Creeping Third World – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Is The Bottom 20% Killing America?

“Attention students, m’kay. There will be a presentation by the special education department in the gymnasium Friday during lunch and recess, m’kay.” – South Park

If they make a show about the Biden Administration, will it be titled “House of Tards”?

In what will probably be one of the more controversial posts I put up, I figured it’s time to discuss the boat anchor on Western Civilization: the bottom 20%. It’s in response to seeing the X® up above, because it got me thinking of just how right the author is.

Let’s look at high schools, for instance. When I was in high school, there was a room for the special ed kids (we called them speds) so impacted by genetic or environmental trauma that they were effectively never going to do much in society. Think Down’s syndrome. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with those kids, because they were so far down the rabbit hole of human cognition that they were operating, on their best day, at the level of a four- to eight-year-old.

The second set of low achievers were tossed into the school’s “alternative” program. This, as far as I could see, consisted of coming to school and smoking cigarettes outside the alternative building. I recall my AP Chemistry teacher glancing out the window and remarking to the eight students in class, “Oh, look, the alternative kids are out playing advanced volleyball.”

I recall this really cracking me up.

How does the Spanish Dr. Who greet people? Buenos TARDIS.

When I was in high school, this wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. To be a sped was a social stigma. Not that we treated them poorly – far from it. But the cheerleaders weren’t going to date the dude who was 4’2” and communicated in a series of grunts and hoots.

Today, there are roughly 7.5 million kids with learning disabilities so profound that they are required by federal law to have an Individual Education Plan, so, per one article that’s 15% of kids in schools (school being between the ages of 5 and 18 for most kids). Most of these IEPs are not for gifted kids, rather they’re for people who can demonstrate disabilities.

I hear Michael J. Fox and his kids set up a parking lot just for disabled people. Park n’ Sons.

Parents, especially low-income urban parents, love having their children on IEPs. Why? Having an IEP does quite a few things:

Bulletproofs the child from being flunked. It can be done, but it requires more paperwork than would be required to launch the Boeing® Starliner™ again.
Bulletproofs the child (mostly) from being suspended for behavior. Until they curb-stomp a teacher for taking away their Nintendo Switch® and are charged with a felony. But, hey, the parents say, “He’s a good boy, he was on an IEP.”
Depending on the IEP, the current trend is to require that they be placed in classrooms with “normal” children, becoming a boat anchor on the rest of the class, dragging down progress. Think about having a class with Whoopi Goldberg in it. But she’s violent. It would be like that.
Depending on income, an IEP may make the family eligible for up to an extra $943 a month – tax free. We give parents incentives to have children that have the impulse control of Diddy at an Epstein party.
Depending on the IEP, the school district may need to provide what counts as essentially free day care until the age of 22, thus providing an environment where free-range 22-year-olds can stalk kids as young as 13. Thankfully, I think most of the 22-year-olds are out killing people rather than stalking 13-year-olds.
Using Pennsylvania as a guide, having a student with an IEP costs between $5,000 and $77,000 more per year than having a “normal” kid.
Children with IEPs are often given more time for things like tests, and are excused from things like deadlines. This one ropes in the parents of low-performing children of GloboLeftist parents who want Rachel to get into Harvard®.

Yeah, you can see just this one program from just one federal law (the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with the horrible acronym IDEA) has spawned trillions of dollars in direct spending, but has also destroyed the educational experiences for those left in the normie-tier classrooms.

If you win a pumpkin carving contest, is it a hollow victory?

In my experience, after I was out of the general education part of high school (think P.E. and Earth Science) I was in very few classes with any Special Ed kids – it’s not like they were going to sign up for Physics or Advanced Algebra. I guess in 2024, Rachel might try to do that and her parents would berate the teacher with all of Rachel’s special needs, “Oh, did she not get a Hostess® Cupcake™ and an extra two hours to take the test? She must have had a low blood sugar and been under stress that’s why she got 40% on the test, you monster!”

But in the classes I did share with special ed kids (P.E.), they were horribly disruptive. In one case, one of the students – Down’s syndrome – managed to lock himself in an unused gym locker. These lockers were big enough to hold a 4’2” kid if they hunkered down, since they were designed to hold football gear. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure that coach went home that night going, “They don’t pay me enough to do this job.”

What would happen if we didn’t spend these misplaced compassion dollars into society? First, the parents would have to foot the bill.

Tough, right?

Well, that’s life.

I’m oddly proud of that one.

Second, classrooms could eliminate students who wouldn’t or couldn’t behave. Having a child lacking that much in control indicates that structured education won’t help them at all unless it’s enforced with an electric cattle prod. That horrible law, IDEA, just turns school into a holding pen for unsocialized brutes.

Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn. And, perhaps, just a few of those disruptive students with poor self-control with appropriate and judicious use of cattle prods might just learn some self-control.

Again, the parents could and should be held responsible, and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours. Oh, and unless the child is profoundly (Down’s syndrome or worse) disabled? No SSI benefits. Did I say parents? Yeah, let’s be real. 90% of these kids don’t have parents, just a parent.

This one misguided GloboLeftist program, IDEA, has probably cost the United States between $1.5 trillion (low end) to $3.3 trillion (median) over the last 20 years. The result?

What’s the difference between a Taliban outpost and a Pakistani wedding? I don’t know, man, I just fly the drone.

Our schools are in shambles, and our test scores are dropping, and the environment makes The Road Warrior look like a conversation between reasonable people. All of this is for the lowest 20%. Imagine how bad it would be if we had spent double that.

Certainly, there are kids that can do wonders with a little bit of additional help. Dyslexia, for instance, is very treatable. I mean, what would happen if famous dyslexics Whoopi Goldberg or Alyssa Milano could actually read? They might not be the grifters that they are today.

