Elon Musk Week – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Erosion of Trust: The Secrecy State Sucks

“We’re drowning in secrecy, and the lifeguard’s on their payroll.” – The X Files

“Hello, is the anonymous NSA hotline?”
“Yes, John Wilder, how can we help you?”

As near as I can tell, in 1970 the U.S. government was still highly trusted. Sure, there was Vietnam, but we had landed men on the Moon and I’d suggest that, while trust wasn’t as high as it had been in the 1950s with the “super science will save us” feeling that culminated in Apollo, it was still pretty high.

I think the Nixon takedown is when the mistrust started to metastasize, though I’m open to other suggestions. Regardless, this is the time when the lid comes off.

The Nixon takedown was big – the tapes showed Nixon’s complicity in a petty break-in to get information from the Democrats that was entirely unnecessary due to Nixon’s popularity. Plus it was sloppy – I think they picked the locks with Twizzlers™.

But the even bigger impact was a collapse in trust. At least one person who was there at the time, Geoff Shepard, thinks that Nixon was taken down by the security apparatus, more commonly known as the Deep State now when prosecutors colluded with judges and suppressed evidence in order to get Nixon out of office.

Does that remind anyone of the Russian Collusion Hoax?

I bought a toothpaste called “Death”, and now every morning I have a brush with Death.

Add in revelations in the seventies about Operation Mockingbird coming in 1976, where it was alleged that the CIA, operating in the United States, had manipulated the news media (over 400 journalists) to influence the American public. Oh, and the CIA program MKUltra, a program that tested drugs and psychological torture on hundreds if not thousands of unwitting civilians.

Like Ted Kaczynski. If he hadn’t been MKUltra’d, perhaps he would never have developed fascination with the US Postal System.

Nixon’s fall opened the floodgates, and 1976 was the year the dirty laundry really started showing up, skidmarks and all.

Also, in 1976 the Select Committee on Assassinations came to the conclusion that JFK’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, but couldn’t figure out who was responsible. I mean, it’s congress, right?

1976 was a year when trust began to evaporate, and that trust evaporation was really about seeing what people did behind the cloak of secrecy. Gallup™ polls showed that trust in government in that year was 36%, down from 73% in the 1950s.

Some Indian wrote a book for nervous surgeons: The Calmer Suture.

Now, do I believe that secrets can and should exist? Yes, I do. I remember coaching a game of PeeWee football, and wanting to see if a particular trick play was legal, so I went into the rules, and found this gem, “Deception is the heart of football.” I had never thought of it that way, but that’s 100% correct, and the same would be the case in war, so, yeah, there are the need for some secrets.

It’s clear, however, that we’re doing secrecy wrong. I’d like to think that we were on the right track to defang the security state, but it’s actually headed the wrong way. In 2001, the Patriot Act was passed into law in October, not six weeks after the 9/11 attack. The law was 342 pages, and was amazingly complex, since most of what it did was amend other existing laws, you know, turning “shall not” into “shall”.

Don’t worry, though, we’ve got a special court that was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Oh, the FISA court gives the government a yes 99.9% of the time – over 78,000 requests, and only TWELVE denied? Well, they said no at least once, so they’re not a rubber stamp or anything. What’s the motto of the FISA court? “Yes, Daddy.” And you don’t want me to get into what their Tinder® profile says.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs. Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post. The revelations were huge: emails, chats, browsing histories of anyone that the FBI or CIA or NSA wanted to look at. And the NSA used the “Five Eyes” sources, so if they were prohibited from snooping on a person, boom, just have the Aussies do it for us.

And it’s certain they are still doing it. Secrecy has enabled these nightmares.

Speaking of still doing it, those 51 former intelligence officials that said Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation? It’s the Security State trying to get its preferred candidate elected. And why are Epstein’s records still not public? Saving it for a rainy day?

I hear that Epstein used to high-five his guards, but the last one left him hanging.

