000.html

https://roloslavskiy.substack.com/p/voting-doesnt-win-you-elections

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fradio%2F2022%2F11%2F14%2Fexclusive-shawn-steel-ballot-harvesting-california-republicans-must-adapt-or-die%2F

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F11%2Fwith_this_obstacle_in_place_republicans_cant_get_the_white_house.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/04/cocktail-parties-that-could-define-democrats-00064560

https://newschannel9.com/news/local/walker-county-man-convicted-of-voter-fraud-sentenced-to-25-years-da-says

Civil War

https://newrepublic.com/article/169141/its-elites-vs-base-coming-republican-civil-war

https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/republican-civil-war-trump-mcconnell-scott

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-civil-war-trump-desantis-midterms-1758558

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-infighting-starts-democrats-also-face-revolt-new-york-midterm-election-1758810

https://hayspost.com/posts/1c6d7c57-df36-4a9a-af45-a4a144702552

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2022%2Fnov%2F06%2Fhow-close-is-the-us-to-civil-war-barbara-f-walter-stephen-march-christopher-parker

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is-a-civil-war-brewing-in-america/ss-AAZBzFn#image=2

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11385903/Ex-CIA-staffer-claims-Christian-white-men-primed-start-civil-war-America.html

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-brink-civil-war-survey-highlights.html

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/has-next-civil-war-already-started-205967

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2022/11/30/how_the_next_civil_war_begins_585926.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/at-protests-across-america-guns-are-doing-the-talking/ar-AA14zpif

Beyond Civil War

https://www.wired.com/story/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-dark-ships/

https://www.newsweek.com/leaked-fsb-letters-russia-putin-nuclear-war-weapons-ukraine-1762695

https://time.com/6228466/nuclear-war-risk-daily-issue-biden/

https://larouchepub.com/other/2022/4947-what_would_happen_if_a_nuclear.html

Reprogramming NPCs For Fun And Profit

“Dad, two of the greatest football players in the country hang out in a speakeasy downtown.” – Horse Feathers

I dated a partially blind girl once. She said she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

Donald Trump fired James Comey, Director of the FBI on May 9, 2017. Leftists had been hating on James Comey since he had, right before the election, announced that additional information about St. Hillary the Divine was on Anthony “hitting on underage chicks while I’m in the bed with my son” Weinerman had thousands of emails on his computer.

Oops.

Leftists really think that this was the reason the most unlikable candidate since cancer lost the election. It really wasn’t. It wasn’t Russia. It was that Hillary was rated below the plague in popularity.

But that didn’t matter a bit. The Left hated, with every cell in their rotund transsexual bodies, Comey.

Then Trump fired him. On Stephen Colbert’s show (press ‘S’ to spit) Colbert announced that Comey had been fired. The crowd cheered. I don’t recall what Colbert said, exactly, but it was something on the order of, “Oh, so you’re big Trump fans, eh?”

The crowd was confused. The Narrative up until that point was Orange Man Bad, Comey Hurt Hillary, So Comey Man Bad, Too.

Colbert went on to explain that now, Comey was now a hero. Inside of thirty seconds, Colbert had reprogrammed the entire studio audience. He had also (probably) reprogrammed however many people who could stand his drivel that were watching him on television.

Why didn’t James Comey indict Hillary Clinton? He found his suicide note in her emails.

In one week, Comey went from villain to hero. Why? The Narrative demanded it.

I know what you’re saying. “Okay, John Wilder, you manly beast who men admire and women swoon for, that was more than half a decade ago, back when gas prices were low and inflation wasn’t 49% per year. I’m sure it’s better now.”

Oh, my sweet summer child.

The reality is the programming now is even more blatant. Let’s pick just one thing. China and the ‘Ronavirus.

This week, I was stunned when The Mrs. was reading me comments from Leftists. It turns out that the ‘Vid is either killing all the Chinese people or Xi is using it as a social control tool. Or something else. Heck, I don’t live in China, so I’m not sure I really care.

It’s true that China has a Wonton regard for life.

In a brief conversation, The Mrs. related these stories:

Leftists were upset that China was arresting a woman who “wore her mask in a way that didn’t cover her nose” and that cause her business to fail.
Leftists were upset that the Chinese people were being forced to follow government dictates about how to deal with Corona.
Justin Trudeau was in favor of the Chinese anti-COVID protests. See below:

Yes. He said that. I guess he reprogrammed himself?