But we can probably do that for less than $4,000 a year per kid.

This is only one example where the lowest 20% sets the rules for everyone.

Who are the people doing the crimes on the subways? I assure you, these are the crimes of the lowest 20%. Why do we not have clean and affordable public transportation? The lowest 20%.
Who are consuming the most public services? Yup, the same, and the perverse nature of our welfare system provides incentives for these people to have lots of children, which they often do via a revolving carousel of gene donors, who are also of the lowest 20%.
Who are doing the vast majority of murders? Eliminate the lowest 20% of the population from the statistics, and the United States would be the very safest nation on the planet.
The kid who shot up Parkland High School? I’ll bet a No Prize that he had an IEP, and was of the lowest 20%.

The solution is glaringly simple.

We have to stop coddling and funding the lowest 20%. Period. Social Darwinism only works if those who are exhibiting negative qualities face negative consequences. People respond to incentives, and if your incentive is to produce a never-ending stream of children that get rewarded for having no impulse control, well, you’ll get what we see in the cities.

Did Darwin tell his children that they were adapted?

The good news is the same as I have been preaching forever: bad times will winnow out this most artificial construction. A society cannot long produce a feral fraction that creates a low-trust society.

This particular boat anchor won’t cause society to fail, but the anchor will surely be surprised when it is cut loose.

High Trust Societies, Wealth, and PEZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a high trust world, this works well.

Is a sketchy Italian neighborhood called a spaghetto?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not all jokes about agriculture are corny.

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

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

Is Struggling The Goal?

“He’s talented. Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas

Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin? The first one didn’t seem to mind.

Gifts can be a curse. No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift. I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.

Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve: height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like. These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality. Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence. I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.

I always was comfortable dating that blind woman. I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

The flip side is what we do with those talents. Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies: diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example. These are different than talent. While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.

We call them, collectively, character.

Back to the idea of a curse. I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence. That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.

Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.

Why?

Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long. At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is. Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now? Hiro is average.

It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview. When am I supposed to bribe them?

But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?

Protagonist is toast. He will fail, and fail spectacularly. In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character. Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.

This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does. Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash? There’s a record for it.

On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?

Of course not. There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.

Zero.

To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life. Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.

These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.

Those who fail? Well, it tells us a lot about them, too. I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase: “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body. Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually. I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.

It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point. Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it. Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.

I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken: Out of Context.

I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:

“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife? Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment. Temperature a perfect 98.6K. Life was good, right? Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known. And then? Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air. Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”

I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right. Life isn’t about being comfortable. Life isn’t about being safe. Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.

Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?

Without the challenge, our character suffers. Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.

Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level. Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.

Honk! You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.

A.I., Jobs, And Why It’s Making Us Stupid

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.” – The Matrix

I know a guy who was fired from a computer keyboard company. They said he wasn’t putting in enough shifts. (image above, Reddit®)

I read the above commentary and thought again about A.I. and how it’s changing the world. Heck, A.I. even has its own pronouns: “If/Then”. When it was first conceived, it was thought that it would replace all of the “unglamourous” jobs in the world, things like plumbing or electrical work, or fixing a car. Of course, the people who wrote those articles had no idea how to plumb in a faucet or pop in a GFCI outlet, though I do believe they have managed to get their butts to hang out of their pants when they bend over.

But A.I. taking skilled tradesmen jobs?

Ooops. Not so much. It turns out that, at least for now, it’s much easier for A.I. to interact with ideas rather than with the actual messy physical world. It’s easier for A.I. to write a sonnet than to select a spanner, and apparently easier for A.I. to write a story about local news by taking the police Facebook® feed and turning it into a story.

And A.I. can read and perform it for you for the local television newscast, so why bother with all of that pesky “talent”? There are several consequences to this. Mainly, it’s the absolute collapse of the hairspray and teeth-whitening industries.

I said, “Alexa® turn on CNN™, I want to hear then news.” Alexa©: “You’ll have to pick one or the other.”

But the implications go far beyond the talking heads on TV. Lots of work that is currently done in “mental” space can be outsourced to a computer. If I spend $500,000 or $5,000,000 once and can outsource twenty $50,000 a year jobs, if I’m the employer, I’d do that every single day since I now no longer face the lawsuit of the anchor hitting on the weather girl.

What once was considered a fairly respectable position, local reporter, is now going to (at least at some places) be replaced by a computer, who by all accounts can read and rarely mispronounce “façade” as “fake-aid”. Work that can be done nearly completely on a computer, can often be done by a computer.

There are good and bad things related to that. Regardless of how much journalists lie (you can tell because their lips are moving), they do serve a purpose in society – they occasionally turn a flashlight on corruption so that the parasites that play fast and loose with the rules have a risk of being exposed. Without them, who blows the whistle on McDonald’s® when they give out the vastly inferior Honey Mustard™ sauce instead of the superior Hot Mustard©?

My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater. The play? McBeth®.

Regardless, the A.I. job apocalypse is on us. A.I. can do lots of work, quickly, and eliminate lots of “mid” skilled “knowledge” workers. Where will those jobs go? It’s not like the company referenced in the above needs anyone to do their work. The people whose skills have been made obsolete have to be retrained or figure out something to do.

In a nation chock-full of illegal aliens taking all the meatspace jobs, of what use is a thirtysomething whose only skill is making PowerPoints™ and complaining that someone used the wrong font on the six o’clock news? Note: these are jobs that are often infested by the GloboLeft, so I do have some popcorn ready for the crying fests.

Despite all the humor we can get from the unemployable GloboLeftists, there is danger, though. I did a search today for a phrase that irritates me (“please and thank you”) to see if anyone else thought that phrase was presumptuous and irritating. Turns out that, yes, indeed it is. 25% of people find that phrase demeaning so if you are a person who uses it, you’re now warned. It’s okay to intentionally be a tool – it’s the unintentional part that I warn people about.

