COVID – Page 4 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Mechanisms of Control: Information

“He who controls information controls the world.” – Babylon 5

I was trying to finish a puzzle. I asked The Mrs., “Can you help me finish this one? It’s supposed to be a bird.” The Mrs.: “Put the Froot Loops back in the box, John.”

Last Wednesday I wanted to write about the mechanisms of financial control. Of course, there’s always more to write – that post was less than 2,000 words, but if I took the time I could probably write another 20,000 or 80,000 words.

It’s the same with this post. Even beyond propaganda, a big part of the game is information control. What information do we get, and where does it come from?

For quite a long time (I haven’t put any effort into going back in time, but it’s been here a while) the control of information has been used to actually create the news that Mainstream Media® uses. Sure, an earthquake is true and fair news. But 90% of the news that we are presented with in any given day isn’t news. Just like “processed cheese spread” or “buttery sauce” don’t contain anything resembling actual cheese or butter, most of the news we have is “manufactured news product” and doesn’t contain much news at all.

Have you heard of Karl’s sister, Onya? She invented the starter pistol.

A perfect example is George Floyd. He was a felon and junkie who died of an overdose. He wasn’t choked. George Floyd died because he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill Ecuador. The “news” created by his death was used and amplified for a purpose. In a normal world, Floyd’s death would have been ignored because “junkie dies of overdose” is another name for “Tuesday”.

Likewise, any sort of violence perpetrated by a white guy against (generally) black people is amplified, often to a national level. But the reverse? It’s suppressed and ignored to the point where black people think (really!) that they are the ones who are the victims, despite the fact that in 2021, 87% of violent crimes between black and whites were committed by blacks on whites.

But if black people watch TV or read the media, they’d be shocked and think that white people were the ones hurting blacks, and not the other way around. Why? The story that they’re selling is that white people are awful, and they’re willing to bend the language on a whim to make it so.

I bet they ADL® really hates pandas. They’re black, white, and Asian.

Racism used to mean that someone felt a race was superior. Now? According to the (rapidly disintegrating) ADL® it’s an explanation of why white people are bad and can never be not-bad no matter what they do.

My thought is that the Floyd death was amplified to put out a trap for Trump. Trump’s media coverage was uniquely and pervasively negative for a president. Remember when it was national news that Trump got an extra scoop of ice cream? Pepperidge Farms® remembers. And I do, too. Anything, and I mean anything Trump did became the big complaint of the media.

The Mainstream Media® always has an agenda. But who feeds them news? The Left. The organizations on the Left are the primary news sources. Like scriptwriters on Disney® movies, they create news stories that meet what they need for their organization’s goals regardless of reality. Also, like scriptwriters, people doing the news don’t really have any need for the Truth if it gets in the way of what they want you to think.

Other things are not very truthful, either. Global Warming® is one of the stories I just can’t escape when I watch the news. But how have they twisted the truth in . . . the weather? Here’s an example:

I enjoyed all four seasons of that weather show on Netflix®.

I’ve seen others. In the span of only ten years, those that want to sell fear to bring viewers have taken the same temperatures and cloaked them in a dangerous red color. Is it hot in summer? Yes! And that’s why the stories about Global Warming Climate Change™ all show up then. And they will every summer, even if it gets colder.

So, news is created by Leftist organizations, which include:

The Media (including entertainment),
Most of the Fortune® 500,
Most Schools,
The ADL®,
The SPLC,
Most Colleges,
Military General Officer Corps,
Most Religions, and
Almost Every Government Agency.

These organizations pump out press releases daily which feed the news cycle. Who fact checks them? Why, a compliant media! Snopes® is run by Leftists, and expecting the Washington Post® to correctly fact check Joe Biden? You’d have better luck pulling out your teeth and leaving them under your pillow for the ADL® to bring you a shiny new quarter.

I’m a racist. I just hate the 440-yard dash. Too long for a sprint, too short for distance. And turning it into the 400 meters didn’t help.

