Elon Musk Week – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

D.O.G.E.: Our Last Chance

“And suddenly, I realize that all of this, the gun the bombs, the revolution – has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” – Fight Club

Elon Musk wants to send millions of people to Mars. He’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

I fully believe that the biggest impact of Trump’s re-election is D.O.G.E.

I’ve long (at least 8 years) publicly maintained that the United States is due to end in its present form. My earliest time for this to happen is 2025, and the latest I’d expect it to come is around 2040. The three most likely candidates for the resulting body have been:

An American Caesar
A Civil War
Peaceful Balkanization

There are many different reasons I believe this is likely still inevitable. The cultural split is deep. The financial imbalances and utter lack of control of spending is immense. The diversity we’re supposed to “tolerate” is nothing but division.

It’s really clear to see – the forest really is made up of trees. And our forest is on fire. How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

However.

D.O.G.E. is here.

What is D.O.G.E.? It’s the Department of Government Efficiency. In characteristic humor, Elon has selected one of the funniest memes of the 2010s for one of the most serious jobs of the 2020s. I don’t go into depth on the origin of Doge, but the first time I saw Doge was on this poster:

Would a missing poster for Schrödinger’s cat say it would pay extra if he was found dead and alive?

D.O.G.E. is important. It’s a shot across the bow of the managerial state. During this election cycle, someone (I don’t have a reference as to whose idea this was) noted that when the GloboLeft said “our democracy” they were really referring to “our bureaucracy”. This is an amazingly astute observation.

How can the GloboLeft whine and complain that democracy somehow failed when they lost the election and the popular vote? Because their faith isn’t in the electorate, and they feel nothing but contempt for more than half of the voters. I’m okay with that, since as long as they keep playing the game that way, we win.

But the managerial state has been growing in the United States since (more or less) Woodrow Wilson. The idea came with the money from the income tax – the United States Government was a thing to be administered, as were the people. As most people in the country and as most administrators were explicitly Christian, at least something was holding them back.

Now?

Not at all. The managerial state exists to grow the number of managers. The tragedy in Waco was almost entirely due to the ATF attempting to create a nice big sexy raid right before budget time to show how important that they were and justify their need for more money and more employees. The managerial state exists for itself.

How do you stop a Department of Education that doesn’t educate anyone, or a Department of Energy that has never produced any energy?

D.O.G.E.

I hope they get badges and walk into the FBI and yell, “Respect my authoritayyyyyy!” This would be followed up by, “So, what would you say it is that you do here, Special Agent Johnson?”

D.O.G.E. is set up to make government more efficient. When Musk bought Twitter®, he eventually fired about 80% of the employees and ended up with a company that was focused on the product, rather than on hiring more employees.

In September of 2023, there were about 3 million federal government employees. Eliminating about 2.4 million of them would be a good start, but it’s far from enough. The crazy spending that those government employees enable is over $6 trillion dollars per year.

Much of this money is money that comes from the people and companies that live in a state that is sent to the fed.gov and then recycled back to the states. How does that add value? Not sure, but it does increase the power of the federal managerial state, so they’re for it.

D.O.G.E. will, presumably, start taking a machete to this mess and remove a large chunk of federal employees and of federal spending. Since government doesn’t actually produce anything, those fired employees will have to get jobs where they have the ability to actually create value. And, if spending is cut as drastically as it should be, there will be a recession.

A big one.

Maybe we can hire Bob to build a wall to keep Dora from exploring.

Elon himself mentioned this – defanging the managerial elite and stopping fed.gov from spending will be a big dislocation on the economy as a whole. This will be destabilizing on the country, but since the big destabilization from the economic trajectory we’re on will be worse, I’m calling it a potential win. It will be worth the pain.

The reason this is an off-ramp is that it is, essentially, a bloodless revolution. The path that we’re on is unsustainable, and only drastic action will change the outcome. D.O.G.E. is just exactly that type of drastic action. Combined with actual repatriations of illegals and a dismantling of the power structures the GloboLeftElite have created within big companies (a very big ask) we just might get on the right path, again.

Do I think D.O.G.E. will work?

Ultimately, it faces long odds. The managerial class has maintained power for over a century, and they really are the Deep State and will react with great violence at any perceived loss of power. Waco was just them looking for a higher budget. The ATF along with the FBI will kill women and children without remorse for a 2% increase in power. And they will investigate themselves and find that they did nothing wrong.