So, these are the same people who were applauding when a woman in Dallas was arrested for trying to be a beautician. When people in Australia were being put into “voluntary” camps that they “escaped” from. And when Trudeau was being protested against? He froze the bank accounts of the protesters, his advisors talked about putting tanks in the streets, and used a law meant for a state of war to give himself more powers.

In February, noncompliance with anything Biden or Trudeau wanted was treason. Today, when China wants to do the exact same things that Biden and Trudeau did?

China bad.

Shouldn’t it be called NPCNN®?

The Left is reprogrammed again.

A common term for behavior like this is a Non-Player Character, like a character that shows up in a video game that has no autonomy. And many on the Left are just that – they don’t have any opinions that are fixed. They show up, repeat what was programmed into their heads, and then the next time you encounter them, repeat the next talking point.

When the old talking point is done?

Replace.

When considering this, I thought, “Well, I know that there are NPCs on the Left. How many of them are on the Right?”

I looked to a moment when Trump was at a rally long after the 2020 election. He praised his work in creating the vaxx.

The arena turned ugly, quickly. Trump wasn’t their leader, and the crowd wouldn’t be reprogrammed. Trump stopped with that little line. I also know from the comment section here and on other blogs that there is a healthy disagreement on the Right. We aren’t a monolith, but most of our decisions are based on principle, not on the moment.

Why shouldn’t vaxxed and boosted people play charades? Everyone guesses they’re having a heart attack.

An NPC? They’ll change their opinions in 30 seconds or less.

I can see at least some reasons that Leftist NPCs are like that. They don’t search back to principles, rather, they’re more swayed by what the crowd says. But television and the Internet serve the Narrative. I think there’s something that happens to an NPC when a crowd all thinks the same thing. I think they seek conformity with whatever the Narrative is, because to be outside of the Narrative is uncomfortable.

At least that’s what I’ve come up with.

So, why NPC programming so easy?

If there isn’t a fixed principle, I think most people will believe anything. I think people on the Right tend to have fixed principles. They have a strong feeling of right and wrong.

In the end, this is why we’ll win – the Right is built on principles, many from thousands of years in the past. The Left? Not so much.

We watch what goes into our heads.

So, here’s our latest livestream. It’s just The Mrs. and I, and we were, sadly, sober. Enjoy!

Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time. I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons: don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday. It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night. As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year. Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject. Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special: memes that are on sale. They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another. So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale. Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Midterms Edition

“$10,000. Is that all it takes to be elected senator these days?” – Used Cars

If you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to vote, but not to drink. But if an eighteen year old looks at the candidates, they’ll understand why the adults are drinking.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after this election. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Vs. The Deep State – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 730 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge. Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals. The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part II

The hype machine is up on the Left and in full swing. I’m actually surprised at the amazing levels of hyperbole that are in swing. Here are some examples:

Rob Reiner seems frightfully unhinged, like he might hurt himself. As do the TV talking heads:

Bill Maher disappoints me. I had thought that he was actually getting to the point where he was not the reflexive Leftist he was back in 2000. Nope. He occasionally talks more reasonably, but he’s as committed as any other Leftist. Aesop (LINK), you were right.

How insane is the Left? They’re running John Fetterman, a person slightly more capable of holding a conversation than a bologna sandwich for Senate. When Fetterman was (rightly) attacked for not knowing the difference between a noun and a shoelace, the Left tried to paint Republicans as “able-ist” as in wanting someone who was able to say his own name without drooling.

He also looks like a Goomba® from the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers.

Luckily, he has a growth on his neck so he can appeal to both Eagle® fans as well as Steeler® fans.

At least he helps Biden look good.

Because Biden looks like you know, the thing:

But Biden is all about scaring people, too, and so is his Chief of Staff.

The Left, though, is setting us up for more ballot shenanigans:

If you spend a few moments looking at the picture above, you’ll see that in most states, the independents break a little for the Right, and a little for the Left. But if you look closely at Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of the independents plus some of the Republicans “voted” for Biden. This is 100% certainty of the fraud that mail voting brings. Will they cook the books this election?