This news is then pumped into the heads of Leftists, nonstop. Places like Google® and Facebook™ and YouTube© where alternative viewpoints aren’t allowed. Think that the Vaxx® was a big mistake? YouTube™ is still censoring that one.

Leftists, for the most part, I’m not concerned with. If they ever stumble upon these posts, they won’t be able to read them. They may be smelly virgins without a hope of ever having babies, but they’re not illiterate. If I say the sky is blue, they’ll immediately ask for a source because the Right to them is worse than Satan.

When no one laughed at Neil Armstrong’s Moon landing jokes, he’d just say, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

They don’t want to think, in fact can’t think, about some of the concepts that I write about here because their amygdala will stop them from listening. Literally, a Leftist can’t read one of my typical posts without getting so angry that they can’t read it.

No, I write for the Right, and I write for the middle. The Right is self-explanatory, since I’m on the Right. The Middle have been the people the Left is targeting. I’m sure that they believe that they can convince the Middle if they deprive them of any other viewpoint.

The Left is excellent at that. They want to tighten down Twitter, er, X®, Facebook™, Instasnap©, MySpace©, and any other place that the Right can disagree with the Leftist narrative. Wonder why the newspapers eliminated the comments sections? The Right was (and is!) amazing at getting points out that countered the information goals of the Left.

Quite simply, from their standpoint, that had to be stopped.

AOC had to write an essay in college about genocides. Took her a long time to decide if she was for or against them.

Again, remember that the “news” you get from the Mainstream Media™ is simply not news, but a product, like “buttery spread”. It isn’t news. Have some fun with it – count the number of stories in a day that you come across, and see how the Left is trying to manipulate you.

When you see it, you’re free to make your own opinions. And free to wake others up.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.

COVID-19, Looking Backwards

“What is more dangerous than a locked room full of angry Narns?” – Babylon 5

Behind every angry woman is a man who has no idea what he did wrong.

This will probably be my final post on the ‘Rona. It may get a mention from time to time about lingering effects on the economy and society, but I think the whole COVIDmania is far enough in the rear-view mirror that it’s time for the final review, barring some amazing new revelation like Corona was actually made by Big Toilet Paper to move product.

The disease clearly did kill people, but so does the flu. It did kill elderly folks by far in a greater percentage than in a normal year, but was nearly a nonexistent threat to most people in good health under the age of 65 or so. It was a threat ranking somewhere below “blood poisoning from cutting a finger opening an aluminum can” for anyone under the age of 20.

Everyone in my house had it, and everyone is fine now. It was a light fever (99°F, 3.2 kilometers) in the afternoon for me, Pugsley never noticed having it (but was confirmed to have antibodies) and hit The Mrs. the hardest, but I don’t think she missed more than a few days of work.

It did take one person I knew, but he was nearly 100 years old. It also took the life of one of my friend’s relatives – an elderly father-in-law. I found that one out after making a COVID joke, so, yeah. For my follow up, I’ll probably end up saying, “Thank you for your loss” at a funeral.

In a world where I expect that “get boosted” will qualify as a synonym for “drop dead” – I’m certainly glad that we’re not Vaxxed.

Being un-Vaxxed was a really easy decision. First, this was a novel use of a new technology on a massive scale. In that respect, I’d much rather be the control than part of the experiment, to the point that I’ve never even been tested for the ‘Rona. How do I know I had it? Like I said, I had a small fever one afternoon.

I heard that when Elvis was in the Army he spent time looking for suspicious mines.

Yeah, I know that having “a small fever one afternoon” isn’t in the diagnostic manual for the ‘Vid, but since that small fever one afternoon happened after The Mrs. coughed on me at close range about a million times during the night.

Second, I wasn’t personally that afraid of the ‘Rona by that point. The peaks in the infection rate had been up and down and up and down, but the numbers weren’t adding up, especially in my age range as all that scary. Back then, I think I said that the only age range where I would even think it might make sense was above 60 or 65.