Inside of a month, the ATF would consist of one guy torching all the ATF 4473 forms that the ATF has if Brandon Herrera was in charge. He also promised he’d donate all his pay to no-kill doge shelters.

The biggest chance Trump has to save the country is to act fast and without mercy before the immune system of the GloboLeftElite has the time to react. No, the FBI won’t be talking to his appointees like they did with General Flynn.

Ever.

Trump has one chance to make the rubble bounce. He’d better act quickly.

They’re going to fight back. And this is our last chance.

Don’t Stop Now

“You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” – 300

I guess Kim is chubby because he never had to run for office.

Certainly, the re-election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency has been a remoralizing event. I know that many (me included) thought that the GloboLeftElite would do whatever was necessary to “fortify” the results so Trump couldn’t return to power. I think, in the end the real power that saved Trump was the power of his hair. I mean, like Hamlet said, let the best mane win.

I’m in hopes that he won’t let his worst impulses take this second term of his administration run into the problems of the first. Trump’s main flaw (not his mane flaw, which is flawless) is his desire to “make a deal”. Hell, his book was even titled, “The Art of the Deal”. That’s where he got his greatest successes, and that was the great flaw that was exploited and why we ended up sending billions to foreigners, yet still didn’t have adequate border coverage at the end of his administration.

Scientists have discovered a way to walk through walls: doors.

So, now is not the time to give up – we must hold Trump accountable for the promises he made. He understands that he’s not our leader, that, rather, he jumped out in front of a parade that was already in motion and gave it a focus. When he gets off track, like when he praised himself for the Vaxx®, MAGA crowds booed him. And then he stopped talking about the Vaxx™, because he knew that wasn’t where the parade was headed.

We must remain vigilant. I do think that there is hope, since his near assassination, this has probably focused him like a laser on his own mortality. He knows he has four years to do what he has to do, and that’s it. Possibly only two: the mid-term elections may change the House, and turn his last two years into a gridlocked standstill.

Now, a gridlocked standstill is probably better than when congress is “doing” things and will probably lead to a dozen more impeachments for crimes like “breathing” and “sighing”, so the next two years is key.

The good news is that the GloboLeft is shell-shocked. They’ve created little echo chambers that made them get high on their own supply and think that a (possibly) drunken (allegedly) cocaine-using diversity hire anchor baby that achieved absolutely nothing, ever, that wasn’t given to her would be a good candidate. They were (and are) shocked.

Good friends are like toasters – if you throw one down the stairs, they probably won’t make toast for you anymore.

Good. The GloboLeft are shaken to the core, and we should make sure that it stays that way. If they think Trump is going to be bad, we should, at every instance, agree and amplify.

This isn’t spiking the ball. This is making them crazy.

Oh, sure, they wouldn’t be the GloboLeft if they weren’t already crazy members of a death cult. But we want to amp it up. We want them to not be able to think straight. For the next two years. We want to hijack (whenever possible) their amygdalae (Anonymous Conservative talks about it at the LINK). If you work with one of these creatures, you can get them to go off at the slightest provocation.

Why? They’re already unstable. Don’t let them plan. Don’t give them their safe spaces. Don’t let up. They may be in HR. They may be community members. When they make accusations in public, or on Facebook™ or Reddit© or X®, they sound crazy. They will call you a Nazi. They will say that you are evil. They will sound unhinged. Good. They discredit themselves.

You are needed. Keep the pressure on.

Her liver was 152.

As long as the GloboLeft sounds like the unhinged death cult members that they are, they move the Overton Window our direction.

Make them crazy. If you see a GloboLeftist flaking out at the supermarket, you can walk by and say, “This is MAGA country, missy.” That’s guaranteed to end up with a shrieking fit and a crazed post. If confronted, you can just say, “I was wondering where the pasta aisle was. Don’t have any idea why she reacted so.”

So, keep them busy.

To the non-crazy normies, keep dropping redpills. One story I heard from about a normie was that she was concerned that Trump wanted to “drain the swamp”. When it was gently explained that “drain the swamp” actually referred to the corruption of the Deep State at Foggy Bottom, the response was, “Oh, I can see that.”

Never expect normies to know what’s actually going on, so don’t get complicated. Explaining basic economics might help. Might.

