Elon Musk Week – Page 5 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Most Inaccurate (but funniest) Predictions For 2023, Guaranteed.

“It’s getting almost predictable, isn’t it?”– The A-Team

What is a teenager under stress called? A teenager.

Here is the annual Wilder Prediction Page, proven so far to be absolutely 0% right. A few years ago I started to put actual predictions about economic and political stuff out quarterly. Real ones. The rationale behind that is, if I put it in writing and then revisited it, I at least owned it.

Those were absolutely the least popular posts I did. They were like posts that were drenched in mosquito-carried Ebola AIDS. I got the hint, “Shut up and play your piano, Wilder.” I can see the reason, frankly. That was a post about me and my thinking, and it wasn’t what I do best.

What do I do best online? Writing about life, philosophy, and nonsense. I also can prove that the Right can be funnier than the Left. This is becoming more difficult in 2022, because they keep letting Kamala and Joe say words into a microphone.

So, welcome back to the nonsense! In chronological order, here are my predictions for 2023.

January:

Russia appoints Charlie Sheen as the head of the Stavka. He immediately gives the entire army a ration of Tiger Blood, declares they are “Winning” and passes out in pool of vomit. We have no idea whose vomit, exactly, since “you can’t really dust for vomit.” Sheen proves to be the most effective commander for the Russian army since Zhukov.

What did Charlie do when he was mad at his wife? Rage against the Mrs. Sheen.

Six movies are released featuring Nic Cage, and seven people actually see three of them.

February:

Kamala Harris is featured in a major policy speech, talking about the massive snowstorm that hit the East Coast in early February. The results were catastrophic, causing Chuck Schumer’s hair to freeze in place on Nancy Pelosi’s thighs. Harris notes that this is “evidence of global warming, where the globe, which is a round thing hanging in space, is warming, which makes things cold because space has COVID.”

The California Legislature votes to allow “consenting adults to have sex with animals in schoolyards as long as the animals have claws or fangs, since that is a sign of consent.” Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill publicly, though the signing was difficult since both of his hands were wrapped in gauze.

March:

Volodymyr Zelensky demands the West send him “seventy bazillion dollars to rebuild the Ukraine on and, like, ten gajillion tanks” and that the heads of state of the EU personally retile the bathrooms in his Florida mansion. “Be careful with the grout!”

What do Putin and Peter the Great have in common? They both have 18^th Century Russian armies.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise© welcomes the 500,000,000,000,000^th visitor, as it becomes the most popular website in the galaxy, as the hivemind of Melexcor III learns to appreciate dad jokes.

April:

The new COVID variant mRNA booster shot for Super-Mega-Death-Cannibal-Famine® COVID is approved by the FDA because “Omigod, why won’t you damn people panic again!” Australia implements “Super Peaceful Completely Voluntary We Mean It Leisure Camps”.

Disney® releases its new children’s film, Honey, I Turned All Our Children Hyperactive, Bipolar, Transgender, Gay, And Multiracial. The three families that have hyperactive, bipolar, transgender, gay, and multiracial children attend, and the film’s three-week box office in 2,000 theaters is $90. Disney© blames the audience for being, well, you get the idea. The film loses $350 million at the box office.

May:

Elon Musk pulls off a rubber mask and indicates that, underneath, he was really Elon Musk. “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you pesky kids.”

The Supreme Court rules in the case of Idiots v. Rationality, that, “Uh, really, that’s a dude. He may be wearing a dress, but, per the original understanding of the framers of the Constitution, that’s totally a dude.”

Back when I was a kid, if a spy had to go undercover dressed as a woman, that was a transmission.

June:

Joe Biden announces, for the thirteenth time, that he’s running for president. “I promise to make America great again after the problems of the housing bubble that George W. Bush created. America will once again be great, starting in 2009!”

Argentina declares war on Great Britain over the Falkland Islands. Again. They send their victorious World Cup® team in the initial invasion. Great Britain counter-attacks with what they call “food”. France surrenders.