Why wouldn’t they. And, you’ll note, fences are going up in Washington D.C. You can tell that a country is close to Civil War when the politicians live in abject fear of the citizens.

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, organized political violence has been fairly muted this month. That’s good. But the .GOV folks are scared – fences are going up all over Washington, D.C. Even the FED has been surrounded.

In case there is rioting, Ron Paul has been busy.

Stephen Crowder, who broadcasts from a position on the Right, has been banned from his primary outlet, YouTube™, just in time for the election. Why? Don’t know. YouTube©’s rules are vague, so you don’t know why they banned you even after they banned you. This has a negative effect on free speech since people have no idea where the boundaries are, they stay as far back as they can. This, in effect, allows even more speech to be banned.

Another person banned is David Icke. He, however, is a British citizen that’s banned from visiting Europe. Why? He is listed as a terrorist. What does he talk about? How the elite are literal lizard people. From watching him in a few videos, I think he sincerely believes that. But he won’t be visiting any European countries anytime soon.

Reporter James Gordon Meek had his house raided in April. He hadn’t been seen for months after resigning from his job. He even skipped going to get an award for his reporting of the pullout from Afghanistan. He was seen recently, though. Why did the FBI raid a reporter and cause him to quit?

And there has been some good (potentially) good news with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter™. If rumors are correct, it really has twisted a lot of knickers on the Left. I don’t think Musk is on the Right, but he sure is messing with the Left, which might be enough.

How upset are they? They want to see if they can keep him from running his toy.

The Usual Suspects are upset. The “blue check mark” was the sign of an elite. Now, anyone can have it. The first price point was $20, but Elon quickly dropped it to $8. This was hilarious, because people on the Left like, well, like Dick Durbin, who has no self-awareness, Tweeted® the below:

AOC was upset by all this, so much so that she quickly became the butt of jokes:

The ADL®, long known for tolerance of viewpoints they don’t agree with (yes, this is sarcasm), was quick to jump in with the Orwellian idea that, to have diversity of opinions, Twitter™ must ban all speech ADL© doesn’t agree with.

And, represented as a meme:

So, Musk started fact-checking. The Left was upset that one of the first persons fact-checked was . . . The White House. The White House was so embarrassed that they deleted the Tweet©. Official Records Act violation, anyone?

And Kathy Griffin was permanently suspended for pretending to be Elon Musk. Ha!

I guess we know how some people feel about that . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. I wonder if his new shipment from ACME will come in soon?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided. Will November be spicy due to elections? A cold front is coming through, so I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – will November cause a spike?

Economic:

Economic indicators did a dead cat bounce this month. Inflation has caught up with the Market.

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.

You vs. The Deep State

You are being lied to and controlled. Not (only) by Google™ and Twitter© and Facebook®, but by all of those folks at the request of the government. Yup, the DHS, the child of the drunken meetup between George Bush and every congressman except for Ron Paul, has decided that they will be the group that decides what information you are allowed to hear on the big social media platforms. This is not me making this up:

This is how this shows up in a meme:

Sure, they’re private companies. But being leaned on by .GOV to shut you up? I have felt it. I can tell you the month that this page was downranked (not a misprint) by Google™ leading to a major dropoff in traffic from search engines. The biggest months of attack? On the months I made the most fun of Joe. But after a while, it no longer looks like a mistake:

It looks like they’ve been planning it. And thanks to Snowden, we know how deeply they’re hooked in with electronic communications:

They want it all: to spy on anyone, at any time, and to control what information you are allowed to see and hear. They’re willing to go to great lengths:

And if you wonder what they value, look at who gets sent to jail:

Oddly enough, we are winning. There is no reason that the DHS would need to enlist the aid of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to have them restrict the flow of information to over hundreds of millions of people if we weren’t winning. Yeah, I know they own the majority of the institutions in the United States, but they’re proving they know they don’t own our minds. They’re scared.