Be reminded that these are the same people that didn’t know who was running for president, so, be gentle, and don’t start with weapons-grade redpills about deportation. Ease them into it. Help them draw conclusions. Point out how the mainstream media is lying or not covering the real news.

Well, maybe Juan in a million.

And remember that X® is our friend right now – the closest we have to a mainstream news platform that isn’t censoring (much).

Don’t cede the Second Amendment. Ever. Not a single inch. Point out that the real killers aren’t law-abiding gun owners, but gangbangers mainly shooting gangbangers, and they’d have guns anyway when everyone else was disarmed. Point out that there is a correlation with more guns leading to less crime. Disarmed people are victims waiting for second responders – armed people are citizens who are the true first responders.

Don’t cede morality. The latest hilarity is the 4B movement, essentially women promising not to engage in random sex and rather wait until they’re in a committed relationship. They expected us to get mad, when in reality we say, “Awesome, welcome aboard! Nobody likes a tramp.”

Are the security people at a trampoline store called bouncers?

Don’t cede love of your country, and don’t cede love of your nation. They’re not the same thing, but don’t give up either.

Enjoy the win. Keep the steel in Trump’s spine. And don’t spike the football yet.

It’s not even halftime.

But for now? We didn’t win by a hair, we won by a whole headful.

And you are needed.

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

Volcanoes, The Global Warming Scam, And Energy

“Remember when you could just throw a girl into a volcano?” – The Cabin in the Woods

Did you know that you can put molten lava in your mouth? I mean, only once, but still.

I know we there is a lot of fretting about the current political situation, which may well lead to a dictatorship in the United States (at least temporarily) and that bothers some people, I guess, but thrills others. As Elon Musk noted, “’When did Rage Against The Machine’ become ‘Rage For The Machine’?”

Outside of the impending dictatorship, which, I know, is like saying, “But aside from not knowing where you were, how did the debate go, Mr. Biden?” I think an even bigger problem faced by humanity is that of energy.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has become more and more dependent upon vast amounts of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. Even if you’re an abiotic oil enjoyer, the problem is resource replenishment time, which is certainly at least in the thousands of years timeframe except in certain cases that would be dependent on very specific conditions. If it’s all dead plants and stuff, that puts recharge rates in the millions of years timeframe.

This is important because, no matter how you slice it, energy is freedom.

And another scientist came up with a unified theory of seatbelts. He said, “It just clicked.”

The attack on freedom through energy has been ongoing for decades. I think, deep down, those of the GloboLeftElite who love control (which is all of them) aren’t happy when people have freedom. Since I’ve observed an inverse relationship between the amount of freedom in the world and the price of energy, the powers that be love Global Warming®.

No, they aren’t really excited about Global Warming™, they’re excited about the amount of control that it allows them to wield over people. How Dare You Herself admits (see below) that her goal is to destroy all of capitalism. Now, if that’s her goal, why is she funded by capitalist George Soros? It’s odd that Global Warming gets so much of the attention of huge power users like Microsoft® and that those that tout the solution create more sweet, sweet carbon dioxide than Poland.

If Greta Thunberg could rearrange all the letters in her name, that would be great. (Meme as found.)

The concern about Global Warming® isn’t because the GloboLeftistElite love humanity, in fact it’s quite the opposite: they despise humanity and want to watch it suffer.

That being said, even an old, crusty skeptic like myself noted that it was pretty warm in 2023, so I wondered why that would be. Of course, the answer was right in front of my face the whole time, but it took a reminder in the form of a story emailed by Ricky to me to jar the old grey matter enough to recall.

In January of 2022, the volcano Tonga erupted. Now, if you’re going to have a volcano, a good name for it is in order, one that implies that when it erupts it destroyed an entire ancient alien civilization. Mount St. Helens does not fit the bill – it’s “meh” tier at best. Mount Pinatubo is better. But better yet? Tonga, which is more formally known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga, meets that criteria since you could yell “Hunga Tonga-Hunga” at anyone in an elevator and they’d know you were one serious dude. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

When Godzilla® isn’t destroying cities, I hear he has a business flipping houses.

Regardless, in August of 2022, NASA opined that Tonga’s eruption had launched enough water high into the stratosphere to increase the volume of water there by 10%. Water is, of course, the most potent greenhouse gas by volume. This excludes my deodorant, which is specifically designed to keep me covered in baby oil and smelling like hydrocarbons and also eliminate pesky ozone in the upper atmosphere. It’s a three-in-one product.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga shot the largest amount of water vapor added to the stratosphere that men who record such things have ever recorded. To double the impact, when a volcano normally blows, in addition to water vapor, it often blasts particulates into the atmosphere that block and reflect part of the Sun’s light back into space, leading to a wee bit of net cooling.