July:

I might go on vacation for a week. Maybe someplace where I don’t need air conditioning.

California governor Gavin Newsom declares “Citizenship Day” where everyone in the whole, wide world becomes a citizen of California. Oklahoma declares war. “No way are we gonna do that.”

August:

California becomes part of “Greater Oklahoma.” “If only we had greater legal magazine capacities,” said Gavin Newsom before he was headed to a minimum-security prison with knitting classes in southern Oklahoma.

Biden announces that gasoline is now illegal. “People have been burning that stuff up! Not on my watch. Now the only people that can have gasoline are,” (checks teleprompter) “people who are in disadvantaged communities that are the victims of systematic race horses.”

In 2023, a man can identify as a car, unless he doesn’t meet Federal standards.

September:

The 2023 NFL® season starts, with a new team name in Cincinnati. The name, “Bengals” has been described as “transphobic” by NFL© Commissioner RuPaul, “They aren’t “Been gals, they’re totally gals!” Their new team name is the Cincinnati LGBT 2S+.

The Beatles reunion is complete as Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney engage in a steel cage death match over who like John Lennon the least. Neither ex-Beatle survive, since Ringo inexplicably chose hand grenades as a close-in melee weapon.

October:

Dammit. More crap about the English royal family. Oh, wait, that’s every month. This month Meghan tells how King Charles made her pick cotton on the plantation in south Brighton for 20 hours a day because she didn’t curtsey properly. Markel is beheaded in Piccadilly Square, and Queen Elizabeth II rises from the grave and fights Mecha George Washington on Skull Island. Oh, wait, that was a dream I had. Nevermind.

On Halloween, children are warned not to get double-secret COVID.

November:

An article appears in the New York Times™ titled, The Final Crusade Has Started: Why That’s A Good Thing. Deus Vult ensues.

I’m probably having some turkey and beer around Thanksgiving. This one isn’t much of a stretch.

What band did Indiana Jones hate? The Rolling Stones.

December:

Avatar XXII: Why Slavery Is Bad is released. James Cameron is executed at Times Square in New York City because that his comment, “I’m king of the world” was culturally insensitive and totally colonialist. At least 500 people see Avatar XXII, with many reviewers noting that the blue fish people’s ethnic cleansing of the humans is “culturally insensitive”.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise™ becomes the most popular website in history of the universe as time travelers from the year 28,764 discover that it is a humane alternative to their other form of capital punishment: sitting in a comfy chair.

The Narrative: Crumbling in 2023?

“Oh, well, please, for goodness sake, narrate me down from here.” – Winnie the Pooh

I guess Scott should learn that in space, no one can hear you meme. (all memes this post, as found)

This isn’t my prediction post for 2023, but one thing that I’m seeing is that toward the end of 2022, the oddest thing seems to be happening – The Narrative is crumbling.

Good. Now do the January 6 Committee.

As you can see from Elon’s Tweet® above, Musk has enough data to realize what most readers here have known for a long time: Fauci has always been on his own side, and was tied into some pretty shady stuff. The Twitter© purchase gave Musk more public power than being an okay car manufacturer for niche cars that are (at least presently) wholly impractical for widespread use or a really good rocket manufacturer that has revolutionized space travel.

If humans ever set foot on Mars, it will be because of the work that Musk started with SpaceX®.

Sure, that might change the history of humanity and eventually turn us into a multiplanetary species, but his purchase of Twitter™ is changing the world, now. As I’ve written about before, Twitter™ is different. It was pumped up by the Left and eventually co-opted by them as one of their means to rapidly reprogram their NPCs.

Diogenes, getting ready to reprogram Plato. Again.

As such, that left evidence. I was a user of Twitter© for a while, and had individual Tweets© that got a lot of response – some of them in the tens of thousands. They weren’t anything in particular, merely reacting against the Leftist narrative.

