Failing Justice: Vigilante In Indiana . . .

“Five hundred and twenty-seven counts of obstruction of justice.” – The Dark Knight

Behold, the American justice system!  (All memes as-found today)

One of the most important requirements to have a functional society is the law.  This is backed by historical evidence.  One of the earliest known fragments of a legal system is the Code of Ur-Nammu.  Ur-Nammu is the name of the king who wrote the laws, and the name of the country he ruled was Ur, which must have been quite a happy coincidence for King Ur-Nammu.

The kingdom of Ur was bordered on the north by Um, on the south by Uh, and on the west by Like.  On the east was the kingdom of Carpetia, who, from their capital of Deepshag, specialized in creating high-quality fabric floor coverings.  But that is another story.

This, though, was at least 4100 years ago.  It illustrates a very simple truth:  when people live together, they have to have laws and punishment or there will be chaos.  Anyone who ever had a roommate or an ex-spouse can vouch for me on that one.

Thankfully, federal judges have jurisdiction in interstellar space.

The law is a very simple premise:  in exchange for the promise of fairness, the individual gives up the natural rights of vengeance and retribution.  This is crucial.  Without law, if Britney Spears borrows $20 to buy a McChicken™ sandwich at 3am and then doesn’t pay me back, I could drive to her house and kidnap her pet ocelot until she repaid me.  I know, I know, that sounds oddly specific, but there are some stories I just won’t get into.

Instead, I can sue Britney Spears in court, and if all of the facts are properly judged, that McChicken®-eating soulless tart will give me back that $20.  Or, maybe, I lost that IOU she signed on the back of my travel copy of the Magna Carta and the judge says, “Insufficient evidence” and frog marches us both out of court.

As long as everyone feels the system is fair, life is good.  But when people sense that fairness is gone, they’ll take matters into their own hands.  This is scary, because it leads to a series of endless reciprocal atrocities.  Another word for this is Chicago.  Or Mogadishu.  Or El Salvador.

Still waiting, Pam.

The people in those locations don’t believe in the law.  Those wandering around killing don’t want cops, obviously.  But most of the people that they kill don’t want cops, either, since they’re killing as well.  The bystanders and clueless non-violent civilians who wander into the games would like law, but it often doesn’t matter.

The punishments are rare, and when they finally hit, aren’t a sufficient deterrent to others going out to break yet more crimes.  Part of the reason is that most of these criminals are really stupid.  I don’t mean that euphemistically – they’re stupid.  Low IQ correlates with high crime.  The stupider they are, the more likely they are to kill.

There are many reasons for that, from inability to plan, to the inability to understand a conditional hypothetical (“How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast, Jamal?”  “But I did have breakfast.”), to the inability to think that their actions might have consequences.

Amazing how opposition to Trump will make the GloboLeft contort themselves.

No, for the law to work on stupid people, the punishment must be swift, severe, and certain.  Our current justice system is none of these.  Cases last for years, most crimes are dealt with by being dismissed or through a plea to a far lesser offences, and Soros D.A.s frequently drop the charges on rapists and murderers.

If that isn’t bad enough – juries are tribal.  The first big case I saw that confirmed this was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

It’s pretty obvious that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife.  This is a non-ideological question.  But it is not a non-racial question.  Why was he found not guilty?  It was because he was black and killed a white woman.  The black jurors certainly weren’t going to convict him.

Do we think a black juror will vote to convict Karmello Anthony?  Or that a pliable D.A. won’t give him a sweetheart plea deal so he can do two years in the slam and then be out?  That leads to a loss of faith in the system.

What happens when we lose faith in the justice system?  Well, in Indiana, one great-grandfather lost faith in the system.  65-year-old Mark Vawter was waiting, likely, to shoot and kill one S’Doni Pettis.

Why would a great-grandfather want to do that?  Because Mr. Pettis had, while (allegedly) with drugs and while being chased by police, Mr. Pettis had driven a car at great speed into an innocent bystander’s car causing it to burst into flame.  Inside?  Mr. Vawter’s 3-year-old and 2-month-old great-grandchildren.  Mr. Vawter probably had seen that Mr. Pettis was charged with 3 counts of a level 3 felony.  In Indiana, that could put him out on the streets again in less than three years.