Third, the propaganda was huge. Some of the biggest attacks (hackers) came after this site after I posted content that was contrary to The Narrative. Public relations campaigns were imposed. The trick where the Leftists swap one chip for an updated chip (Comey Bad Because Clinton Laptop becomes Comey Now Good Because He Hates Trump) was really in play for the ‘Rona. Thankfully, the Internet remembers:

Above is a short list of people who I hope took their boosters.

The Leftists were well programmed. And then, in a move that is especially Evil, they approved this technological monstrosity for kids. Babies as young as six months. And they died, and are dying today from the Vaxx. How many healthy athletes in their 20s had a heart attack prior to the ‘Vid?

None.

The evidence for the Vaxx being awful is piling up. Approval for the Johnson & Johnson® Vaxx has been pulled, as it is apparently the worst one in use in the United States. I know two people who took that Vaxx at about the same time. They had major heart surgery within a month of each other. That’s an anecdote, I know, but the plural of anecdote is data, and that’s probably why Johnson & Johnson™ is no longer available.

But it’s cold showers. And video games. And . . . anything but the Vaxx™.

The Science®, they told us, was clear. If you get the Vaxx©, you won’t get COVID. Simple!

Oops.

Yeah, you can get COVID if you get the Vaxx™. You can spread it, and you can also die of it. Based on some data that I’ve seen, the ‘Rona that Vaxxed® folks get is actually worse in duration and impact than those who are pureblooded like me. Perhaps that’s why peabrains like Jeff Spicoli want purebloods to be in prison camps.

I’m on the opposite end. I actually hope that all of the people who took the Vaxx™ aren’t harmed by it. I do think that the powers that be are ready to let it go. For whatever reason this was pushed, even if it was something as simple as getting Trump out of office, it’s served the purpose that they intended for it, and when Russia invaded the Ukraine, well, it was okay to shut it all down.

I wonder what the next thing they push will be?

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

A Few Good Memes

“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” – Rollerball

In a life filled with signs, be that bird.

I’ve got that “scratchy throat, feeling warm, feeling tired, and just a bit under the weather, so, here’s a low-effort memedrop based upon several themes. All memes are cage-free, organic, and gluten-free. Enjoy!

Someone, somewhere needs to do this:

I maintain that we’re now at “peak trans” and will soon be getting off this treadmill:

To be fair, not many thirty-year-olds have cratered an entire product line:

Scott Adams points out that LinkedIn® might be allowing companies to quietly discriminate – against white people.

Part of the story is what the media says, and part is what it doesn’t say. See the toxic empathy of the Left showing up here:

Decline or Collapse? Collapse.

“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch? Tip him for the pizza.

Finished my taxes. All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back. In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes. This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board. So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.

I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use. But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.

How does civilization end?

Lots of people talk about an eternal decline. That’s a wishful thought, I guess. It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human. I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.

Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.

To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.

Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age. And the Zoomers and Millennials?
Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.

There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine. The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier. The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.

I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once. “Nice going!”

Again, that’s an optimistic case. It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly. That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.

But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems. The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals. I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy. Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone. And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).

I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.

We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire. In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.

There are other materials that this applies to, as well. The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back. Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do. But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required. And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon. Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.

The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes. The civilization of the world today is just that. Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization. It’s all interconnected. Russia declares war on the Ukraine? Wheat prices go up. If there’s an attack on Taiwan? Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.

I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.

When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue. If any part of the world collapses today? The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.

The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody. This is not a new development. But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine. The world is at war? No one cares.

Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter. Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered. But if China takes Taiwan? A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture. And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.

A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once. The cop got away with a warning.

One break? Poof.

I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone. COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed. Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.

Oops!

The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse? No more taxes! Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.

There’s A Mind Virus. And A Cure.

“Exactly. An illusion, placed in our minds by this planet’s inhabitants.” – Star Trek, TOS

Well, tell us how you really feel, Elon. All photo and meme content “as-found”.

Elon Musk Tweeted® the above on Saturday.

He was replying to another person who was walking down Market Street with a friend.

Her friend said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” She continued, “I love SF, but what the city has become is unconscionable. Several pockets of 20 to 30 people all off their heads. A number of them with pants barely on. Zombies. The walking dead. Cops observing the proceedings from 100 feet away.”