That wasn’t allowed, apparently. After a year and a half, I noted that my Tweet reach was now very, very limited. That was fine. I could take my ball and just spend time writing here instead of Tweeting®. The Leftist tactic of silencing the Right worked in my case.

Now Musk has the keys to the data, and has already started showing the slime-trail that the Leftists always leave behind. The rot was inside, of course. Leftists tend to try to hire their own, and it turns out that the Federal Government was directing (in some cases) the stories what stories would be told, and what stories would be suppressed.

I’m sure that the guys who put this together said, “The science is settled! What are you, ignorant?” But they would have said it in German, so it would have sounded even meaner.

Wonder what data exists in the private messages of the Very Important? Probably only one person has greater access to that data (outside of the .gov people) and that’s Mark Zuckerberg. Mark won’t be telling anyone, because as Elon heads out to space, the Zuck seems to be suffering a reboot as Faceborg© slowly loses billions of dollars in value.

This makes me wonder if 2023 isn’t the year that The Narrative finally cracks. Disney’s™ stock value has plummeted, and they can’t make movies that people don’t want to see forever. Eventually, they have to have some cash coming in to pay for the LGBTQ+ chat rooms and employee abortions and transition surgery.

When did the Babylon Bee® become non-fiction?

That’s another thing that’s past its sell-by date: the trans (and trans indoctrination) movement. Parents will put up with a lot, but when you start messing with their kids? They push back. And they are pushing back. Parents are pushing back at school board meetings, and the woke can’t stand the light.

This one, in particular, opened a lot of eyes. But, hey, the science is settled that there’s no difference between men and women, right?

The Narrative on the COVID vaxx is also fading. It is now inescapable and proven that the vaxx has killed more people than any vaccine in history, and the long-term effects are unknown. I certainly don’t hope that all the people who took it die, since I know several people I really like that got the vaxx.

I think it’s also becoming clear that a very, very large number of the people who are Leftist activists are . . . crazy. The recent Department of Energy, um, person in charge of nuclear waste is now accused of (spins wheel) lifting luggage at airports. Clearly this, um, person is nuts, and we’re lucky that they were stopped after lifting a few bags, rather than after they went full “where can I bury all these bodies?” But that seems to be a qualification to be placed into high office in Biden’s administration.

You may see a crazy person, but I see someone who could be a Supreme Court justice, or take care of the nuclear codes, or decide educational policy impacting millions of children.

Ayn Rand was really wrong about a lot of things, but she knocked it out of the park with one particular statement: “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” That’s what The Narrative does. And the consequences of ignoring reality are showing up again and again here at the end of 2022. Will 2023

Looks like I’ve found the Biden motto on how to govern.

Even the virtue signaling, when it doesn’t have a basis in reality can lead to failure. When the symptoms of the situation are addressed, but the root cause isn’t, the problem will rot and fester. The sooner The Narrative crumbles and people are brought, face to face with reality, the sooner actual solutions can be found.

I’m sure that some people would rather that The Narrative would have crumbled a few months earlier, and probably would have made other choices. Including losing the “Where’s Waldo” hat. And if you think that’s mean, he called me an idiot first.

2022 In Review. When Is The Next Asteroid?

”I could end this review here, but I’m really just getting started. I do have to go to traffic court soon though, I accidentally ran over a Korean family with my car.” – The Phantom Menace Review

The Romans were really good at killing people. They really nailed the execution.

It’s not the exact end of the year yet, but it’s close enough to look at 2022 in the rearview mirror. Me? I say good riddance. It also marks the sixth year I can’t jog because of my knees. In 2017, no jogging. In 2018, no jogging. In 2019, no jogging. In 2020, no jogging. In 2021, no jogging. In 2022? Again, no jogging.

I guess that’s a running joke.

So let’s run down the events of 2022:

January

January 10 – the first transplant of a heart from a pig to a human was accomplished. I’m not sure what you call a person who has a heart from a pig. But they did also breed a pig with four eyes. I guess you call that a piiiig.