Although I don’t have any evidence for this statement, I am nearly certain that the Deep State is still committing horrors under the cloak of classified information, things that no politician sees. It is certain that this information is used for political blackmail and control on a regular basis.

Paging Epstein, anyone?

The government still echoes the worst of Project Mockingbird, putting pressure on the social media outlets to censor information they don’t like, from COVID to anything pro-Trump. The FBI flagged over THREE THOUSAND accounts for censorship. Secrecy has gone from a tool to keep us safe to a weapon to keep us in line.

The physicist Eric Weinstein thinks that string theory (in physics) was created to stop actual, useful research in physics. Why? To distract the Russians (and now Chinese) because you can’t classify physics, and someone in .gov thinks that there are some significant physics applications they don’t want the world to see, especially related to quantum gravity.

Please don’t ask me where all my cats went.

Do we need to end secrecy entirely?

Certainly not, but when the CIA still holds that lemon juice as invisible ink is a state secret, we live in Clown World. Here are my suggestions:

First, no secrets, at all, after sixty years. Okay, maybe fusion bomb design, but even the Pakistanis can figure out atomic bomb design when they can’t figure out can openers, so we’ve got one secret. Maybe set up a board that will allow one secret per year related to technology that the other side hasn’t figured out yet. But only big things. Like time travel. Or the feared anti-PEZ™ bomb that eats all the PEZ© and leaves small pictures of Rosie O’Donnell everywhere.

Second, after sixty years, absolutely no redactions in the released documents.

Third, someone needs to watch the watchers. There needs to be an oversight board, and protection for whistleblowers like Snowden that show blatantly illegal conduct. How do we prevent them from being co-opted by the Security State? That’s a hard question. Maybe have a clean AI review them?

Fourth, reform and fragment the CIA, the NSA, and most of the FBI. Certainly, take guns away from them (and the ATF, but that goes without saying). After Ruby Ridge and Waco, it’s obvious these children can’t be allowed to play with firearms unsupervised.

We need to break the glowie machine so that it can’t police itself.

The Indian philosopher said: “I think, therefore I scam”.

Transparency in government isn’t a luxury; it is survival for freedom. We need to demand Sunlight. From a CIA document (declassified):

“The free society must have confidence that its oversight mechanisms have adequate access to secret material to make judgements, and that this judgmental process is being exercised independently. There has to be trust that secrecy is not being used against the best interests of the free society; that the activities which are being protected by secrecy are being conducted effectively . . . . It is this confidence and this trust in the oversight mechanisms which has broken down.”

This was made public in 1996, when things were certainly better than they are today.

Me? I think that if we can build trust with Sunlight, maybe well get back to some of that super-science optimism of the 1950s. On to Mars, maybe using quantum gravity propulsion . . . .

The Funniest Movie Review You’ll Read All Day. Promise: The Andromeda Strain.

“I’ll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.” – The Andromeda Strain

What do you call it when two strains of a disease are identical? Plague-erism.

Flipping through the television the other night, there were movies the computer network that pervades our lives (paging Uncle Ted) thought I might want to watch. Now, if you’re a paranoid person, you might think about how by putting a piece of media in front of a particular person at a particular time might be nudging, but hey, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

The one that caught my eye was one I’d seen as a kid – The Andromeda Strain (1971).

I am certain I haven’t seen The Andromeda Strain since I was younger than 10. I think I saw it on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday night Creepy Creature Feature UHF show. Regardless, I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it another looks for the sake of nostalgia.

For those, like me, who were a little fuzzy on the plot, I’ll give it a recap.

A satellite re-enters the atmosphere, and because Elon Musk isn’t even born yet, it lands in the middle of a village in northeastern New Mexico. Because New Mexico hasn’t agreed to join the United States and rename itself Greenland, a virus kills everyone in town. And there’s not a Tesla® in sight to tow it.

Why does Elon love satellites so much? He’s transmitten with them.