I was shocked to find out that six out of seven dwarves aren’t Happy®.

But not Hunga Tonga-Hunga. It was, in fact, perfectly situated to maximize water output and minimize particulate output. And it was just shallow enough to zap out all that water, but not so deep so that the water would be absorbed by the deep water above it. Thus? A warm year.

And, unless Dr. Evil caused this via volcano an unsanctioned experiment in Evil Science®, mankind was 100% off the hook for this, as mankind has likewise done very little during our lifetimes to make the climate warmer. Yes, all the agriculture has an impact, but people gotta eat.

But this is still very, very different than the alarmists indicate. There will be more hurricanes. Oops, did we say more? We meant there will be fewer hurricanes. And it might cause things to get cooler.

In short, Global Warming™ is whatever will make you scared and turn you to full autocratic communism.

The problem with Global Warming® is that it’s distracting us from the real problem: we need energy.

Yes, I’m in favor of Clean™ energy, but it has to make thermodynamic sense – we have to get more energy out of the system than we spend making the energy, which is not the case with most renewables (ethanol, biodiesel, I’m looking at you). Global Warming© is a distraction, and is moving capital needed to create an energy secure future into corrupt projects that loot tax dollars to give to political cronies that are net energy sinks.

I guess it’s a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.

But, hey, I said energy is freedom, and if they don’t want energy, they don’t want us to have freedom.

At least they’re making George Soros happy.

Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics

“Baseball. Cold showers. Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.

It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat. In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.

However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids. Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked: at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.

That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system. The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output. Which is also their minimum output. My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off. Period.

What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster. Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach. Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.

If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.

Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.

The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward. As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”

After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.

That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.

I think step five is the hardest.

But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy. Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates. So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.

Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time. Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response. But soaring oil prices?

Responding to those requires time and investment. First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases. After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.

Then, pipe is needed. And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera. This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales. That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.

The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.

Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results. Now. Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.

The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located. They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”

I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?

The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them. They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:

John Wilder: “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder. With me?”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “Huh? Why are you in my house at midnight?”

JW: “Let me try a different approach. How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”

AOC: “Oh, like 40 or 50?”

JW: “Good. Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”

AOC: “I don’t know? That they smell like my feet?”

JW: “Well . . . . okay. But is it hard to keep them organized?”

AOC: “OH! Totally! I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”

JW: “Right! The amount of disorder increases!”

AOC: “Oh, I get it!!! Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”

JW: “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there. Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”

AOC: “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner. Instead? Only Fans®.”

I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.

Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.

Longer term decisions include:

tax policy which drives investment decisions and can kill industries,
Social Security and Medicare, in which cash is taken, spent, and then the next generation is saddled with the repayment obligations,
immigration policy, which changes the population and workforce over decades,
tariffs, which determine winners and losers, and
many other things that you or I could name if we just spent 10 minutes thinking about it.

Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades. The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.

I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.

Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.

But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time. I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.

The Drive To Kill The Constitution

“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – Return of the King

I had a sacred, flammable piece of wood once. It was a match made in Heaven.

All memes “as found”

One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.

Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do.

The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”

The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10^th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”

The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10^th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.

This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17^th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.

Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it:

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.

If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.

Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.

Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual.

Yeah, that was the plan.

Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2^nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.

A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.

Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).

The pesky 1^st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:

It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win.

Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men.

The only thing that stands in their way? Us.

Hammer Films, Creepy Creatures, B-Movies And Christopher Lee

“I have just been fired because nobody wants to see vampire killers anymore, or vampires either. Apparently, all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.” – Fright Night

If Kamala is selected president, she promised a new post-apocalyptic movie. She’s calling it Mad Marx.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was a kid (think four or five) there was a local channel that ran horror movies late at night on Saturday night. First there was the news at 10PM, then Star Trek at 10:30PM, and then, finally, at 11:30 Creepy Creature Feature started.

There was no host, just a title card with a vampire and perhaps some cobwebs followed by one or two B-movies and whatever ads the local salesguy could sell for midnight on a Saturday night. I’d imagine the ads were nearly free: five-year-olds in my generation didn’t have a lot of disposable income.