January 28 – the vaxx dose was injected for the 10 billionth time. Kamala Harris declared it an “amateur”. There are several jokes about what will happen to people who took an essentially untested mRNA gene therapy. They never get old.

Looks like lead pipes are back on the menu, boys!

February

February 4 – the Winter Olympics® start in China. The country that brought the most athletes to the games was Brazil. I hear they brought eight Brazilian athletes.

February 26 – Russia commences its Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. It’s scheduled to be concluded in two weeks.

March

March, date unknown – The Democratic Republic of Congo gets its first phone, and prank calls Angola.

March, date unknown – Joe Biden starts wandering around the White House claiming that water is now only legal in three states – liquid, solid, and gas.

April

April 6 – The first fossil that could be tied explicitly to a dinosaur that died because of the impact of the asteroid at the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago was found. He was named “Lucky Larry”.

What do you get if you cross a T-Rex with a human? A T-Rex.

April 24 – The Large Hadron Collider was turned back on and changed its power level from Incredibly Large to Mindbending. Of course, history has been changed, again, and now it turns out I’ve been wearing my underwear backward.

The one on the left? Never existed as a logo according to the world. Not according to me. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that it was on my tighty -whities.

May

May 6 – Monkey Pox discovered in the wild! Panic!!!!!

May 7 – People don’t panic.

June

June 14 – Canada and Denmark end the Whiskey War. This 50-year-old conflict was a dispute over a barren wasteland (see “Hillary Clinton”) that started in 1978. It was called the Whiskey War because the Canadians left a bottle of booze and put up a Canadian flag in 1984. The Danes took it down, put up the Danish flag, (while politely folding the Canuck flag and putting it up) and left the Canucks a bottle of schnapps. On June 14 the island was split between the two countries. Previously, Denmark had one border (Germany – never a good choice) and Canada had one border (guess).

This really happened.

June 21 – I think I had a burger at lunch that day. Tasty.

July

July 11 – the James Webb Space Telescope returned its first picture (see below).

How does Bigfoot tell time? He has a sasq-watch.

July 23 – Monkey Pox still not a thing, since it was discovered mainly to transmit through non-heterosexual relations. Everyone ignore!

August

August 4 – the Chinese military drill Taiwan, and then don’t call.

August 15 – Disney® finds way 7,328 to ruin a movie.

September

September 6 – Liz Truss is now Prime Minister of Great Britain, making the first time two people named Liz are in charge of Great Britain.

September 8 – Oops! Lost one Liz. Spoiler? Pretty soon it’s zero people named Liz.

October

October 8 – Russia celebrates the several hundred-day anniversary of two weeks.

October 28 – Elon Musk buys Twitter® for reasons that no one can really figure out, and seems to have a lot of fun with it.

Oops, he doesn’t have a wife.

November

November 8 – there are 8 billion people now in the world. Kamala Harris is quoted as “Well, that’s somewhat of a challenge, I’ve got some catching up to do.”

November 16 – Several days months years behind schedule, NASA launches Artemis 1. The idea is to launch several dummies around the Moon. Sadly no Antifa® members are in the capsule.

December

Thankfully, no Leftists read here, so I don’t need to remind you what happened in the last 9 days.

We’ll look at the future in my Amazingly Accurate Predictions for 2023 post that’s coming up. I would take some time off and go running, but my knees are worse than Kamala’s.

Woke, Broke, Wealth, and Agendas

“Been to Disney World, one too many times, have we, Captain Ron?” – Captain Ron

What’s the difference between an iPhone™ 14 and half an ounce of gold? Half an ounce of gold will still be worth $1000 next year.

Once upon a time, there was a small business. It was run by a man who wanted to make cartoons and money. The cartoons were, mainly, for children, but he branched out. He made wholesome entertainment for families for decades, had multiple television shows, and eventually made a theme park. He was an avowed Christian, and was an ardent anti-communist.