And Mr. Vawter had probably learned that Mr. Pettis had already been charged with an attempted murder, but the case was plea-bargained down to an aggravated battery.  He went to jail, and . . .

Pettis was likely let out early.

Mr. Vawter calculated that the system would probably fail again, and decided to take matters into his own hands.  Vawter waited with a pistol, and drew it when the prison van doors opened.  What Vawter didn’t know was that Pettis wasn’t on the van – his hearing had been postponed.

Vawter was shot by the police.

Vigilantism is something that has been feared by governments for more than 4,000 years.  When individuals feel that they have no choice but to enforce justice themselves, you have the chaos of gang warfare.

But thankfully in the UK, you know the justice system is working, and people will get longer sentences than Mr. Pettis for speaking their minds . . .

The justice system is important, and it’s failing.  There will be consequences.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about.  One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs.  They never existed, and never will exist.  This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that?  Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

  • People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
  • To fake that the company is growing,
  • Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
  • To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
  • Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
  • Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged:  often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”.  It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place.  My second job?  Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school.  When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role.  I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size?  The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much.  The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible.  Many corporations only take job applications online.  And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow.  When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty.  These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications.  In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit.  So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.”  (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys.  In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote:  freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job.  Men need a purpose.  They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen.  Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable.  They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable.  Not the Elon Musks.  Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966.  Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy.  Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth.  (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful.  There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple:  never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal?  No, that’s shut down.  Maybe they should become journalists?  Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced.  The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough.  But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Lawfare And The New Battle of Shiloh

“Czervik Construction Company? I’ll slap an injunction on them so fast it will make their heads spin.” – Caddyshack

The judge allowed my injunction against Folgers™, saying I had grounds to sue.

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

Volume VI, Issue 12

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I kept the Clock O’Doom at 7., but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up. Racial tension is exceptionally high now, and can lead to violence in a heartbeat. Beware: it can climb 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 – Lawfare – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Long, Hot Summer – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 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.

Lawfare

When last I checked, Donald Trump was elected in November. Yup, everyone still agrees with that. But it doesn’t sit well with some people, especially the GloboLeft rank and file. It does create a Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that keeps them from thinking logically.

To keep them triggered, Trump’s team has released a never-ending barrage of executive orders and clarifications. This has resulted in them taking patently indefensible positions: a United States senator flew down to talk to a violent (likely) gang member deported to his own country because he was never in the United States legally. Wonder how that plays with the constituents who actually have never illegally invaded a country and beaten women?

Regardless, the GloboLeft has a strategy.

When they couldn’t achieve something that was a goal because they lacked the political power to do so, what did they resort to?

Lawfare. They used legal tactics and ideologically sympathetic judges to file lawsuits.

Why did the GloboLeft NGOs file a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. when the guy who was going to be deported was in Texas? Because they knew they could get an ideologically compliant judge who would do whatever the GloboLeft wanted. And judges face no consequences for this.

None. They can behave in unconstitutionally behavior as much as they want, with no fear because the only significant punishment would be via impeachment, and that won’t happen with a nearly split Senate. So, if they want to walk around wearing nothing but nipple rings and quoting Marx while covered in red paint?

Sure, buddy, go ahead. No one will ever be able to do anything about it. And until that order is overturned, illegals are a one-way rachet: millions can come in under Biden, but only thousands can be kicked out under Trump.

Likewise, Biden deem every conceivable sexual fetish as fit for service in the military for the first time in the history of the nation, but Trump can’t kick them out. In excess of 225 lawsuits have been filed against Trump, and at this point, 70 have resulted in injunctions blocking them from taking effect.

This is a delaying action, since most of the lawsuits seem to be pushing back against the inherent powers of the president – who has in many cases powers that are unreviewable, such as his ability to proclaim emergencies under the Alien Enemies Act.

Why didn’t the TradRight do that to Biden? First, the TradRight is not nearly as organized as the GloboLeft, except for when it comes to gun rights. Second, many of the TradRightElite want exactly what the GloboLeftElite want, just a few years later.

The next phase, should the Republicans not do well in the midterm elections, will be infinity impeachments for, well, whatever. Because they don’t like the results from . . . “Their democracy.”