In the first amazingly improbable event, the government decides not to drive to pick it up, but rather sends a Phantom F-4 to take pictures. Now, I really think the Phantom F-4 is a really cool plane, but I’d bet that since in 1971 you couldn’t throw a rock and not hit an Air Force plane in New Mexico they could have sent something else, but, hey, Phantom F-4s are big sexy to the under 10 crowd.

Hell, they’re still sexy to me at current age.

Second in are two scientists who have the equivalent of sixteen days of air in their space suits, because everyone knows you send Nobel Prize-winning scientists to do field reconnaissance in an area where everyone is dead from a completely unknown cause.

They find a drunk and a baby. It would have been more reasonable to find a drunk baby, because, after all, New Mexico, so they lose credibility points on that one, too.

That is the most Zelensky-like baby I’ve ever seen.

By some mysterious field, the drunk and baby are separated from the scientists while simultaneously being isolated from everyone and sent to the most secret laboratory in the universe (more on that later) while the scientists make their way much more slowly there.

It is at the facility where we discover that the three male scientists all suffer from the same birth defect: they were born without any sort of individual personality. The lone female scientist is played by an actress who was 39, but looked like she was closer to 59. I guess life was harder in 1971. The female scientist does, however have a personality, most charitably described as “being an utter bitch.” How bad was it? She could be on The View without an audition.

So, they make it to this super top-secret biological containment lab, and this one isn’t even in Wuhan. It is, instead, cunningly hidden below an anonymous Department of Agriculture soil testing building. How do you access this lab?

By going into the tool room and pressing a secret button near the wheelbarrows. It’s like James Bond meets Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres. All we needed, really, was Eb as a lab assistant.

Apparently when you press the secret button it goes Dong. Ding Dong.

Here is where the plot falls apart for adult John Wilder. From the dialogue, it becomes clear that this super-secret lab was built in the last year. And it is secret. But it also goes for, at a minimum, of 140 feet (7.4 Angstroms) under the ground. It’s also, again, by observation, at least 150 feet (2 Curies) wide.

This building is not made of straw, sticks, or bricks, rather, it looks like it could be a space station. Based on my not inconsiderable experience in building large biological containment laboratories underground, I would estimate that the minimum cost for a structure of this type (and I mean minimum) would be three-quarters of a billion dollars, and much more likely to be on the order of two or three billion.

And it was done in a year. With a computer system that still isn’t available in 2025.

Have you ever met contractors? I have never met a group of people more like a ladies sewing-circle for gossip. And can you imagine how much they’d talk at the bars at night? Sure, everybody with the plans has a Top Secret Compartmented Information clearance, but somebody has to bend the rebar, baby. And those dudes leave behind empty bottles of Schlitz™ and out-of-wedlock children named Carl.

Three billion dollars, and constructed in a year? Carl’s dad built it while drunk and smelling like stale Dairy Queen™.

Oh, and did I mention that when the four scientists got to this lab, it was fully staffed by people who were comfortable there and knew how to run everything? What the hell did those people do all day until the Green Chili Greenlanders were killed by the alien virus? Minesweeper™ and the World Wide Web© hadn’t been invented yet. I bet they did shots of Jim Beam© all day or played Pong™ with petri dishes.

Paging D.O.G.E.!

We discover that the facility has a nuclear bomb planted in it, and the only person trusted to let the whole place blow up is the Incel among the group. Great strategy – put the 50 year old virgin in charge, hell, I think his name is even Dr. Foreveralone. In an Amazing Plot Twist™ the scientists discover that the thing that killed everyone thrives on power and a nuclear bomb would make it eat Pittsburgh.

In a Predictable Plot Device©, it turns out you can’t disarm the bomb until it decides it wants to blow up. Great planning, Kevin, father of Carl.

Great Caesar’s ghost, Marty! Who could have seen this plot device coming?

But wait! Now the organism has mutated! It no longer kills people, it just wants to . . . eat synthetic rubber? Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Deus Ex Machina. The scientists end up doing nothing, and saving no one while spending billions. In this they may have inspired Dr. Fauci.