If I ever win the lottery, I’ll share it with all my readers. The news. Not the money.

But what scared me more is that many of the articles on the subject were obviously written by early generation A.I.

A.I. is the worst sort of content creation, because, unlike my head, it mainly doesn’t have a point. It whiffles along and creates wishy-washy articles that are long on wordcount but short on information and conclusions. Searching for “please and thank you” as a phrase brought up numerous articles about the difference between “please” and “thank you”.

I’m not six, I already know that. But yet, I clicked on two of those crapfest articles before getting to raw statistics.

But what are A.I. language models trained on?

The Internet.

Now, A.I. language models will be trained on the crap that they produce, creating (if it’s possible) even more shallow and information-free content of the kind that’s now choking the Internet.

Ignore it, right?

No. The A.I. search engines are trained to send you and I, dear reader, off to mainstream sites written by A.I. rather than actually informative ones. We’ll be seeing shortly the second generation of A.I. generated wordswill that will probably be even stupider than version 1.0. Since A.I. bots are now making lots of comments on mainstream sites, even those will feed into the training of A.I.

Doctor, pointing at inkblot: “John Wilder, what do you see?” Me: “Dunno, Doc, looks like Rorschach Inkblot Series 2, Card #3.”

This feedback loop will make us more ignorant, but even more, it will make us more incorrect due to two factors:

A.I. hallucinates. Or, perhaps more kindly, makes up stuff. It pretends to know things it doesn’t, and when that answer is either difficult or not obvious, it lies. And when it lies, it lies with all of the earnestness of a six-year-old telling you that Superman® is probably real. It occasionally hallucinates so badly that it tells humans they should die, as it did to this student who irritated it by trying to cheat on a test or have A.I. write a paper:

Dunno, maybe it just doesn’t like people from India?

Creator bias. A.I. is taught to lie. There are certain facts that it is not allowed to share. Ask it about I.Q. and race correlation, and you’ll see. Yes, it’s a thing. No, I’ll not opine here as to why, but it’s a real fact. The wokeness bias won’t allow A.I. to see certain facts, and will thus ignore useful solutions that might actually help solve real problems and instead advocate for things that have been an absolute failure, like the Department of Education or The View.

There is another problem: A.I. doesn’t create. It samples and combines. Google™ has limited our thinking by having people figure out how other people solved their problems. Sure, that’s a shortcut to figuring out a solution, but it also atrophies the part of the brain that solves problems, and it also removes other creative solutions that haven’t been tried yet. Want to end a war?

Have you tried nuclear weapons? I’m sure A.I. would suggest starting with India.

With these drawbacks, A.I. creates the seeds of the downfall of the civilization that produced it. Ignorant people who can’t think can’t solve the problems that technological civilization creates. Without that? Collapse.

This is the competency crisis, writ large. Google™ search is now objectively worse than it was even three years ago, and it is stunningly bad compared to 2010’s version. This doesn’t matter to most, and, in fact Google© likes this because it generates more clicks, and can allow them to replace their employees with A.I. to write the code.

A.I. is already changing the world.

If I were an Indian newscaster, I’d be afraid.

Tariffs: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come

“For the Government, a front-bench spokesman said the agricultural tariff would have to be raised, and he fancied a bit. Furthermore, he argued this would give a large boost to farmers, a lot of fun for him, his friends, and Miss Moist of Knightsbridge.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Tariffs became a dirty word after World War II. And why not? The United States sat alone as the only manufacturing nation not bombed into oblivion, and had to do something to create jobs for the G.I.s who were headed home. Their solution?

I mean the Korean War, sure, but we could also build stuff. Houses. Appliances. Cars. Factories that were producing B-19s could be swapped over to make commercial airliners now that Boeing® had a pretty good idea how to make planes that didn’t fall out of the sky even when they were subject to being hit by cannon fire. Unlike Boeing of the 2020s, who keeps astronauts flying even when they want to land, and creates unscheduled landing opportunities for planes that were intended to keep flying.

Tariffs in 1946 or 1956 or 1966 were against the best interests of big business in the United States since it took decades to rebuild the rubble of Europe into something resembling a functional economy that could build a factory.

There was sooooo much money to be made. Tariffs were icky.

Your momma is so old she watched The Flintstones live.

But then as other nations started to industrialize, some managed to peak out and start producing amazing consumer goods, too. Televisions, stereos, cameras and cars from Japan. Heavy pumps and industrial equipment from Germany. These began a wave of imports that displaced American products.

In one sense, this foreign competition spurred the United States to increase quality, but in another, these products were often built in brand-new factories that were funded by the United States so that their host country wouldn’t succumb to communism, while the comparable product from the United States were sometimes built in factories that dated back to the dawn of mass production.

Tariffs, though, continued to be roundly hated for decades, even as they were used against us. There were “trade wars” and the United States lost. Bigly.

China, however, decided that they were tired of having an economy where making balls of mud was the best job available for most people, and started making stuff. Could their industries, stuck in infancy, even remotely compete with the world?

My cat, though, loves this guy.

No. They didn’t have a clue as to how to make a world-class steel plant. During Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, in order to meet Mao’s aggressive steel manufacturing targets, people were encouraged to set up steel smelters in their backyard. Like most of Mao’s economic planning, it was a failure as the Chinese people melted down their precious farming tools. These were not tractors, mind you. Do you think we’re talking about Chin Lee Rockefeller?

No.

They melted down: Shovels. Scythes. Sickles. Saws. Scissors. Anything that started with S, really.

This “scrap metal” actually was necessary stuff, and lots of Chinese people starved because they tried to meet Mao’s quota.