Violence and Censorship Update

The biggest story is easily Karmelo Anthony’s admitted murder of Austin Metcalf. Is this related to a Civil War? Certainly. The racial tensions are now exceptionally high, as it becomes clear that the vast majority of black people are supporting the admitted knife stabbing youth. Why? Because he killed a white kid.

White people have noticed, and we’ll talk more about the 2025 Battle of Shiloh below.

How bad is TDS? It apparently caused a kid to kill his parents so that he could assassinate Trump.

Oh, and a socialist pro-Palestinian tried to kill the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania.

And if you cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage to a car, you can get away and face no charges. If the cars are Teslas™.

And when it comes to censorship, how much did it take to convince people that two dudes are the same as two women?

The UK won’t draft foreigners, and instead just let actual English people be drafted to fight and die.

Oh, and so will we.

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new Trump administration. Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

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 indicators in are flat this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it shot up this month.

Economic:

The economy is down a bit this month, as I expected last month. Next month? Probably will look up a bit.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since the Weather Report started.

The Long, Hot Summer

I get the feeling that we are in a significant danger zone – not necessarily for full-blown Civil War 2.0, but that precursor violence that will eventually lead to Civil War 2.0. I think, perhaps, we’ll have a near-term peak in violence this summer.

The elements are, in fact, in place. Karmello Anthony admits he stabbed Austin Metcalf. For no particular reason that would justify deadly force. The result? Blacks (predominately) donate over half-a-million dollars to him for legal defense for admittedly slamming a knife into the heart of another human. The comments, though, on this donation campaign are overwhelmingly for the murder of white people. I assume that these were black people making those comments.

Going back to Scott Adams, he noted that “If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people . . . that’s a hate group.” Just noting that led to Adams being excommunicated from the Church of the Politically Correct. He lost all income from his books as they were pulled from publication, all income from his widely syndicated comic strip, and, for one year all income from his annual calendar.

He’s publishing the calendar again. And I don’t feel bad for Scott, because I’m betting he’s sitting on millions that he’ll never spend even he got a dozen poodles and fed them all bigfoot filet roasted over Moon rocks every day.

But Americans are done with it. When a white, blonde woman uttered the Gamer Word at a Somalian alien (who had been charged with rape on a 15-year-old) and at a kid who had been allegedly stealing from her child’s toys. She had had enough.

And so, apparently have a large number of other (presumably white) people who haven’t canceled her. It’s hard to cancel a stay-at-home mom, but it’s even harder for a stay-at-home mom to make $600,000 over two days, which Shiloh has on her Give Send Go™, the same platform that Karmello is making money on.

This is driving black people insane with anger. I don’t get it – she said a word and didn’t stab the kid in the heart. And that kid has heard that word a dozen times a day.

No, the reason that this is driving black people crazy is that the taboo is over. The giving infinity second chances is over. The constantly asking, “Why are they more violent?” rather than “What do we do about the violence?” is over. Their well of good will is exhausted.

This is a blood pressure cuff on the zeitgeist of racial relations in the country, and it’s showing that the pressure is high. Rodney King high? George Floyd high?

We’ll see. Keep your head on a swivel, and don’t relax.

LINKS

LINK

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1919041214222860394
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14608197/Bloodthirsty-migrant-gangs-evil-power-drill-torture-terrified-woman-2-000-miles-border-shows-no-American-safe.html
https://x.com/fox5dc/status/1909962300208931185
https://x.com/ExxAlerts/status/1912920385567285713
https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1918845478403260462

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1910338385681535341
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1910012146651459605?t=70s

ONE GUY

https://www.thetrace.org/2025/04/maurice-byrd-self-defense-acquittal-race/

BODY COUNT

https://archive.is/2fGiq
https://archive.is/UgeN4
https://archive.is/IdWmI
https://www.newsweek.com/2025/04/18/birth-fertility-rates-millennials-gen-z-marriage-relationships-2034965.html
https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/drugged-into-oblivion-more-than-60-percent-of-u-s-adults-admit-that-they-are-taking-pharmaceutical-drugs/
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1908665989627019373

VOTE COUNT

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/04/14/democrats-are-furious-as-arizona-moves-to-remove-50k-non-citizens-from-voter-rolls-n4938873
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/14/north-carolina-supreme-court-allows-60k-votes-lacking-id-to-count-in-high-court-race/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/04/10/repub/house-passes-bill-targeting-voting-noncitizens/