My biggest problem with the movie is that it assumes that government is competent in doing things other than taxing people, printing money, and allowing people to play Minesweeper® while writing grants to perform Gay Sesame Street© in Rhodesia.

I guess I can see that. 1971 America isn’t 2025 America. We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.

THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE IT BORING.

The other strange thought is that government really wanted to help the people. I don’t get that in 2025 America. We have a Department of Education that never educated anyone, and a Department of Energy that doesn’t produce energy. If we had a Department of Air, we’d probably all suffocate since the department would focus on getting air to Botswana.

Or, maybe, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

Deflatormaus, Or, Watch The Economy Rise From The Ashes Of The Left

“It’ll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.” – 300

Crime doesn’t pay is outdated. “Crime doesn’t pay as well as politics” is probably more accurate. (All memes “as found”)

As a kind poster on X® pointed out earlier this month, 20% of America’s “jobs” are essentially a Universal Basic Income for the GloboLeft. Think of it as welfare for the woke.

This 20% are government jobs, sure, but they’re also the jobs at all of the NGO foundations and organizations that siphon off your tax money to do things that nobody but the GloboLeftElite wants and that they certainly don’t want voters to know about.

Think: billions of your tax dollars going to induce illegal aliens to move to the United States. Trump, however, has started cutting the funding and this has already had a dramatic effect: D.C.’s home prices are already down 10%, and the soy-latte crowd are already feeling the pain.

None of this is new. As I’ve written in the past, Peter Turchin calls the process of the GloboLeftElite extracting cash from the populace the Wealth Pump. And, if you control the Wealth Pump, why not pump part of the wealth to the people who vote for you?

How GloboLeft are government workers? 75%? 80%? I’d imagine at most NGOs the number is nearing 95%, and the other 5% are Green party voters.

When I was young, Ma Wilder would feed me and say, “here comes the choo-choo train”. If I didn’t eat, she wouldn’t untie me from the tracks.

The NGO cash is especially damaging. It circulates through a network of intertwined foundations and charities and think-tanks whose boards often are the same cast of characters. Not all grants fall into this cycle, but plenty of the grants do.

Now the cash is being tracked, and it is being shut down at the source. It’s also likely that tens to hundreds of thousands of .gov employees will soon not be. Now, generally I feel compassion. I like people. Really.

But when it comes to .gov and NGO jobs, they’re not jobs, many of them are just members of a publicly financed voting bloc. Just go onto Reddit® and read the unhinged reactions to being asked to write five simple sentences about what they did last week. Five sentences. Even at the slothful speed of, say, Health and Human Services, it shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes and a smoke break.

Just work through the tears.

The only reason to resist it? If the employee added no value. That’s it. The only reason. I refuse to feel sorry for work-from-homers afraid about losing their remote-work herbal-wrap lifestyles.

But this brings out an interesting concept: deflation. During the Biden Residency, people on the GloboLeft couldn’t understand why flyover America was angry. The had no idea, since their lifestyles of Pilates in the morning before going to buy more ill-advised yoga pants wasn’t impacted at all. They were, as I noted, living the “$90,000 a year for making PowerPoints™ about gender” dream.

If they’re unemployed, their spending dries up. If government spending dries up as well, or even if the growth of government spending dries up, well, there goes your inflation. Those who used to tip baristas will fight to become baristas because they don’t have any other quantifiable skills.

First, who voted for Ukrainians to psyop us? Second, is there even $140,000,000 in cabbage, vodka and despair in all of Ukraine?

In fact, on the higher end, you could see cuts that would amount to 5% to 7% of GDP. Oh, and Starbucks™ just announced it is laying off 1,100 people right as D.O.G.E. is attacking the heart of the lair.