The movies were (at the time I was growing up) almost all from the 1950s and 1960s, and almost all of them were in black and white. I think that the television station could get these movies for very low cost, or, perhaps free in movies that failed to follow the proper copyright steps, like Night of the Living Dead.

Who flips Rob Zombie’s pancakes? Count Spatula.

Last month Bob suggested I revisit the old Hammer Film Productions® films, which are mainly known for their Frankenstein and Dracula movies. The studio turned out over fifty films, however, before it started cranking out science fiction and horror movies around 1957, and brought Peter Cushing in as an actor and having him join former British commando Christopher Lee in 1958 with Lee playing Dracula.

An aside: apparently when they were filming Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson was describing how he wanted Lee (playing Saruman) to react when Wormtongue stabbed him in the back. Lee stopped Jackson when he was trying to explain what he wanted. Lee: “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody is stabbed in the back? Because I do.

To be blunt: I have never seen a scary Hammer™ film. Most of them were, at their very best, entertaining. F-Troop’s Forrest Tucker as a scientist in the 1957 film The Abominable Snowman? Yeah, that’s not going to be scary.

And if the animal got stuck in the chute, would that make him adoorabull?

Oh, sure, when I was a kid Hammer’s® Quatermass and the Pit (United States title: Five Million Years to Earth) gave me shivers when I was in still in the footed pajama set, but rewatching it as an adult, I found it an interesting concept (alien overlords still “kind of” alive underneath London), but not scary.

One of the big differences I have seen in either the Hammer™ movies, or any number of movies from the day were built around concepts that seem to have been put away in the current political climate.

What concepts?

Humans are the good guys. Sure, not all humans were good. There were sniveling bad guys (mostly effeminate) or traitors (especially mostly secret commies) or scientists who didn’t understand what they were doing. Or Dr. Fu Manchu – he was definitely a bad guy, from a culture so different that although his goal of world domination was clear, his motives were less so.

Dr. Fu Manchu is still more credible than Dr. Fauci.

There was an optimism about the future. Roger Corman’s horrible movie Day the World Ended (1955) scared me six ways from Sunday because there was a mutant that was afraid of rain and I lived in a place where it hardly ever rained. But the end of the

Just like traitors, the scariest bad guys looked like us but weren’t us. Dracula, for instance, was, like Cornpop, a bad dude. And he looked like us. And, sort of, acted like us. But you knew, deep down, he wasn’t human.

We (generally) win. Now, I’ll admit that I like John Carpenter movies where at the end of the movie I’m pretty sure that mankind was wiped out sometime not long after the credits roll: (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness). But most horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s were optimistic that brainpower plus grit would solve almost any problem we face. Of course, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was in the “we lose” category, but it was pretty amazing, but much more common were films like When Worlds Collide where humanity, led by Elon Musk, manages to save itself through nearly impossible odds. On a rocket. With hot chicks.

I guess he’s now offering space for rent.

For whatever reason, I think the end of the optimism was around 1970. Westerns turned dark, and B-movies where humanity was the bad guy or where humanity out and out lost became much more common, such as Colossus, the Forbin Project, where supercomputers manage to link up and prove that A.I. is scary and may become humanity’s master benevolent and will be the best thing ever to happen to humanity. Not long after this (1974) Hammer® was essentially done making films and their quirky and optimistic take didn’t seem to sell anymore.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Hammer’s© fall was right after The Exorcist (1973) came out. It might be the final and most optimistic movie of this period of horror/science fiction. Although not a B-movie, it did show a world where true Evil was far scarier than anything that Dracula or Frankenstein ever was.

Yeah, the doctor even called the cemetery, “Human Resources”.

The Exorcist, optimistic? William Peter Blatty certainly thought so, since, although there was Evil, it could be vanquished.

By Good. And no matter how many times Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing tried, he never ever could get rid of Hammer’s™ Dracula. Probably because Van Helsing knew that Christopher Lee was pretty good with a knife.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them! They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street? It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool. There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least. I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet. Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together. By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel? That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination. But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment). I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail. Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970. Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club. We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon. Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end. The Wright Flyer? It sucked. But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it. Radio? It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows. Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome. A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA. Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress. Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes? Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways. Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope. It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents. The time was ready for that particular innovation: if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media. Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes. 28 lines. It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right? That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was. Now? I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history. That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig? A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years. Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein. You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?