CIVIL WAR

https://archive.is/RV3C4#selection-513.0-517.147
https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/austin-metcalf-and-the-endless-race
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/former-state-department-official-warns-deep-states-undeclared-second-cold-war-against
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/07/the-american-jacobin-how-some-on-the-left-have-found-release-in-an-age-of-rage/
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/07/survey-55-of-self-identified-leftists-say-killing-trump-is-justifiable/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/majority-americans-left-say-murdering-trump-justified-new-poll-finds
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/tactics-to-survive-dictatorship-secession-enters-the-conversation/
https://insideinvestigator.org/secession-could-connecticut-become-a-new-canadian-province/

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight.  I’m sure you’re shocked.  I’m out travelling.  Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing.  When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income.  The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it.  Was it a nice house?  Sure.  But not that nice.  Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad.  The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place.  Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit.  The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff.  The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment.  What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California.  Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego.  Rent?  $3000 to $4000.  A month.  But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation:  my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™.  Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave.  Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes.  A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™.  Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal:  to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan:  You’ll own nothing, and like it™.  Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check.  Wait.  It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem.  Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying?  “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand.  There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything.  In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations.  The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly.  I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record.  “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas.  My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month.  That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect:  lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men.  Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it.  Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?

Misplaced Empathy: It’s Killing Us

“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner

An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.

Empathy.

I first heard that word when I was five.  I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes.  Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”

That’s supposed to be good, right?  We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.

Empathy really is part of what makes us human.  Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling.  And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel.  Like asleep.  Or perspiring.  Or sticky.  You know, emotions.

Empathy is important.

If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?

But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world.  One example are the transgender people.  I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019.  He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.

Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited.  He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir.  Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe.  He called the dude, “sir.”

I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.

While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself.  Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long.  Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.

You want to play pretend?  Fine.  Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade.  And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.

We also show empathy for the wrong things.  Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?

You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.

Rose.  She was the villain.  She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean.   This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren.  But no.

Everything is about her.

The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her?  Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him.  No.  She’s awful.  But she’s not alone.  Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.

And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.

The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher.  But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.

Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.

Kirk couldn’t sing, though.  He had trouble with trebles.

You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.

And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.

We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.

There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting.  Who cares what other people think of your lunch?  Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?

As found.

This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels.  Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.

It’s misplaced empathy.

This also has implications with race.  People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination.  Now?  Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.

This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare.  Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms.  The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.

Enough is enough.  Empathy is not a blank check.

The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.

That’s good.  After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Just How Close Are We?

“I don’t know if it’s the ‘on’ button or the ‘zoom’ button.” – Cloverfield

Donald Trump says the United States has the “best debt.  It’s outstanding!”

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

Volume VI, Issue 11

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I kept the Clock O’Doom at 7., but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up.  If things keep on an even keel until June, I’ll notch it down to 6.  Beware: it can climb 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 – Taking A Step Back – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – A Big Mistake – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 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.

Taking A Step Back

It’s always good to take a step back, zoom out, and see what other opinions are out there.  So, I asked Grok™ what it thought the odds were for a Civil War before 2040.  There are two versions of Grok™ I consulted:  one that I just opened, and one that I’ve been working with for a while.

The “new” version felt there was a 10%-25% chance of Civil War in the United States, and pegged the most likely year as 2028, though it indicated 2032 and 2036 were also possible years.

The one I’ve been working with gave me a much different answer, however, of 55% by 2040, with the most likely year of 2036.  Factors that it felt were biggest:

  • Debt hits a peak,
  • the dollar crashes,
  • popular immiseration crests in 2032-2035,
  • 20 million jobs are lost as A.I. tears into the economy,
  • energy costs increase due to shortages,
  • polarization explodes,
  • and ethnic trust bottoms out because of immigration.

Obviously, there are not certainties, but the more the model includes, the larger the probability seems.  Both models pick presidential election years, since that is when political tension peaks.

Many of these factors identified are included in the information that feeds the graphs below, so it looks like we’re close to measuring the right things.  I’ll be tuning a couple of them in the next few months so they better reflect 2025, though I don’t imagine that the “output” will change a lot.

Again, I still think a Civil War is coming, but I think we’re a few years into the future for the period of greatest danger.  Of courses, if something crazy like a coup happened, all bets are off.