Elon’s Tweet© was in response to that. Of course, when I looked it up to make sure that it was real (it was April Fools on Saturday), the media had tried to spin it that Elon was relating it to mass layoffs. He was not. He was referring to the disease of Leftism, which he referred to as “this self-destructive mind virus”.

And although I don’t think of Elon as any sort of savior for the Right, he often says things that are so provocative that it drives the Left nuts. They can’t even drive their Teslas™ with the amount of Smug™ they were promised because Elon has broken their Twitter® echo chamber.

That’s not going to win him friends in San Francisco or Washington, D.C., or with any Leftist, since the things that they want to avoid are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The theme of this is inversion. Let’s take an example that you’ve probably seen before:

What’s the difference between a Calvin® model and a bakery? The bakery is supposed to have rolls.

I’m sure that the model on the bottom might be a perfectly nice person. I don’t know her. She also might have a great personality and might be an excellent singer, or poet, or writer. But in any world where beauty is measured objectively (and it can be), well, let’s hope she has that nice personality.

But that’s the nature of inversion, replacing virtue with vice. And the self-destructive mind virus Elon is speaking of? It’s Evil. I don’t know Jack Fell (this is an as-found with no context) but he spells it out nicely in this Tweet® (or Gab®?):

My friend’s family is very racist. He brought his Asian girlfriend home to meet them, and his wife and kids were very rude to her.

The level of propaganda for Evil has reached “Comically Satanic Villain Plotting To Destroy Society” on the Wilder Scale. Of particular and topical concern is the LGBTQI+ (it just keeps growing and I’m sure will soon include people sexually attracted to cactus) agendas. It started with an appeal to emotion – let adults do what they want behind closed doors. This flew in the face of many facts, but it was sufficiently strong to move public opinion.

No one called me anorexicphobic when I was against teen girls starving themselves, some to death, because they had a mental delusion that they were fat. I wanted them cured. But suddenly, because a five-year-old picked up a Barbie®, now he has to wear dresses and be called Nancy and then be jacked up on chemicals that will wreck many of his body’s normal processes and if I don’t agree and want them to be helped instead, I’m transphobic?

Nah. I’m not. I’m sympathetic. These kids need help, not hormones, and society should say so.

Let me give you a taste of how bad it’s going now:

I cut out the pictures of the kids that were pictured on the Drag Camp ad, since I view it to be among the most corrosive and exploitive thing I’ve seen in months. It is putting the ordinary and boring next to the horrific – summer camp right next to exploited children.

David Foster Wallace called this “Lynchian,” referring to the director David Lynch. That’s what this is – putting the ordinary and boring, kids growing up and coming of age through the typical drama, and then adding in ghoulish parents and doctors talking about mutilating a child to conform to this peculiar mass hysteria. And normalizing it. Oh, and to top it off, anyone who objects to this monstrosity is denounced and cancelled.

I wonder who could be behind this . . . could it be . . .

As I’ve said before, this practice of transforming lust and deviance into a virtue above actual virtues is something old and awful – Evil.

The mind virus continues. Looking back at COVID, it appears that at every case, the people who were opposed to the crazed response and rules were correct. Being skeptical of the Vaxx turns out to become more validated daily – today the World Health Organization® came out and noted that kids and teens really shouldn’t be experimented on with a (now verified) gene changing experimental mRNA technique, and that (if the stats are correct) that same Vaxx now is likely behind a 25% increase in mortality and a decrease in fertility of women.

But this is what the Mind Virus made people say:

I bet he’s fun at parties.

They wanted people who disagreed with government mandates crushed. I guess, inside every little Leftist, is a Stalin wanting to break free. And nothing makes them madder than Trump. Nothing.

Questions that I’m sure that they don’t want you to ask . . .

Because I disagreed with them on a fundamental level on the way that I would manage my own health, they wanted me fired, broke, my children removed, and if I still wouldn’t relent, dead. And it was a joke to them.