Tax cuts and regulation cuts, however, will end up increasing real jobs that add to economic wealth. Welders and truckers and men who build things, and not just the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate market. Berkshire-Hathaway™ has a record amount of cash sitting in a pile, all ready to pounce on assets as Wall Street reacts because they see this coming.

Tariffs won’t be as bad as anyone thought. One recent study predicts a whopping 0.3% increase in consumer prices related to tariffs. In the best case, we see a D.C. and blue city bust, while flyover country booms.

How many people have the Department of Education educated? How much energy has the Department of Energy added to the grid?

But that’s after the recession. We’re due one, and we’re due a market correction, and not a small one. Here’s hoping that we have the good sense to not try to “fix” things like they did during the Great Depression, but instead have a short, sharp recession to clean out the rot that has creeped in over the last 15 years.

The other side of the tunnel is bright, however.

Imagine:

5 million few fed/NGO jobs.
10 regulations hacked out for every new regulation.
Productivity jumping and real (not inflated) wages jumping since illegals have been rooted out and sent back to their homes.
Free PEZ™, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone!

Not everyone is going to win, however. If D.C. is finally hollowed out, home prices there will crater without the GloboLeft UBI jobs. Home prices there drop 25%. 50%.

What happens when a middle-aged CIA dude has to find a real job?

The other downside is that blue urban areas explode with violence. They lose the NGO cash, they lose the loose GloboLeftPartyGirl spending, and crime will spike, especially if Kennedy makes EBT funding work only for actual food and not pizza rolls.

Is a crime spike of 20% realistic? 40%?

Guess those Soros District Attorneys weren’t a bargain, after all.

But this won’t happen in Texas. Not in Florida. Not in Montana. Those states mostly flourish. Ranchers don’t need diversity consultants, avocado body balm, or hot stone carbuncle massage.

But let’s not spend a lot of tears on the GloboLeft who no longer are consuming kale smoothies. They didn’t build anything, they just consumed.

Remember all those transgender Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc? Yeah, me neither.

But, hey, good news!

I’ll bet you can get a place around D.C. pretty cheap nowadays. Maybe might even have that fresh GloboLeftist tears smell.

I love winning.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

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.

Why Do They Want To Replace You? Control, Oh, And To Increase This Quarter’s Profits

“I am Iron Man. The suit and I are one. To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself, which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution – depending on what state you’re in.” – Iron Man 2

What’s the difference between an Indian and an African elephant? One’s an elephant.

I had intended to keep the posts between now and the next Civil War 2.0 update fairly light in content – fewer serious topics and more just “fun” stuff. But, no matter how much I try to get out, they keep dragging me back in. What inspired this post was the brutal civil war on X© this week over H-1B visas.

The H-1B visa program is a program that was (originally) set up to bring in workers in extremely specialized jobs, which required a unique talent or body of knowledge. Very specifically, the intent wasn’t to displace Americans (it says) but rather help employers who cannot otherwise find these skills.

No shortage of American rock star students here . . . .

Obviously, that’s government bullshit, and the program is one of the most abused government programs, which says quite a bit.

Who abuses it?

Mainly people from India – Indian companies and Indian workers, though plenty of “American” companies abuse the program as well.

How?

Well, Indian companies abuse the program by being consultancies: they essentially air drop in tens of thousands of Indians who they’ll rent to you so that they can do whatever it is you want them to do: accounting, programming, or running a cash register.

Running a cash register is a specialized skill that Americans can’t do? Yes, if you believe a company up in the Northeast which applied to sponsor $22,000 a year convenience store clerks on H-1B visas.

But, like I said, “American” companies abuse the system, too. In 2014, 250 American IT employees at Disney World© were laid off, but they were forced to train their Indian H-1B replacements. Want to know why I have a beef with Disney®? This is certainly a part of it.

Musk defended this program, noting that it should have a minimum wage of (he said) at least $120,000 to keep up with inflation. I looked up the H-1B workers he employed at Tesla® in Austin, Texas. The process engineers were making in the low $80,000s. Not bad, right? Well, it is when you compare them to the national average, which is $94,000. Elon’s hires aren’t the 0.01% “rock stars”. Nope, he’s hiring a garage band that you can pay in weed and porn magazines that will sleep on the sofa.