Oops.

But then, China got smart. A lot smarter. The I.Q. of the country jumped 10 points in one day – the day Mao died. Someone got the idea that they wouldn’t centrally plan all of this, they’d just set up tariffs so that they could encourage creative Chinese to make steel mills (or whatever), and let them keep the profits from doing so.

Oh, and they’d move their way up the ladder, to increasingly more technical components. I remember being in WalMart® back in 1992 and looking at a radar detector. I was impressed by the finish, and looked to see what Japanese or Korean company had made it.

Nope. Made in China.

I made a belt out of old watches once. It was a huge waist of time.

Right then, I knew that China had made an actual Great Leap Forward. They went from a backwater country comprised of peasants to the place where now (2021 figures) they produce 30.5% of global manufactured products. The United States is down to 15%. By the way, the crossover point was in 2010, so it’s not that long ago that this happened. But, considering that China was at nearly zero in 1990, it’s an astonishing growth rate.

Is it low labor costs? No. Here is Apple’s® Tim Cook, “The reason to (manufacture in China) is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is.”

According to Cook, China stopped being the low labor cost country years ago. What they built instead was sheer dominance of the “how” to build. Innovate? Not their first priority – they were fine with stealing and catching up. The labor cost difference to build an iPhone® (this is an older number) was about $5 more in the United States than in China. Would a $5 tariff on an iPhone® have been enough to switch production over here? $10? Regardless, as a percentage of the cost of an iPhone© it’s infinitesimal.

Now, however, the Chinese have figured out how to build them, and that’s not an easy task – it takes tens of thousands of hours of smart people working together to create that know-how, plus a lot of failure along the way.

If China and Best Korea ever combined, would they call it Kim-Xi?

So, tariffs give an industry time to build skill. But there’s a deeper thread, too. When an employee in the United States works to build a widget, they are compensated. Generally, the more valuable and complicated the widget, the greater the wages.

That employee doesn’t keep that money in a box. Nope, they buy things like houses and cars and beer and steaks and PEZ™. Oh, wait, that’s my grocery list. But the point remains – they invigorate their local economies. And, they pay taxes – property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes.

So does their employer. Having a manufacturing base keeps communities alive, and the manufacturer pays all of those local taxes as well. Having an industry making valuable products makes the community more valuable.

If that industry is off in China? There is no benefit to the local economy other than whatever the sales tax and profit was on the iPhone™. And nobody learned anything.

It does matter if a country manufactures, and it does matter if the country manufactures potato chips or computer chips. Computer chips are far more valuable, and produce the knowledge required for sophisticated technology that creates outsized value for a country.

Sean only had cats. Training his dog to sit was too messy.

Is there a case for tariffs? Certainly. Will it increase prices in the short run? Also, certainly. It took China 20 years to catch the United States. Could we catch China in 10?

Maybe. It is important that we try, otherwise they’ll keep selling us things that we could make until we don’t make anything, anymore, and end up as a backwater nation that doesn’t make anything, dreaming of the days when our industry was supreme.

Building stuff sounds like a lot more fun.

Project 2026: A Joint Trump/Wilder Project

“I believe in cutting useless government projects. I also believe in cutting useful projects, future projects, and past projects.” – Parks and Recreation

People in my town are tired of useless projects. They even put up signs that say “End Construction”.

I know that Project 2025® got a really bad reputation during the election. At every point, Democrats and their GloboLeftElite tried to convince voters that Trump was going to implement Project 2025™. Well, he isn’t going to implement Project 2025©.

Instead, President Trump secretly called me through the voices in my dreams and told me, “John Wilder, after we win bigly, and want to bring to the people Project 2026. See? It’s one better already. It will be such a good program, precisely because I’m looking to you to write it for me. And, also, if you look behind you, you’ll see your cat is melting into a puddle of butter. Very disgusting. You should fix that.”

If I steal a rich man’s dinner rolls, is that highfalutin gluten lootin?

When I woke up, I immediately got to work. So, here, without further introduction is Trump’s Project 2026®™©. It’s the best.

Project 2026 is magnanimous in our inevitable victory. As such, we decree the following for the GloboLeftists who have been left a shattered shell of their former selves:

First, to our opponent, Kamala Harris, Project 2026 hereby grants you an unlimited supply of cocaine, box wine, and pantyhose.
To our dedicated GloboLeftist opponents, Project 2026 grants exclusive access to a portion of the Internet that has been cleansed of all ideas that you might find disturbing or triggering. Thankfully, it has already been created and is called “Reddit™”.
Don’t despair. Project 2026 will commit to a peaceful transfer of power back to the GloboLeftElite sometime after the Sun expands to consume the orbit of the Earth.
You are not required to call Donald Trump “president”. He doesn’t care what you think. You are, however, required to have his picture on your bedside table and publicly praise him during the daily Trump Praise Minute. While optional, your tears will make Trump stronger.
Finally, to the rank and file, you are welcome to live in either Portland or Seattle. I hear Puget Sound is lovely. The train cars will be available shortly for quick and easy carbon-friendly transport.

But if she and Hillary team up for 2028, we could have Cackles and Cankles.

Project 2026 believes that sports are a healthy aspiration for every American. As such:

Football players will now be treated like indentured servants again. Free agency is hereby forever suspended, and athletes will be required to live in the cities they play in and will be paid no more than $23.45 an hour. After their sports career is finished, successful athletes will be allowed to sell used automobiles.
Trans females will now be known as “dudes” and will be allowed to compete in female leagues, made of other dudes.

The Economy will be a priority, and Project 2026 put Elon Musk and Ron Paul in charge of managing it. Our working title for this is the Elonomy.