We’re not as far down the road as some countries. Great Britain appears to be well down the road to utter insanity, and also proving why the 2^nd Amendment was a really good idea:

I guess the Brits don’t hire cops with self-awareness in mind.

The “self-destructive mind virus” that Elon says was being spread by Twitter® still is, but now people have the ability to speak out against it on Twitter™. Would I call Twitter© a force for Good? Not yet. I do believe that the arguments for the Good always beat Evil over time, and unmuzzling the Good is a great first step.

But it’s not nearly enough. The Left has pushed this insane agenda to fundamentally repudiate and destroy the family to the point where normal people are done with it – messing with the kids is always a step too far. Is this a temporary pullback, so that the Left can consolidate its gains while pretending we should be okay with the present situation, and then push further later?

I’m hoping not, because I see the complete moral capitulation to inversion of the most cherished values that we have being examined and rejected by a good portion of the base of the American people. We see what happens when the Left has full run, and it is the inversion of a good American life. Besides, there are things other than the recognition of a failed society we can learn from The Walking Dead:

After a fair trial, of course.

How An Army Commercial Shows We’re Rapidly Falling Apart

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual. But now I know why I have always lost women to guys like you. I mean, it’s not just the uniform. It’s the stories that you tell.” – Stripes

I didn’t know I was a lycanthrope. I guess that makes me an unawarewolf.

The United States’ Army has a new ad campaign out. The slogan, however, is fairly familiar: “Be All That You Can Be.” This became the slogan of the Army’s recruiting campaign back when they had to convince people to join because driving a fast car like Burt Reynolds while marrying busty blondes was a much more interesting career option.

That slogan lasted from 1980 to 2001, with “Army Of One®” was replaced by Call of Duty™ online mode. The Air Force was encouraged by that slogan, and decided to use “Air Force Of Only One Plane®” since that was all they could afford if they decided to go with the F-35.

But things have not gone well for Big Green recently. I heard in the last year, they actually recruited only one soldier, and he was a decoy. I kid. They had a goal of something like 60,000, but only recruited 45,000. I’m guessing that’s because the other 15,000 decided that working at McDonald’s® was a better option.

Want me to stop telling Rolling Stones jokes? You can’t always get what you want.

And, why not? The videos showing recent Army performance have been, um, less than stellar. From the pullout of Afghanistan, to Biden forcing troops to take the Vaxx or take a hike, it’s been bad. The commercials for recruitment have likewise been horrific. If it’s not good enough for the wise Latina child joining the armed forces and then looking back on her lesbian biracial parents who gave her hormone replacement therapy at age three, well, it’s not good enough for me.

I think the Army missed some real gems in going back to that old slogan. They could have chosen some of these:

Join the Army, where the camouflage makes you invisible to your ex.
Join the Army, and let us take care of your social life . . . because you won’t have one.
The Army: Where you can kill two birds with one grenade.
The Army: If you needed a good excuse to shave your head.
Join the Army: Where you’ll find that “hurry up and wait” isn’t just a saying, it’s a way of life.
The Army: “You’ll learn to stay awake while standing up.”
Join the Army and see the world, through the scope of a rifle.
The Army: “You’ll make lifelong friends. Or enemies. Or both.
The Army, where you can put your Call of Duty™ skills to use, just without the respawn.
Join the Army, and get one free PEZ™ dispenser every year.

Why did the magician sleep at Motel 6®? Because only he could make the stains disappear.

I mean, who traditionally makes up the Army, anyway?

Actually, white dudes. In the terminology of today, people who were born male at birth and score low on the diversity index. Hell, in 2023, I’m wondering when “mail” will show up as a gender – “Oh, baby, put me in the big slot! I’m an oversized package!”

I looked up the makeup of the Army using the most recent statistics I could find. They’re kind of murky, because they don’t break out “Hispanic” by itself. I guess I can understand that. Even though I’ve been described as “so Danish that’s the picture in the dictionary” I can also claim that at least 25% of my ancestors were born in Mexico. Were they Danish?

Yeah. Still don’t understand how they dealt with the sunburn. But Pugsley can check that box on the college application.