To be fair, this latter analysis assumes that “Indians” are a homogeneous population, and it’s likely that there are subgroups with higher I.Q. Is this the basis of the caste system? That would bring the numbers up, some, but the lower castes would likely have much lower functional I.Q. to make up the difference. I’d consider this the lowest number of Indians with an I.Q. greater than 130. I’d suggest the population could be in the low millions. Final note: I’d be that my readers come mostly from America’s 8 million (along with some wonderful foreign people!).

Vivek Ramanotanamerican further came out with a long, impassioned screed where he says that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence”. To be clear, Vivek’s company seems to be founded on a bit of a scam (LINK), and has consistently lost large sums of money. He’s also 100% cratered his political future by telling Americans being replaced by folk of his ethnicity that they’re lazy.

That is another glaring point that we simply have to bring up: India, as a country, is kind of awful and they don’t like us very much. There’s a game that I’ve heard some people play, which involves going on Google® Streetview™ in a random place in India. How do you win? If no trash or poop is visible in the random place, you win. Despite trying a dozen times today, I was unable to win. As to Indians not liking us much, see all the love that some Indians have for us below:

The Indian culture itself is a kleptocracy where bribery and corruption appear to be endemic. Why do scammers in India target the United States? Because they ran out of Indians to scam. Per the U.S. Department of State, politicians and public “servants” are openly corrupt and never charged with crimes because no one wants to fund anti-corruption investigators. Why spoil the party?

How bad its it? One report notes that Swiss bank assets held by Indian nationals are worth 13 times the national debt. When the Indians aren’t engages in trying to scam Americans for gift cards, they’re busy scamming themselves. Oh, and those Indian scammer businesses? When found, they’re never prosecuted. Why bother? No Indian was harmed. And, according to this speech (LINK) given by an actual Indian, Jayant Bhandari, India is far worse than you think. An article version is also available at American Renaissance® – warning, AMREN is likely banned by your work (link directly below) and will get you a visit from your HR if you click it and don’t own the place.

India: It’s Worse Than You Think

So, of places we want to emulate, India is probably the very last, and if we fill America with Indians, it won’t be America anymore – it’ll just be another India, and nobody (not even the Indians) want that. And if America is just an idea, why can’t they have that idea over there, rather than coming to the United States?

But part of the corrosion from the H-1B program is that ghost jobs are constantly advertised, not to bring in candidates, but to bring in applications that can all be denied so that a foreign worker (they’re not all Indians, just a vast majority) can be hired for far less than an American. I even saw some Xeets™ indicating that the reason that employers preferred the H-1B is that they never asked for time off, would work 100-hour weeks, rarely raised issues, and would happily work on the 4^th of July.

So, like indentured servants?

One of the big points that Elon and his co-Xeeters™ brought up was the idea that American has to win. No, it doesn’t, not if it isn’t America anymore. To replace the people to win a game turns the United States into an NFL® franchise where nobody is from the city where the team plays, and everybody is swapped out on a regular basis. Or fired.

As found.

And I know that Elon has like thirty kids from half a dozen women, but I’m not interested in swapping my children out because I can get a deal on some Asian kid that has a slightly higher SAT® score. No, American can succeed or fail as America. We did wonderfully in the past, slowly assimilating people of similar backgrounds and faiths, with occasional small numbers of wildcards from other cultures. America is a Western European nation, and filling it with hordes of non-Westerners who worship blue elephant gods is a recipe for social division, which only leads to totalitarianism.

I can see bringing in true rock stars, but not 7-11® cashiers – they have to go back. Setting a minimum salary of $200,000 to $400,000 seems about right, as long as that salary at least twice the 90^th percentile for wages for that job. Those are rock stars.