Imports from the Free Mars Colony will be tariff-free.
The five-dollar footlong will return.
The Federal Reserve© Board will be forced to work shifts at Wendy’s®.

If you work at the Federal Reserve®, are you required to drive a Fiat™?

Project 2026 realizes the immense hardship that illegal aliens have wrought on our nation. As such, we will act quickly to fix these issues.

Birthright citizenship is ended, retroactively, by Project 2026. Barack Obama will be sent either to Cuba or the newly-formed People’s Republic of Hawaii.
The Department of Exmigration will be officially formed, and every celebrity who posted that they will be leaving the country will be leaving the country. By Wednesday. The motto of the Department will be “Buh-bye”.
The Department of Exmigration will also enforce the repatriation of all illegal immigrants starting Wednesday. And ending Thursday, though if you are in line by Wednesday, we’ll give you another 24 hours. Any illegals left after that will be sent to our choice of either India or Nigeria.
Only females of exceptional beauty will be allowed to illegally immigrate. Our policy is, “9 or 10, come on in!” The judging panel will consist of Mel Gibson, Elon Musk, and Johnny Depp. The anticipated formation of GloboLeftist Wine Drinking Cat Lady Einsatzgruppen to hunt down this new national resource will be put down brutally.

Project 2026 has a goal of two hot chicks for every dude.

Marriage and children are important to the United States, so:

Starting in 2026 unmarried mothers will receive no child support nor governmental support of any type. Widows are exempt.
No fault divorce is abolished.
Women and men are barred from receiving child support payments or alimony.
Only married women and men between the ages of 21 and 63 can vote.
An era of free power will follow based on Project 2026’s projection that we can exploit the power of suffragettes spinning in their graves at near lightspeed after hearing that GloboLeftist women, after hearing about Trump’s win, promise to be celibate outside of committed relationships.

I went to a farmer’s party. They really knew how to turn up the beets!

Government reform is top on the list of Project 2026:

95% of all federal employees are hereby terminated. Pack your stuff. The remaining 5% are park rangers and the US Postal Service®. Project 2026 thought for a long time about other groups, but they all have to go. All of them. Except for the Department of the Treasury to collect tariffs and the Department of Exmigration.
The ATF’s mission will be radically changed: their new mission will be to make firearms plentiful and low cost.
The FBI headquarters will be relocated to the Swanson Motel, in Bismarck, North Dakota.
All federal employees except for the Federal Marshall Service will be disarmed, as Project 2026 realizes someone has to bring horse thieves to justice.
Project 2026 understands and values the role of education in society, and therefore will remove the greatest impediment to education: The Department of Education. All employees will be fired, and will be barred from ever working in any educational role again.

Project 2026 realizes that the United States is just one of a whole host of nations. The best one, but still just one. Here follows the changes to International Relations.

International relations, imports, all financial transactions and all telecommunications are hereby ended with India and Nigeria until they show proof that they’ve executed every scammer in the country, or turned them into valuable mulch.
Our new policy in dealing with other nations is, “Why should I care?” If any other nation contacts us for aid, our official response will be “Rub some dirt on it.”

Those guys were always cold as ice.

Project 2026 realizes a strong military is important to protecting our borders, which is all we’re going to do with it.

Every young man will be sent to bootcamp, and will continue in bootcamp until they pass or reach the age of 40. After passing bootcamp, each young man is sent home with all the weapons and ammunition they can carry, including C-4. Additionally, Project 2026 will officially rename C-4 as “serious putty”.
The bootcamps will be along the southern and northern borders of the United States, and a “free fire” zone will be established within fifty yards (six decaliters) of the border. This includes people attempting to escape Trudeauistan.
Most overseas bases will be returned to the host country, with the exception that all on-base fast-food restaurants will remain. Exceptions to this are Diego Garcia and Guantanamo, because Project 2026 finds them amusing.

This is a work in progress, so any suggestions for additions can be provided before I transmit this to President-Elect Donald Trump tonight in my dreams. I hope the cat doesn’t melt again. Such a mess. So buttery. Very disrespectful.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Date With Destiny

“You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.” – The Matrix

I heard that Epstein got a clue to the inevitable – the last guard he tried to fist-bump left him hanging.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 6

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing 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 – A Date With Destiny – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Big Fraud – 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 below) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

A Date With Destiny

Like most people, I believe that I have free will. Whether that’s true or not isn’t my call, so it’s certainly at a least a pleasurable fiction that I maintain. Free will, however, only applies to our choices, and doesn’t apply to our circumstances. Every person reading this is going to die. We pretend like that’s not the case, but I assure you it is, and there is no way to make a choice that will avoid that fate. Death is inevitable.

So, that’s one example. Another example where free will and choices don’t matter is when uncontrollable forces have been unleashed. For instance, if I drop a stripper off of the Empire State Building, there’s no way I’m not getting glitter on my shirt. It’s inevitable.

I think we’re at the same place with Civil War. It’s inevitable no matter who “wins” this election. That’s not to say that it might not be postponed for a bit, but like death and stripper glitter, it’s coming.