2 is a prime number. That’s kind of odd, right?

So, the stats I could find are murky. It looks like the numbers of white people in the Army has gone down 2% in two years from 70% to 68%. And what’s one percent? About 5,000 guys. So, of their missing 15,000, you could make an argument that 10,000 of them might have been white guys that didn’t join up.

I know three kids that were friends of The Boy that were gung ho about joining the military, until November, 2020. Then?

“Nah, I think I’ll work.”

So, to recreate the idea that perhaps the Army wants white guys to join up, the reversion to the “Be All That You Can Be™” slogan was the reaction from the Army. To be clear, they’re still using food made before 1960, ammo made before 1970, so why not a slogan that was made in 1980?

Oh, Francis, where are you now?

Enter the new video. Where in the last few, the only thing not visible was a white guy, this video is chock full of white guys. At one location where the video was stored on YouTube©, the comment section was more disastrous than French naval performance at Trafalgar. I mean hundreds and hundreds of comments that, well, I’ll just post a few of them and let you draw your own conclusions. I did not cherry pick these, and did not see a single, not one, zero positive comments. Feel free to go give a look yourself – the video is here (LINK).

Yup, pretty bad. Both of my sons have received text messages from Army recruiters, heck, as late as 2016, I presented to The Boy the options of West Point and Colorado Springs for colleges. He noped out of both choices. Pugsley is not at all interested.

I am not disappointed – rather, the opposite, and became doubly so after the decision by the Biden Administration to force armed forces members to Vaxx up. Sure, the DOD rescinded the requirement this year on January 10, but that didn’t help the people who already Vaxxed up. Wonder if the VA is going to cover that?

Regardless, I would hazard a guess that confidence in the cohesion of the country is lower than at any time in my life. Perhaps the real slogan should be “Be All That You Can Binge-Watch On Netflix®”?

Things You Can’t Say . . . 2023

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

In reverse, The Matrix is about a guy who quits drugs and gets a job.

What opinions do you have that you can’t tell all of the other people you know? I’m willing to bet that since you read here, you have quite a few. I have plenty of them. When someone doesn’t have views they can’t share, well, I think that’s probably the best definition of an NPC: always believing the current thing. I swear, if an NPC takes over, it will be a dictator-sheep.

One of the more difficult things is keeping track of what to believe. Scott Adams (more about him in a future post) famously noted that the anti-vaxxers were right, but there was no way that they could have known that they were right based on the evidence at the time. I respectfully disagree. The application of a new technology to stop a disease in a panic? What about that says, “wise decision”? Especially when Pfizer™ and the other “vaxx” manufacturers demanded secret language in their contracts to absolve themselves of liability.

Literally nothing about the vaxx looked legitimate. There were more warning signs than a cocktail with Bill Cosby.

What about January 6? The most visible icon of the January 6 “insurrection” was the face painted dude with the bison headdress. Turns out he was led around by various security folks until they found an unlocked door for him to go through. It’s like they picked the silliest looking person for the photo opportunity of a decade. Yet, folks didn’t see through that, either.

Not pictured: someone who actually broke into the Capitol.

If the January 6 protest was a real insurrection rather than people who (mainly!) were there peacefully, even observing the velvet ropes. How did I know it was fake? If it were a real insurrection, they’d still be there.

January 6 was political theater, and was misrepresented by nearly every news media outlet, and was also lied about by the Left every chance they got.

Am I correct in everything I believe? Certainly not. But I try, every time that I can, to look to the things that are True, Beautiful, and Good to be my guideposts. Some of my calls are wrong, but with those guideposts, it’s difficult to be too far off the mark.

It is clear that if we don’t think different thoughts than those the media would put in our heads, there is something wrong with us.

When the Kardashians die, they won’t be buried or cremated – they’ll be recycled.

It’s odd, because the pushback comes the closer we come to the Truth, because that’s dangerous. If I were to walk around proclaiming that Hillary Clinton is 40 feet tall (6 milliliters), blue, and made of cheese, people would think I was a nut and ignore me. But when I wrote about the “vaxx” – the website came under the biggest attacks ever.