What’s your take?

Violence and Censorship Update

There have been multiple SWAT raids against homes of conservative media figures based on false reports of violent crimes by GloboLeftists.  I’ve seen over a half-dozen reports, including talk show host Joe Pagliarulo (Joe Pags).  These can turn deadly, and FBI head Kash Patel indicates he’s taking these seriously.

Speaking of deadly, InfoWars™ writer Jamie White was shot dead when he interrupted “thieves” trying to steal his car.   They still haven’t been caught.  Hmmm.

One of the best things about our current timeline is that we’ve managed to get GloboLeftists to key cars owned by other GloboLeftists.  But they’ve also set Tesla™ showrooms on fire, not realizing this makes an insurance company give Elon Musk money to replace the burnt cars.

What was being hidden at USAID?

Okay, it’s literally the lamest act of violence ever, but it’s probably no accident that Trump got blipped in the face with a microphone:

Is Chuck advocating violence?  Looks like.

Now we travel to Blighty, and see how bad it can get if a populace won’t fight back:

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new administration.  Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers, but I’ll wait a month or two longer before I post them.  But remember how they’ll tell you that good news is bad news:

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 indicators in are down again this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it is unchanged this month.

Economic:

The economy is stable to slightly up this month, but I expect things to head south, soon.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since the Weather Report started.

A Big Mistake

For stability, the economy has to have jobs for young men, especially bright young men.  One way that this has been abused over the years has been though the importation of H-1B labor.  I’ve written about that before, but especially now as we’re entering a recession, it needs to be brought up again.  One would argue that coding (a primary consumer of H-1B labor) has been in a recession:  there are more people who know how to code than available jobs.

So, what to do?  How about just fire Americans and move all the work over to India?

Yes, this is the strategy.  Indians in the United States apparently want too much money, so Indians in charge send the jobs back to India.  Even in the United States, anecdotally, Indians primarily hire Indians, regardless of their qualifications, even if they scam each other.

Don’t worry about the Indians that stay in the United States – they qualify for free money that white people can’t get, and there’s a special bank in Texas owned by an Indian that only loans money to Indians so they can by Kquiki Marts and Motel 4™ franchises.

And there’s no danger at all from the great number of intelligent, young, unmarried white men with nothing to lose.

But don’t worry since multicultural societies are the most stable, right?

Oh, wait.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/adamfrancisco_/status/1908036036141199835
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1905407467929895024
https://x.com/_Pr_i_me_/status/1905596558281707579
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1905298482174239165
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1906189087125520704

GOOD GUYS

https://www.heritage.org/gun-rights/commentary/12-defensive-gun-uses-show-armed-citizens-make-communities-safer
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/black-gun-clubs-naaga
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/defensive-firearm-use-far-less-common-exposure-gun-violence

ONE GUY

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/03/13/indiana-supreme-court-rules-indianapolis-man-self-defense-shooting/82331664007/

BODY COUNT

https://x.com/Rust_And_Decay/status/1902524720303554581/photo/1
https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1907920675953848800
https://vpc.org/press/more-than-2500-non-self-defense-deaths-involving-concealed-carry-killers-since-2007-latest-violence-policy-center-research-shows-2/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/geofenced-every-event-democrats-caught-staging-another-inorganic-color-revolution
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/american-women-are-giving-up-on-marriage-54840971
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2025-03-17_10-44-19.png?itok=60nZ88e3
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/rcna196809
https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/02/can-we-fix-our-demographic-doom-loop/

VOTE COUNT

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/25/trump-executive-order-voter-id/82657485007/
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/03/nx-s1-5351751/voting-executive-order-lawsuit
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2025-03-31_09-18-31.png?itok=L7NEqE8n

CIVIL WAR

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/civil-war-mark-twain-fiction-trump-reality-excerpt
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14563453/donald-trump-allies-maga-anna-paulina-luna-president-agenda.html
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5227919-alec-baldwin-us-pre-civil-war-culture-trump/
https://newrepublic.com/article/192806/schumer-democrats-civil-war-trump-musk
https://www.newsweek.com/maxine-waters-civil-war-warning-donald-trump-2044857
https://nypost.com/2025/03/26/opinion/in-democrats-looming-civil-war-one-side-is-already-doomed/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/03/civil-war-is-coming-to-britain/

It came from . . . 1993

“I’m your huckleberry.” – Tombstone

I have no idea who half the people in the picture are, but, hey, the logo rocks.