He was moral. He hated pornography. And then he died and was frozen into suspended animation so his reanimated body could conquer the Universe from beyond the grave.

After he was put to “rest”, Walt’s Company was acquired and began to put out R-rated movies, as well as taking very, very un-Christian stances on, well, almost everything.

I’m talking, of course, about Walt Disney. Were Walt unfrozen alive today, I think he’d be shocked at what his company had become. I’ve had a beef with Disney® (the company, not the frozen founder) since before 2000 when they pushed hard to own all of their intellectual property until the heat-death of the Universe.

I have a problem with that, since I think that’s essentially stealing from the public domain, but I won’t go into that right now. Beyond that, there’s the steering of the company into entertainment that Walt would certainly never have greenlit.

In space, no one can hear Walt scream.

Case in point, the latest film from Disney©, Strange World. It’s being hailed as an “alt-family eco-drama featuring an openly gay teen”. I’m out of the “raising pups” stage, but hearing that I knew it was going to be a flop. Why? About a million gays would go see it for the feelz, and the hardest of the hard-core Left who had forgotten to abort their babies. That provides a stunningly small audience.

It is going to lose, by some estimates, up to $150,000,000. The earlier Adventures of the Incredibly Gay Buzz Lightyear probably lost a similar amount.

$300,000,000 in losses between them. I know people that work a whole month and don’t make that kinda cash. So, the guy who was running the company got fired. And then they re-hired the person that initially green-lit the bombs in question, Bob Iger, who had only left the company a little over 11 months previously.

Iger gets rehired, and in the first town hall with employees, says that he’s going to stay the course and continue the LGBT programming that has cost Disney™ $50 million a month for the last six months. And it’s not like there’s no movie audience – Top Gun: Maverick made $1.5 BILLION while Disney© was losing piles of shareholder cash. Disney’s© market value in 2022 is pretty close to what it was 8 years ago – and that’s after billions in profits from Marvel™ flicks.

Hmmm. Why is Disney© so committed to making “entertainment” that people don’t want at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars because Disney© doesn’t share the values of the parents of the kids the movies were made for? It’s like going to Drag Queen Story hour and asking, “Why do men in lingerie want to spend hours in close contact with children under the age of six?”

Well, certainly Apple© is different, right? I mean they have all the cool iPhones© and iPads® and iPods™ and no real new ideas since Steve Jobs died. Certainly, they’re focusing on making money?

It turns out, they are. Apple® is making a 30% cut off of everything bought through apps from their App Store©. That’s loan-shark level cash. But as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter©? Well, I’ll let Elon describe it:

And not only that:

Either advertising on Twitter™ makes Apple© money and they’re voluntarily dumping a revenue source because of feelz, or advertising on Twitter® never made them money and they’re removing a woke subsidy.

I wonder which. And speaking of wondering, why the heck is Elon still using an iPhone©, as noted on his Tweet©?

Stonetoss has a comment on the whole situation:

I guess losing Steve Jobs and turning the company over to a committed Leftist like Tim Cook would make Apple® less than a fan of any thoughts other than Leftist thoughts. And Tim Cook is not at all afraid of Elon Musk – Apple is worth $2.3 trillion dollars, which is more than Elon has, even if he looks under the couch cushions.

Who is Tim Cook afraid of? I think the Bee® nails it:

If Xi turns off the iPhone© flow, Apple’s™ cash flow will fail – it’s that simple. I wonder if this would impact the way Apple™ deals with security on their phones? Nah. But Apple is still raking in the cash.

For now.

We’ve discussed Disney® and Apple™. But certainly a fashion company wants attractive people in their ads?

Well, Calvin Klein® has changed a lot in 30 years.

There are some people I don’t want to see in their Calvins®. No! Don’t take them off!

In the final analysis, some businesses make money just to make money. Others make money just to fund their own ideologies, and I’m certain that’s the case with corporation after corporation. I could go on, but will stop here so the post doesn’t get 2,000 pages long.