The attacks don’t come when people are silly – the attacks come when the ideas presented might make people think. And the attacks come with a fury that is only reserved for those who have committed actual heresy.

Leftism is a religion. Sure, some of them say they have other religions, but Leftism is generally their guiding star. Recently Jane Fonda suggested murdering anyone who was against abortion. And abortion is one of the greatest sacraments of their church. No one on The View told her she was wrong, just that she shouldn’t say that in public. And a Leftist, as long as they are a True Believer, will always be excused for amazingly horrible comments like Hanoi Jane spouted out of her wrinkly piehole.

At her age, I’m sure she casts a lot of smells.

But someone on the Right? The guy who ran the Firefox™ project was essentially fired because he donated to a group that was against legalizing gay marriage years earlier. Years earlier when Obama was likewise “against” gay marriage.

Now it’s microaggressions and any perceived slight that someone can make up.

There are only a couple of reasons to do this. The biggest is the one that I think that is operative here: they’re scared because they think they might be wrong, or that they know that they’re lying. Again, if I go outside and tell someone who is a Leftist that they’re an idiot because their house is floating, well, they can be confident that life is okay for them because their house isn’t floating. They know it to be true, and don’t need me to validate that for them.

Their economic ideas? They’re upset at me (mostly) because they’re not sure they have the Truth, and they simply cannot have anyone thinking about alternatives to their ideas. I mean, I’m totally sure that communism would totally have worked if only the average 20-year-old at Harvard® had been in charge.

I remember the time I came up with a cure for dementia. That brings back memories!

And that, partially, is why I write the way that I do. If you can make a great point, you can win the debate. If you can make a great point and poke fun at the idea? The idea itself becomes the joke.

As near as I can tell, that’s always one of the biggest crimes of totalitarian regimes: a joke about a Communist Party official could send an unlucky Soviet citizen to the GULAG for 25 years. That isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of fear.

That is why they want to shut down the conversation – they’re afraid. They know as well as anyone that putting a 300 pound model in lingerie isn’t Beautiful, True, or Good. It’s hilarious. But until we’re not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes (and that the lingerie model needs more) you can tell that the struggle hasn’t been ridiculed enough, though that time is coming.

And then maybe we’ll all find out our secret opinions were shared by millions. Except that one I have about motor oil, shower curtains, escalators, and garden tools. There are places I’m not gonna go.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Reprogramming and Coming Apart

“You did. Thirty-five years from now, you reprogrammed me to be your protector here, in this time.” – Terminator II

6:30 is the best time on the Civil War Clock, hands down. (all non-regular memes are as-found)

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. Again. This is moving sideways, but things can unravel quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Reprogramming Time Is Danger Time – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Coming Apart – 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 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The Reprogramming Time Is Danger Time

It has become almost humorous to watch the reprogramming of the NPC public take place in near-real time. I suppose it’s been there in the past (as in “W. is the most evil person ever”, circa 2000-2009) but it really became noticeable around the time Trump started campaigning for President. Sure, it was funny to watch, but his comments turned the triggered into deranged. Loosely, here are the main reprogramming events in the last decade. I may have missed a few.

You’d think that people would figure out to pretend not to be home.

2016 – Hate Trump, Comey bad (because of Hillary emails)
2017 – Hate Trump, Comey good because Comey fired (this reprogram took less than a week)
2020 – Hate Trump’s virus overreaction because China is good (Pelosi, et. al.)
2020 – BLM riots good (we had to burn the city to save it from racism)
2020 – Trump mRNA vaxx bad
2021 – Trump riots bad (January 6)
2021 – Biden mRNA vaxx gooder, only evil people don’t take it
2022 – Russia invades Ukraine, Ukraine good
2022 – (Reprogram in Progress) Maybe it was the Trump vaxx all along
2022 – Trump documents in office patrolled by secret service bad
2023 – (Reprogram in Progress) Biden secret documents in garage okay
2023 – (Reprogram in Progress) – Ukraine was good, but Taiwan more gooder

Now, each of these above viewpoints has been taken by folks I know for good reason, so just that a person had one or more of these views doesn’t necessarily make them an NPC. But a significant chunk of the American public can be easily swayed to believe absolute nonsense, as long as there was sufficient emotion behind it.