Remember, this is in our hands, not theirs. And that’s what scares them.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Huh. Pre-Musk Twitter 404ed almost all of my Bad Guy links from private citizens by the end of October…

It’s almost like there’s suddenly a crime wave coverup ahead of an election or something…

These two are still up (for now – because they are from Blue Check TV news reporters?)…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582472383910117377
https://twitter.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1585595820077977600

Good Guys
https://youtu.be/akXJ_yuE-Ek
https://youtu.be/XRkpMhuXmZU
https://twitter.com/BornAKang/status/1584054864178339840

One Guy
Firefighter tries to be a good guy at a convenience store…
https://twitter.com/KcDiscover/status/1582552334994796547
https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-missouri-shooting-kcmo-firefighter-anthony-santi-charges/41693134

Body Count
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/47/95
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/19/daniel-bobinski-interview-embalmer-says-blood-has-changed/
https://icandecide.org/v-safe-data/
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-mortality-rate-is-up-17-across
https://chaosnavigator.substack.com/p/80-young-canadian-doctors-died-suddenly
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-surgeon-general-covid-mrna-vaccine-found-to-cause-84-increase-in-death-for-men-ages-18-39?utm_campaign=64483
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ob-gyn-laments-covid-jabs-massive-unprecedented-side-effects-for-pregnant-women-babies/
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/25-percent-people-received-covid-19-vaccination-missed-work-serious-event-cdc
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fborder%2F2022%2F10%2F12%2Fgraphic-mexican-cartel-gunmen-dump-4-human-heads-near-texas-border%2F
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/glock-switch-epidemic-may-be-rippling-through-americas-inner-cities
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-made-up-60-4-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2021/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-undercounts-number-times-armed-citizens-thwarted-active-shooting-incidents-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

Vote Count
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-trump-election-fraud/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/bxwz-o06.html
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/jawdropping-fraud-systemic-ballot-harvesting-in-orlando-black-neighborhoods/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F10%2Fdemocrats_are_aboard_the_big_data_emtitanicem.html
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/03/mayor-says-milwaukee-election-worker-fired-over-ballot-fraud/69616108007/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mail-in-pennsylvania-ballots-with-incorrect-dates-will-be-saved-not-counted-2022-11-02/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/new-york-has-more-3-million-voters-lacking-proof-identity-analysis
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/bombshell-texts-show-milwaukee-mayor-colluding-with-democrats-to-rig-2022-election/
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-voter-registration-delaware-constitutions-da8ac023e52da4a78c2ccb110750f8aa
https://whowhatwhy.org/deep-state/what-donald-trump-got-right-about-voting-machines/

Civil War
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1588262127105703936
https://resavager.substack.com/p/are-americans-still-a-people
https://unherd.com/2022/10/how-turbo-wokism-broke-america/
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/no-the-usa-is-not-headed-towards
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jordan-klepper-civil-war_n_63574553e4b051268c57fda3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/civil-war-mar-a-lago-violent-extremism/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/civil-wars-are-too-easy-to-start-just-ask-the-spaniards
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/10/14/donie-osullivan-civil-war-threats-extremism-zw-orig-contd.cnn-business
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-paul-pelosi-attack-latest-cold-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/podcasts/civil-war-belle-sebastian-narrated-articles.html
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/is-another-american-civil-war-possible/
https://currentpub.com/2022/10/31/how-to-avert-a-partisan-civil-war/
https://www.niskanencenter.org/americas-unfinished-civil-war-with-jeremi-suri/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1278293.shtml
https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2022/10/23/a-chronic-civil-war-is-raging-on-in-us
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/politics/jan-6-civil-war-violence-what-matters/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/13/no-we-arent-headed-to-civil-war-00061696
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/civil-war-isnt-on-the-horizon-the-original-battle-never-ended/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/dixon-democrats-destroying-america-in-revenge-for-civil-war.html
https://americanmind.org/salvo/become-undraftable/

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird. You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi. At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today.

I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive? (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery? He was dead.

I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything.

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail? They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19. The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough. The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below. And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes. The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion. It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output. How bad? Some have said, “Great Depression bad.” The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know: religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash. I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move? Was it because he like making Papal airplanes? Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated? He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail. They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail. Why? When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken. We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine. As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™. Nope. Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did. And now the consequences cannot be avoided. Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops. But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are? Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election.

Oh, he did? Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh. Well, I guess that’s really scary. Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh. I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war. Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery. Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history. This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head). In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us. We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.