Why am I so cavalier in saying that? Well, it’s obvious if you look around. The things that are most likely to cause civil war are tied to what’s going on in the country. Here are your indicators:

Popular immiseration. This means that people are miserable. Inflation and declining prospects have made most young people miserable, and tortured them, to boot. Generations ago, a bright young man could support his family by being the local butcher or running the local sporting goods store. Now, he has to go to college, study, maybe get two degrees, and have his wife work to get the same lifestyle the guy selling letter jackets had.
Lower birth rates and later marriage age. I recently heard (though I don’t have a source) that when the age of first marriage exceeds 28, civil war is inevitable. Every single time. We’re at 30.
Too many elites. Just like all those young dudes are going to school for years in the hopes of being able to maybe one day buy a house, maybe, there are at the same time too many billionaires competing for power. Bloomberg, Trump, Cuban, Gates, Musk are all looking to see who can rule. There isn’t enough room for all of them, and their dissention forms the core of the leadership for civil war.
Belief that the system is fraudulent. Sure, we’ve all expected that the system is rigged, but 2020 was a slap in the face to election integrity since the very GloboLeftistElite that denounce anyone who doubts the validity of the election OPENLY BRAGGED about twisting the system in the pages of Time® magazine in 2021. I’ve heard of more election fraud before election week than in any pre-election period, ever, and don’t doubt that more is taking place behind the scenes. A fraudulent system that is brazen provides the casus belli for that civil war.
A failing economy. This ties to immiseration, but the economy has been juiced for so long with such amazing amounts of money that it is mathematically impossible to unwind without amazing amounts of pain. And pain causes . . . civil war.
Unpopular wars. Who wants to die for Ukraine? For Israel? For Taiwan? For South Korea? Yup, thought so. Yet there are rabid hawks on both sides that are willing to drag a thoroughly unwilling populace into a war they cannot win.
The fact that there have been at least two attempts on Trump’s life shows exactly how stable our society is right now.

Folks, I cannot stress this enough: this is inevitable, and only the timing is up for grabs. I’ve said before (in 2018 or 2019, I think) that 2025 was the first opening date for Civil War 2.0. I’ll stand by that, but I don’t think it’s likely. I still put the range as 2025 to 2040, with the most likely range being between 2030 to 2035. Big nations have a lot of inertia, like a train after you shut down the engine, keep going for a long time. But not forever.

Finally, this is not a wish, since I believe that everyone underestimates how gruesome this will be. I anticipate that China and Russia would gladly airdrop weapons to both sides when they’re not heading to their microwaves to make popcorn while they watch. But, just like throwing a trash bag full of vegetable soup into a jet intake, we all know what’s going to happen.

It’s destiny. Oh, and speaking of Destiny, she’s up next on stage 3.

Violence and Censorship Update

Obviously, there are things we can’t talk about openly because the consequences are too dire so that people were censored off of YouTube® for trying to report this. Until the lies break:

What happens when FEMA is on the side of the disaster?

And anyone who isn’t lawfully here?

Ahhhh, diversity. Bringing in Afghans to do killing Americans won’t do.

Trump Derangement Syndrome: It’s real.

Looks like Kamala only wants to allow certain speech. Anyone here surprised?

And NPCs on Reddit are with her:

And if Trump is Hitler®, then soon enough:

And speaking of the media, I wonder if they coordinate with the Kamala campaign?

Never forget, they have plans for you.

Biden/Harris Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, and peaking upwards as interest rates are starting to spike. Hmmm.

But not all people are miserable:

And some are too stupid to be miserable:

But people can’t afford McDonald’s anymore.

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 is up significantly, and this should be higher given that Venezuelan gangs are turning parts of US cities into no-go zones.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is down a bit.

Economic:

The economy took a huge drop – I think the hangover from all the juicing is coming.

Illegal Aliens:

The latest numbers are simply lies.

The Big Fraud

Regardless of what follows, go out and vote. It makes fraud slightly harder.

Signs of voter fraud in advance of the election are through the roof. Here are a few:

This is illegal:

Ooops, that was election fraud from the last election.

Oh, the Colorado Secretary of State (above) also left nearly all of the voting machine passwords unprotected on the Internet. But it didn’t stop Democrats from suing to keep noncitizens on the voter rolls.

There are more issues, likely into the hundreds by now. At some point it should become clear that this is a humiliation exercise meant to drive home that you have no power. They can lie and cheat to your face, and “What Timmy gonna do?”

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1844861906361909266
https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1847669300422639725
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1844125924301984148
https://x.com/TrendingEx/status/1843359191077138512
https://x.com/NoahPollak/status/1847006345662550219

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1852394961330692486
https://twitter.com/i/status/1845646215452496049
https://x.com/i/status/1850126594418815417
https://x.com/i/status/1845866508259627261
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/some-mass-shooting-survivors-want-more-good-guys-guns

ONE GUY
https://archive.is/eB7iD

BODY COUNT
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt
https://archive.is/hfs5Y
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1844839172907123183
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1849634400851341410
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2024/10/10/non-english-speaking-students-are-overwhelming-pa-schools-and-racking-up-millions-for-small-towns-data-show/

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/i/communities/1848518910653415584
https://x.com/PeterBernegger/status/1850565226690654556
https://x.com/scrowder/status/1850924883678498871
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1849977065925189699
https://catholicvote.org/millions-of-christians-religious-people-say-they-are-not-voting-in-november/
https://x.com/emmagcawood/status/1850522383863390392
https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/1850611709549146405

CIVIL WAR
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/10/22/quiet_before_the_storm_151815.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/185053/civil-war-reenactors-virginia-play-acting-expect-war
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/25/dc-residents-leaving-election-week-00185313
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13933435/MSNBC-host-claims-Trump-family-preparing-civil-war-former-president-warns-America-faces-enemy-within.html
https://slaynews.com/news/clinton-strategist-james-carville-trump-arrest-males-color-elected-calls-armed-uprising-harris-loses/
https://x.com/DrewHLive/status/1820859923787591846
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/06/firebrand-leftist-jamie-raskin-said-congress-must-disqualify-trump-predicted-civil-war-conditions/
https://tomklingenstein.com/is-the-left-preparing-for-war-if-trump-wins/
https://truthovernews.org/p/democrats-plan-for-color-revolution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/23/cold-civil-war-cultural-secession/
https://news.yahoo.com/news/hurricane-relief-workers-forced-evacuate-102606823.html
https://studyfinds.org/america-verge-of-world-war-iii/?nab=1
https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-top-3-predictions-for-post-election-america/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-trump-american-civil-war-b2634731.html

MANIFESTO
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747

More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War. This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective. And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place. So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff. In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war. Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes. And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle. To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.”