You can’t make a souffle without killing a few hundred million people, I guess.

Stalin said it best, that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths was a statistic, but he learned from the study of history – in 1789 in Paris, thousands of pamphlets were circulated among the rabble to get them fired up for revolution. The pamphlets were effective. Oh, wait, did I not give a spoiler alert?

Sorry for the spoiler, don’t lose your head.

But understand that the NPC reprogramming is critical to the plan. It’s been done for hundreds of years, and is crucial to the plan. The big question is this: what will be programmed in next?

Looks like some old programming here that we need to fix.

Violence and Censorship Update

Best way to not get Pfired™? Don’t be Evil.

I do like what O’Keefe has done with Veritas™, and the Pfizer™ work has been outstanding. But what happened? YouTube™ censored at least some of his work. If I were a congressman, I would certainly like to investigate how much Pfizer™ pays YouTube© for ads. Just sayin’.

I’m sure these were peaceful, less fiery looting, but, hey, Nike™ is 100% off!

Riots in Atlanta, where people burned things, used explosives against cops. National news level? Zero. Of course, we all know that if any of these people had ever owned a “Make America Great Again” hat, the news would have been broadcast like the breathless screeds about FBI agents getting together and pretending to be extremists and talking about stuff they’re never going to do. But it wasn’t. Version 20 of “If only the tables had been turned.”

Want to decrease nationalist extremist events by 99%? Disband the FBI.

And then it came for speech. I had been expecting this for a long time. What’s allowed? Only things that agree with the Narrative of Freedom is Slavery. Carry on, and note this is a sign of things to come.

Thankfully I identify as a BFYTW-American.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, and, like Kamala, this graph doesn’t include eggs.

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 ticked slightly downward this month, again, due (my guess) to suppressing the Atlanta riots and the Memphis riots fizzling when it turned out that the wrong people did the beating. I’m betting it stays down until March-April at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more. I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together.

Economic:

Economic numbers took a big dive this month, which surprised me. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

Record numbers at this time of year. This is intentional. I’d say border is wide open, but we have no border.

Coming Apart

I’ve written these Civil War Weather Reports for years now, and I can’t get away from one thing: we’re coming apart. The Right is essentially in the same place, but the Left is moving farther and farther left, faster.

This is usual when the Left senses victory. The Leftist Singularity (I don’t recall who to owe this to, or I would credit them, I think it might have been from the wonderful Jim’s Blog (LINK)) is what always happens. When the Left thinks they have won, they keep swimming Left, faster and faster, creating a whirlpool that sucks in everything around, again, just like Kamala.

Wonder where the Leftists get those ideas?

And that’s what’s going on now. In no sane world do we go from “recognizing gay marriage” to “we must give your child puberty blockers in anticipation of removal of their genitals” in less than ten years. That’s not normal, and it’s nothing less than an amazing change, and in a country of several hundred million people, it couldn’t have moved any faster.

The attack is the same attack that the Left always uses, attempting to normalize behavior that is far beyond the norm, and then recasting anyone who would push back as bigoted.

The targets of the attacks from the Left are often the same, too – the most frequent is the atom of society – the family. Families are the basic building block of civilization, and have been since Grug first knocked Gorga over the head and drug her back to the cave to make babies.

I wonder what the alternative is?

The Left hates families almost as much as they hate God. Er, the Christian God. In their mind, all other gods are the result of dimwitted (often brown) people who need to be pandered to and talked to like they are pets. But families are the first targets.

Why?

Because it works. Leftism has ripped the family apart through the use of things like welfare and no-fault divorce and divorce-rape of men. The idea is that Progress for Leftist women can come via destruction of the family for Fun and Profit and Games and Prizes. Imagine how this works when multiplied by race and class?