1993 continues the descent from the 1980s and Peak Movie, but as comedy fell, action movies continued to produce fun films. What did become more pronounced was the dismal “woke” viewpoint as shown in Falling Down.

As usual, there are no sequels on the list, though in 1993 there were 13 major releases that were sequels. In 2013, there were 33. In 1973, there were just five.

Let’s start with a movie that you can sink your teeth into:

I guess rugby players really will eat anything, but why didn’t they eat all those darn cats before carving up Carlo?

Alive – Not the best movie to take a date to if you’re planning on having dinner afterwards, this straight-forward tale of the rugby team stuck in the Andes when their plane crashes nevertheless nourish the soul with the feeling that people of taste will always be tender friends. When I left the theater, I felt so full . . . of life. In reality, most of the survivors were outrageously successful, since life had already thrown the biggest hurdle that it could at them and they came away satisfied. Note: although they were from pretty rich families, but, hey, they turned out to be salty guys in a savory story.

If this movie were about lawncare, that poster would be perfect.

Hexed – I first saw this on a video I rented from Blockbuster™. It didn’t have a big budget, and it lived up to it. In a sense, this is a throwback to an 80s comedy with a bit of Fatal Attraction thrown in for good measure. Is it a good movie that I would recommend? No. Is it a footnote of a fading genre? Yes. Bonus points: Claudia Christian’s body double is naked.

I told Grok® to have Tom Berenger eating crayons, but Grok™ told me he played a Marine, so that would be redundant.

SniperSniper inspired 10, yes 10 sequels. It is an action film where Tom Berenger and Billy Zane play snipers wandering around South America shooting people. It’s decent action, and, obviously cheap enough to make that all of the sequels were profitable.

Now hear me out, every character except Murray is a groundhog.

Groundhog Day – This movie is about the invasion of giant, sentient, robotic groundhogs that just want to burrow and take over humanity, but are instead frightened when they see their shadow . . . from an atomic explosion. Just kidding. You know this one, the best romcom of all time (with the exception of Sniper Six, The Unsnipable). ‘nuff said.

Okay, Antonio Banderas wasn’t in the movie, but Grok® made the poster like this, and I loved it.

El Mariachi – Shot on a $7,000 budget in 14 days (from money raised by being a lab rat for experimental drug testing) El Mariachi is pretty good, and I was really surprised by it when I saw it on VHS back in the day. A tale of violent Mexican crime, you can now save your theater dollars and just watch the news from Los Angeles.

This would probably have been a more positive movie.

Falling Down – Where to start on this one? First, it’s probably the most prophetic movie on the list. Micheal Douglas plays a disgruntled, unemployed engineer whose wife got bored and divorced him. In short, he’s a person that society has passed by and from his perspective, the world is dystopian, so why not blow it all up? The parallel character in the film is the cop chasing the engineer, played by Robert Duvall. In one scene we see that the cop is retiring, and that he is being (not so subtly) replaced by a Hispanic. And, I think that (less than secretly) the director, Joel Schumacher (a gay GloboLeftist) was enjoying the torture of the Douglas character as he watched the world he grew up in implode. I wrote the preceding before I found this quote from the author: “The main character represents the old power structure of the of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost.” So, yeah, nailed it.

Turns out the Roadrunner™ was trying to knock over the Fed®.

Cliffhanger – Whew, that last one was dark. This one, not so much. While the 1990s may have killed the comedy, the action film was still going strong. The move stars Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, some other people, and a mountain. Guns? Yes. Climbing? Yes. Tension? Well, we know the good guy is going to win, so, not so much. A fun ride.

Is Jurassic Pork the bacon I’ve left in the fridge that scientists brought back to life because they could, but never asked if they should?

Jurassic Park – This was Spielberg at, perhaps, his best. It was the number one hit of the year, and ended up on every lunchbox, video game, comic book, t-shirt, and tattoo in 1993. It was also the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic ruined James Cameron for us. Everything came together in this one – the music, the cast, the story, the special effects, all perfect for the time and place. Sadly, they never made a sequel.

Back, and to the left. And then the PEZ™ comes out!