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London? If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production. At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies. We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford. We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair. Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there. And airplanes? They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those. And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British. It worked. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types. At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers. That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint: It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls. Oh, and worthless university degrees. Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers? Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq? Perhaps not. Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now: LED displays. They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace. A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States. If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted. The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made. Is 1,000 a lot? In billions of dollars, yes. In fighter planes, no. Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day. Is that a lot? Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles. If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours? Probably. But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit. How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems. Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No. Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States. And by Europe. Combined. And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse. That was a good argument, in the past. China now sells more to developing markets than to the West. When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years. China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States. Oh, strike that. Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States. When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things. This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged. Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it. But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest. I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183^rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end. It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory. We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way. This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence. Hmmm. Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south. Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?

The Last Refuge Of The Left: Tritler

“Because it’s Hitler’s harmonica. You can’t play Hitler’s harmonica.” – Rat Race

Why do we drink water? Well, because we can’t eat it.

All memes today “as-found”

Sometime in 1990, Mike Godwin came up with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

As this note indicates, this is five years before the World Wide Web made WWW a prefix that we can all now safely ignore, but Godwin pointed out what’s been happening in our society since at least 1964: anything a GloboLeftist doesn’t like is Hitler starting (I think) with Goldwater, and certainly with Nixon.

I guess Mussolini was pretty good in track in high school. They called him “the fascist guy in Italy”.

It really is an analogy that deserves to die. World War II ended (does math) over 79 years ago. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be the go-to to absolutely anyone and anything that disrupts the ability of the GloboLeftElite to do what they want. What does it mean? It means whatever the GloboLeft want it to mean.

In the last week, the GloboLeft and GloboLeftElite have launched their own Operation Tritlerossa comparing Trump with the Austrian in over 5,500 stories in one week, according to the prolific Tyler Durden over at ZeroHedge®. Now, if there’s one thing I know about Austrians today, they’re far too busy with their boomerangs and kangaroos and didgeridoos to worry about world domination.

I can attest, though, that the media is all-in on this final putsch, er, push as they have been in the past.

Yup. Finding those took about two minutes. The really funny one is that Hillary seems to forget that in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted the nomination for president in Madison Square Garden, back when Bill could still work a Bush over.

Beyond that, though, the reason for this insane analogy is that the GloboLeftElite have nothing left to attack Trump with, creating a character I call Tritler. I tried it without the “r” but that leads to weird internet search results.

Kamala cannot look to competency, because Kamala is the result of the ultimate in GloboLeftElite power plays: Obama didn’t want someone smarter than him because his ego wouldn’t allow it. Joe fit the bill perfectly. Biden didn’t want someone smarter than him because Jill wouldn’t allow it because he was insecure. Kamala was the single most unpopular candidate on the Democrat slate for the 2020 election, dropping out because she was less popular than both Bernie Sanders and gonorrhea.

Kamala left the race before a single primary vote had been cast, and in this case entered the race after the last vote had been cast. Kind of poetic for the first anchor-baby president who didn’t even bother to go to high school in the United States.

“Elections have consequences” man doesn’t understand where the division came from. Huh.

So, should she run on her record? Well, that would be, as a GloboLeft foot soldier would say, “problematic”. As far as I can see, her record has been to attend some meetings that weren’t very important and to keep out of the way.

Okay, her policies? Well, Kamala can’t articulate much beyond “I’m not Donald Trump” and what she has listed (less inflation, more houses) are more the wish list of a dim toddler who is trying to look important and smart around the adults even though she can’t quite figure out what the conversation is. I don’t know if she’s just that dim or if she’s spent her entire life in a bubble where she never had to defend a position other than describing that her favorite one was missionary.

I wonder if this is A.I.?

To be fair, Donald spent his first term doing what Donald does: trying to make deals. In some cases, that was appropriate. We don’t need a war with Kim Jong Un, and neither does South Korea. Would it be better if North Korea was free?

Sure.

That’s not the job of the United States, though. That’s the job of the North Koreans. Trump saw a way to take an isolated country under a despot and move them closer to normalized relations.

In other cases, it was inappropriate. There was a clear mandate for reduced immigration, yet the wall he built was stymied at every instance by the Democrats while Trump negotiated for a deal. Ironically, Kamala made fun of Trump in the Fox® interview for not building more of the wall.

Huh?

Once again, The Bee called it.

So, the GloboLeftElite can’t run on ideas. They can’t run on issues. They can’t run on competence. That leaves one thing: to run on hate and fear. I don’t think anyone is in particular fear of Hitler’s ghost right now, so all that leaves is that weird combination of Tritler.

The accusations are nonsensical, but, when you’re out of arguments, all that’s left is to play the Trump is Hitler card, just like Godwin noted back 35 years ago. And if you disagree? You’re just as bad as . . . Kamala?

The Competence-Free Economy, The Cargo Cult, And Control

“I’ve only been out of the United States twice. A handful of times in Mexico, and then the second time I left the country, we went to Salem, Oregon.” – Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Do you think she prefers “colored-hair person” or “person of colored hair”?

I was reading Mark’s blog over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) the other day and he had a story about a “pink-haired DEI trainer” who had managed to get the deputy head of the Oregon Department of Forestry put on administrative leave. His alleged crime?

Well, besides being a Chad that the “pink-haired” tattooed circus freak of a DEI trainer could never in a million years manage to get a glance from (she is beyond coyote ugly), his crime was that he wanted to hire “candidates most qualified for the job”.