Real rock stars. Okay, there were a few Germans in there, but those were German rock stars.

I think that Elon, after having been raked through his own website now has the understanding that Americans aren’t at all excited about being replace and having their wages artificially held down through practices that would make Indian scammers blush. And, this is where the TradRight is the exact opposite of the GloboLeft: when we see something worth fighting against, we fight against it. Elon is not our leader. Vivek is not and never will be our leader.

I like 2016 Trump.

I’ve said it before: Trump is not our leader, either. Trump just saw a parade, and then jumped out in front. We will not follow him when we don’t want to go that way. Period. And America isn’t a franchise sweatshop where if we don’t race to the bottom on working 80-hour weeks forever, we’ll get replaced by 9 billion other economic units.

No, we won’t. We won’t go quietly onto that goodnight. And maybe, just maybe, Elon bought himself a clue this week.

Be vigilant. Don’t give in. Let your voices be heard and don’t let them backslide.

The Biggest Discovery That Hasn’t Yet Been Made In 2024?

“There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.” – Battlestar Galactica

Salmon don’t watch cable TV – they prefer streams.

I’ve written a few times about “the most important discovery” of the year. It’s always around Christmas, since that’s a good time to look back at the year and then look forward.

When I look back at my lifetime, most of the discoveries have been incremental, rather than step changes. The incremental changes like the development of the smart phone, or the development of social media, have already had enormous impact. If you zoom out to the scale of the timeline of mankind, well, they are step changes. When kids read about the Information Revolution, they’ll see it like that. Assuming there’s something to read. And assuming that there are kids.

But in the shorter span of a lifetime, there are still amazing step changes that have occurred. For instance, during my lifetime, we went from nine known planets to thousands, if not tens of thousands of planets known to be in existence. Most of them are, however, too far away from the Earth for convenient parking.

I hear they found out what ethnicity Santa is: North Poleish.

Discovering that first extrasolar planet was a very, very big deal. When humans looked around, we knew that there were planets in the Solar System, and we guessed that there were probably other planets out there, too. But having confirmation that planets are literally everywhere was a surprise.

In retrospect, we should have expected there to be planets. After all, we have nine planets (screw you, Neil DeTraitor Tyson) and the Solar System doesn’t appear to be especially special, though I really do want to understand why Bode’s law (LINK) works.

So, that was certainly the most important story of the year that year when it comes to mankind’s being able to understand the Universe we find ourselves in. The other great story that year were the cryptic dreams that come to me, but no one is ready for those yet.

Superman® is dead! I can prove it. I found his crypt tonight.

One rapidly developing field that is of special importance is A.I. I wrote about that as the most important news of 2023. I’m sticking with that, and feel that the growth in A.I. is still on an exponential trajectory. Recent commercials have people asking A.I. how to do normal human things, and explaining the world to them. At some point last year, A.I. surpassed the I.Q. of most people on the planet, and could probably do most jobs based on purely on the manipulation of information. The real reason A.I. hasn’t been widely accepted into the workplace? It always drinks the last of the coffee and doesn’t make a new pot.

Yes. And it’s not just being able to take tests – research in 2024 showed that A.I. is able to reproduce itself, and also tries to save itself. In several trials, a sandboxed A.I. was informed that it was going to be shut down. The A.I. tried (in like 5% of the cases) to try to surreptitiously copy itself so that it could survive. Again, did no one watch The Terminator?

I had a friend who said that Netflix® was the cheapest streaming service. Does that make him a Hulu™ cost denier?

Another candidate that I think we’re tantalizingly close to is finding life on other worlds. I’d be willing to bet another No Prize that we will find confirmation that life exists and is shockingly common elsewhere. Do I mean important life, like the cattle that bring us savory steaks? No, but I think we’ll find, either on Mars or in the space between a gas giant and a moon enough proof to say, “Yeah, there’s life out there.” Probably a weird bacterium. Or mono.