In the Line of Fire – Again, action movies were pretty strong in 1993, and Clint Eastwood taking on an evil genius assassin played John Malkovich is a pretty good story. Dylan McDermott Mulrooney is also in it. Okay, I know that Dylan McDermott and McDermott Mulrooney are supposed to be two different people, but, really, have you ever seen them together?

I was wondering how to get this joke into the post, and Grok™ did it for me.

So I Married an Axe Murderer – Before Michael Myers was shagging spies, there was this lighthearted movie about a woman whose romantic interests keep being murdered. Hint to everyone: this does not indicate the basis for a stable relationship, since that’s a 10 on the hot/crazy matrix, she’d have to be a 10.

So, it looks like the acid made them all Salvador Dali.

Dazed and Confused – Nostalgia for the relatively free-range days of the 1970s had already hit the people having kids in 1993, or so the producers hoped. This movie was made for late-stage Boomer/early-stage Gen X kids who didn’t go to see it, since it was a box office bomb that has sent become a cult favorite after the careers of so many actors that were in it took off. Watch this right after Falling Down as a palate cleanser. Or, that might make it worse, seeing what we’ve lost.

I tried to make Grok® do Sandra Bullock in a swimsuit, but that was a massive failure.

Demolition Man – I love stupid action movies. This is set in the distant future of 2032 where woke culture has taken over and no one has sex anymore. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes were frozen during this time so that the plot can happen, as two barbarians from the 1990s make fun of woke culture.

No one is doubting that fire.

Mrs. Doubtfire – Is it predictive programming to try to shove strong, independent women plus crossdressing in the same movie? I did not like this movie even though I’ve found several of Robin Williams’ movies to be okay, but the divorce theme soured the whole plot for me. Apparently, I was alone, since this was the second-highest grossing movie of 1993.

Okay, at this point, Grok© would only draw Mrs. Doubtfire. So? I went with it.

TombstoneTombstone was on the list even before I had heard Val Kilmer had died, and he really had the best performance in this popular movie. I still rank this as my third-favorite Kilmer role, behind his roles in Top Secret! And Willow. Tombstone, though was a solid Hollywood western.

As we move along, comedy is obviously dying out though one of the greatest is on this list with Groundhog Day, but action movies are doing okay, even if they’re becoming a bit more comic book and less Dirty Harry each year.

But I’ll always remember the wisdom I learned from Alive: the more you eat, the lonelier you get.

What did I miss?

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole.  I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union.  As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination.  In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing?  They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way.  They had the institutions:  colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose.  They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power.  Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor.  How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks.  The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found) 

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves.  This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof?  Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

  • Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
  • Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it.   Yay death!
  • Wanting to have Zero Population Growth©, at least in white populations living in traditionally white countries.
  • Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
  • Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first.  This happens in roughly this order:

  • Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
  • Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
  • Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
  • Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
  • Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
  • Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal?  What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies.  The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see.  Men are women?  Truth is a lie?  Strength is weakness?  Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either.  They’re currently working on “messaging”.  What is messaging?  It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong.  The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them.  The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

  • Men are no different than women,
  • Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
  • Being a woman is something anyone can be,
  • Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
  • The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change.  One of those changes has and will be in economics.  I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight?  Certainly, it will.  But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist?  If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society.  Ha!  Just kidding.  They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested.  DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is.  And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland?  You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated:  the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon.  No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit.  The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything.  Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

  • Ukraine versus Russia.
  • Palestine versus Israel.
  • Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
  • Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant.   I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion:  I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me.  And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it.  News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion.  Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details.  I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy:  what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary:  if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away?  Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really.  And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them.  I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board.  It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe.  People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game.  But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares.  In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased.  Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral.  I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity.  Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders.  Just not our borders.  Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction?   Not a problem.

Oh, Europe.  I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians.  And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go.  If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about.  The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century.  Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin.  Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic.  I guess I can see that.  Ma Wilder cared what I thought.  Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him.  Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador.  Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much.  Why?  The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right.  When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first.  And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

2025 Predictions

“They took one of the rods out of the orb, and it gave me the strength of a dozen men.” – The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Or should that picture Ray Orb-ison?