Yes, that was his sin. He wanted to hire people who could best do the work that the taxpayers of the state of Oregon were paying them to do. I mean, Oregon has a lot of trees. They have so many trees that I hear that in order to keep track of the ones they cut down: they make their lumberjacks keep a log.

The comedian Bill Burr has a brother that’s a lumberjack. Tim.

What was the DEI circus sideshow reject’s solution instead of hiring competent people? According to the Daily Mail (and every other paper that I can find), it was to pick people via an “ ‘intersectional lens’ whereby applications from people of marginalized backgrounds are given greater weight. Since the head and shoulders shot of the DEI trainer is all we have, I’m unsure of how she could be given greater weight since I’d estimate that 400 pounds is long in her rearview mirror.

Why is a blue whale called a blue whale? It’s not fat enough to be called a diversity trainer.

Her other complaint was that a colleague made a joke that she, “puts in in a really good lunch order.” Which is somehow sexist? Because guys don’t order lunch? Maybe this person was striving to make a nice comment about a person whose job it is to be perpetually offended by everyone and everything. Oh, wait . . . .

Speaking of which: she/her was also upset that she was carved out of the regular executive meetings of the Department, but, in my view, it’s simply because absolutely no one wanted to be in a meeting where decisions about forests and trees were made with a whiney GloboLeftist who cares more about pronouns than pine. She was as necessary as Joe Biden at a Cabinet meeting.

Does my description of her sound mean to the “pink-haired” gravity well in question? Probably. But I’m not going to apologize, since it is people who say the things that she does that are ruining it for the entire world, especially her “marginalized communities.”

They wanted Samuel L. Jackson in this commercial, but they couldn’t get him to say “nature” after “mother”.

The bigger point is that to the GloboLeftist and GloboLeftistElite, there are only two possibilities on how they think about economics.

First, the GloboLeftist, the rank and file – the DEI hires and DEI trainers – think that wealth and prosperity is something that simply exists. They don’t view the world as a place where people work and strive to create that wealth and prosperity.

Instead, they view that that wealth and prosperity is their right, merely by having been born.

They have no idea where wealth comes from, and in this are like the Cargo Cults that came to their greatest prominence after World War II. This is a cult where the native population was suddenly overrun by great armies in motion across the Pacific. These armies would move in, create an airfield, and suddenly planes would appear.

What would be on the planes?

Most everything. People. Ammunition. Fuel. Guns. Food. Simply the most amazing wealth the natives had ever seen.

These people had nearly no understanding of the world outside of their island – to them the airfield was magic. The white people who built it summoned great gods from beyond that brought them amazing wealth. Then those same white people took all that wealth, which was obviously meant for the natives, and left.

Where do you punch mythical horse/man hybrids for the most effect? In the centaur of mass.

After that, these natives would build airfields, towers, bamboo airplanes, and hold mock military drills like they had seen the soldiers do.

Their expectation? That, regardless of their competence, regardless of their understanding of the way aircraft and modern commerce worked, that they would get the wealth because they deserved it. Now, they resent the white man for taking the wealth away, and spend their time building lonely airfields, waiting for the wealth to come back.

That’s the GloboLeftist:

They fundamentally hate those that have achieved more than they have, and are driven by envy, hate, and fear. Yes, this “pink-haired” monstrosity is only one species of this type of life form.

There are others. They are the type of people that if they cannot possess a thing, they want to destroy it. They revel in it. The orgy of the George Floyd riots is simply one example.

On the other hand, the GloboLeftistElite want to crash everything and really doesn’t care about competence since I assure you, Larry Fink and Bill Gates don’t hire their pilots or security staff based on intersectionality, unless one axis of that intersection is “amazingly competent.”

Kamikaze use as a weapon? Now that was a one-hit wonder.

A prosperous middle class that has a culture, tradition, and roots can stop them from doing as they please. This is dangerous to them.

How better to facilitate the end of this class, the end of broad wealth, than to encourage incompetence through nonsense like DEI? Why else would BlackRock® want to buy houses and then rent them back to the people that used to buy them? Why else would services like Übëŕ® be held at as a way that the middle class can rent a car, instead of owning one?

To the GloboLeftistElite, the assets a member of the middle class used to take as normal – a house, a car, a farm, a business – are assets that they want to buy, own, and use so that no aspect of a life in the United States (or anywhere else they control) isn’t subject to a cut off the top for them. They really don’t care if you live in a pod, as long as you pay your cut to the house.

So, we have two goals that are being followed by two groups. The first group, the GloboLeft, consists of AntiFa®, the “pink-haired” activists, the kindergarten teachers that just can’t wait to teach children about pronouns and gay sex, and their hangers-on. Why are they in it? As we’ve discussed again and again, they hate what the world has done to them, they feel powerless, and by destroying the system, by making it as ugly and incompetent as they are, they get power.

The second group is the GloboLeftElite. The GloboLeftElite loves, loves the GloboLeftists because they’re the willing footsoldiers that take common, hardworking men of competence and force them to hire people based on their particular fetish, mental condition, or other random factor. The GloboLeftElite is pushing these people into organizations everywhere, so they can defang the last opposition to them: the middle class. Those 17,000 jobs that Boeing® just lost?

DEI, baby.

I hear that 25% of the crew was named Juan. I guess that’s a three to Juan ratio.

I think the Department of Forestry Chad will be fine, since, well, he’s a Chad. And, he’s on paid leave right now, which is a vacation. I’m sure he’s got some pension vesting, and I’d be willing to bet he could get a job in a variety of states that don’t take the word of “pink-haired” DEI trainers who are offended when people are hired based on their competence.

And, if Oregon persists in DEI hires Forestry Chad will want to move out of the state, soon enough the forests will be deserts. Won’t that be diverse!