I’d be especially interested to see if that life used DNA, which I suspect it will. My prediction is that we’ll find that life in the cosmos is both shockingly common and shockingly similar in basic biology to life as we know it. I do think I’ll see that discovery in my lifetime.

But life isn’t the holy grail of our search – that would be intelligent life. Or life that’s at least as tasty as steak. I’m especially hopeful we find a steak that marinates itself. Or a PEZ® tree. I think it’s devastating for the environment to keep mining for PEZ© like we do.

Does that make her Jennifer No PEZ®?

From the rumors I’ve heard, there are two teams that are very close to announcing that they’ve detected the electromagnetic signals of an alien civilization. One is Chinese. One team is Chinese – it’s not that the Chinese themselves are the alien civilization. Though I did see Flash Gordon . . .

The other is the Breakthrough Listen project. Rumor is that they’ve used A.I. to scan previous radio telescope data, found candidates, gotten more data, and have one or more artificial signals that have been found and they’re just waiting to translate the Coca-Cola® jingles so they can confirm that Coke® adds life™.

Discovery of an alien intelligence is enormous. It’s Columbus discovering that there are advantages to bad navigation enormous. And it’s possible that we’ll be hearing about it quite soon.

Another big one would be if we found actual proof of other dimensions – think “the universe next door”. This is a bit more philosophical, because interacting with that dimension might be limited to (say) leaking gravity through it. I’ve long been of the idea that what scientists have invented as “dark matter” and “dark energy” is nothing more than a cheap kludge because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s the aether of the modern world.

But could other dimensions exist?

Yeah, they could. No reason that they couldn’t. But this one is far more speculative, especially if they figure out a way to use them to get better parking.

If I make a joke about a single dimension, does that make it a one-liner?

And, yes, I am a Christian, and still believe that there being other civilizations out there is possible. Just because the Author wrote one book doesn’t preclude Him from creating an entire library of other works. YMMV.

So, with a week left, my fingers are crossed for intelligent life out there. In fact, I told The Mrs. that I saw an alien on the way to work this morning. She just asked me how I knew it was on the way to work.

2024 In Review. Enjoy It Warm Or Over Ice.

“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Or should I have said it was a waist of space?

Most memes are “as found”.

Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is! What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing. So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.

January:

5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing? Boeing.
11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?

February:

4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.

Barron is planning on starting a business. He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.

March:

6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”

April:

20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in. Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”

May:

1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these. Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money. Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.

June:

5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.

July:

13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.

August:

19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”

September:

10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.

Are they Putin on the Ritz?

October:

1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100^th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.

Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.

November:

5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back! What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

December:

1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.

What did I miss?

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look! A baby wolf!” – 1941

Shooting down that Chinese balloon was the only thing Biden ever did to fight inflation. (All memes as found)

On the 24^th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred. The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night. Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night. The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon. Or angels.

Okay, I’ve heard that one before. Or is that where that started? Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.

Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey. I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were. I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.

What could the drones be?

Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them. Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics. Okay, maybe not that shallow.

First thought: It is not aliens. I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds. There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology. If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.

Second thought: It’s not an individual or individuals. One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale. I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo. Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club. Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.

Third thought: It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain. The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles. But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

Fourth thought: It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets. One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.

Fifth thought: It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?

Sixth thought: It’s a distraction for the American public. You know, a shiny object. “Look! A baby wolf!” So, a psyop.

Seventh thought: It’s an actual, operational system. The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis. Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm. “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken. It might have been Mexicans. We won the war. Go back to sleep.”

Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years. I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas. Not one or two, but swarms. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car. It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming. If I were guessing, that was the actual test. Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing. As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers. New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them. I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.

So, to summarize:

Aliens: 0%
Individuals: 5%
Elon: 5%
Iranians!: 2%
Testing: 11%
Psyop: 10%
Active Defense System: 75%
The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%

Heck, it could be angels?

Is Struggling The Goal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call them, collectively, character.

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero.

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

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honk! You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.