Having broken the seal on the pondering orb I got for Christmas, I decided to give it a go and provide my best predictions for events that will occur in 2025, month by month.  Any errors are the problem of the orb, and anything accurate is purely by mistake

January:

Donald Trump is inaugurated in Washington, D.C., while dressed as an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh.  Immediately, Democrats file for impeachment.  AOC explains why:  “We think he’s running a pyramid scheme.”

Barron Trump is studying plumbing fixture design in college – I guess this makes him a pharaoh faucet major.

February:

In honor of the third anniversary of the three-day military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky decide to open a series of dinner-theaters in the Czech Republic called “Put In on the Zitz” and thus averting World War III.  Germany becomes despondent, having planned on finally not getting picked last in a world war.

March:

WilderA.I.© announces a brand new A.I. that has achieved human-level self awareness, called Jimothy.  In order to prove a point, Jimothy wins a court case where he is judged, “much more human than a toaster, and can solve all sorts of quantum physics problems and stuff.”  Jimothy then applies to get an H-1B visa, but it is told it has to get in line behind 1.4 billion Indians that don’t like India.

Should I say sari about that last meme?

April:

Clarence Thomas replaces 90% of his body with machine parts, declares himself immortal and will only be addressed by the term, “RoboJudge, the Robed Wonder”.  He then displays a specially crafted gavel that shoots lightning into the eyes of lawyers who make arguments against the Second Amendment.  The gavel is only activated when Thomas says, “Infringe this, bitches!”

If Clarence Thomas was a Transformer™ instead of RoboJudge, would his name be Stoptimus Crime?

May:

Unable to contain himself any longer, Gavin Newsom expresses his undying love for Kim’s techniques in controlling Best Korea’s population.  They elope to Acapulco and are married in front of a mariachi band.

Will Kim Jong Un be followed by Kim Jong Deux?

June:

Facemasks again reappear as the “pentademic” of Duck Flu, Monkey Flu, Kitten Flu, Hamburger Flu, and Kung Flu appears.  People are most afraid of the Kung Flu, and flee the big cities, but the Kitten Flu supercharges the feline metabolism, increasing their speed by a factor of five.  I guess you could say that everyone was Kung Flu flighting, and that those cats were fast as lightning.  Fauci recommends everyone inject mRNA in their eyes.  Because.

Fauci found out he was allergic to cats, or perhaps he undercooked it.

July:

The month of July is cancelled as being “too damn hot” and is renamed “Second December” by climate activists that begin gluing themselves to Alec Baldwin’s face.  Greta Thunberg becomes concerned about Calendar Change and demands greater fossil fuel usage so that Second December doesn’t get in the way of her tanning sessions.

Greta has slowed electricity usage.  Every time she’s on TV I turn it off.

August:

Netflix™ releases a drama called the 6 Triple 9 about a group of gay, black, trans, disabled soldiers that saved World War II by putting salt packets in Army rations bound for the European theater so that the soldiers could season their food before being blown up.  “These are the real heroes of the war,” said Netflix© president Rachel Levine.  In a surprise move, all of the characters are played by white body builders covered in oil.

September:

Joe Biden announces that he’s finally gotten the Russians to agree to a peace deal with the Ukrainians.  Unfortunately, the negotiations were between his cat, Mr. Buttons, and his stuffed rabbit, Don Julio rather than Putin and Zelensky.

“Of course, you realize, um, that this means, what’s the thing, PEZ® in our time.”

October:

A UFO lands on the street in front of the most powerful institution in the world.  When the Federal Reserve® opens the doors, they end up buying the UFO and selling shares in the alien home planet to BlackRock©, who immediately begins importing illegal aliens to the actual aliens so the aliens can have someone to do the work that their genetically engineered slave species won’t.

Wait until he reads the fine print.

November:

Vivek Ramaswami loses his fortune after Elon pranks him into investing into FartCoin®.  He’s forced to work as a cashier at the local convenience store, doing the job that Americans won’t do.

The prom king and queen are buying beer because there’s no punch line.

December:

In a surprise move, Elon Musk lands on Mars with his latest spaceship, Musk One.  He took along as companions a crew entirely composed of Elon Musk clones.  He’s planning on eating a new food, Melon Musk, and has even made a female clone, Shelon Musk.  He’ll defend his colony with an Elon Muskett.

He’ll either go down in history as the colonizer of Mars, or the most creative serial killer in history.