I think Walt had an ideology, back in the day, but it was one I agree with. I do hope that Walt is eventually unfrozen in a thousand years and comes back with a vengeance and finishes that last cartoon he was working on.

I guess that would be the world’s longest suspended animation.

What World Do We Want To Live In? There Is A Choice.

“Is this the emergency services? Then which country am I speaking to?” – The I.T. Crowd

Why don’t Leftists like to talk about the future of what they’ll create? It’s two in tents.

We are on a course to a new country. Perhaps someone has a source for this quote (that I’m going from memory on): It’s been said that every man dies in a strange country. It’s not original to me, but it does contain a lot of wisdom. As our country is aging, it is changing. I’m just hoping it has better knees than I do.

But to illustrate the point, let’s take Pa Wilder:

When Pa Wilder was born, the income tax wasn’t even a decade old. The meaning of a “state” was stronger then than now, though it was subsidiary after the Civil War. Pa was born, grew up, and died living almost all of his time within a 30-mile radius, except for an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe from 1942-1945.

The rock band Flock of Seagulls never toured Iran. Why? Iran so far away.

When Pa Wilder passed away, the world had gone from the biplanes of World War I to a fully inhabited space station and regular flights to orbit, and occasional flights to the Moon. The dollar had gone from gold to gimmick, and the question of freedom had gone from “why can’t I?” to “may I, please?”

The world Pa lived in growing up was one that was difficult. If you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you had to find someone to raise it for you. It is undoubtedly a fact that people died of starvation in the United States, and some certainly died because they didn’t have any money.

After the war, though, his generation had optimism. It looked like there was nothing that mankind couldn’t do. The atom had been split. Rockets had touched space. The largest rivers had been dammed and tamed and the only foe to be concerned about was the Soviet Union, and it looked like all of those people ate a diet of potatoes, onions, sawdust, and sadness. A 1950s Hungarian joke went something like this: “Definition of socialism: the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.”

And, from the looks of him, he certainly could have nursed a drink.

The family had primacy. And culture was built on the idea of that family, and policies at the local, state, and national levels were built around supporting the family and keeping it strong.

It worked pretty well. Was there a cultural prohibition against being a tool? Sure. Was there an upper limit on the things that women could do in society? Yeah, certainly there were few CEOs at the time that were women, and there were demarcations between jobs women would normally do, and jobs that men would normally do. Men got the jobs that had higher stress, higher danger, and sure, higher pay. Women got the jobs that conserved the culture, raised the young, and, yup, didn’t pay nearly as well.

It was a bargain made not to punish women or men, but as a nod to societal stability based on family hierarchy.

This is the America that was, and more than a few people on the Right look to this as the model of a successful society that creates the ability for mankind to make good on the promise of individual freedom, individual responsibility, a role for religion and celebration of individual success.

It is a world where equal chance based on merit is the goal, and winners of fair competition get the rewards.

Yup, pretty hard to take that to dinner, since each one required its own nuclear power plant.

This goal is soundly rejected by the Left. They look for a model of America that can never be. Their world is an entirely made-up concept of what they think the world should be.

What do they think?

Like Lake Woebegone, all children in their Leftist Utopia are above average.
Diversity is actually a strength.
Every deviance in sexuality is celebrated.
Every outcome is equal, regardless of effort, talent, or merit.
People have whatever they want, regardless of if they work or not.
Society owes it to everyone to take from the successful and make them the same as anyone else – equity is the goal.

Whereas I can love the ideas they have as ideas, the truth is that the world cannot be that way. Some children are below average. People who live and work with people that aren’t from their culture typically have lower trust, disharmony, “cultural tension” and conflict.

Oops. Turns out that if you worship the Moon God Gorto and think child sacrifice is okay, Baptists might not be the best folks for the cubicle next to you. And most people won’t applaud if you have sex during Thanksgiving at the table – I won’t explain how I know this.

The Mrs. tried to tell me to not fix my rifle with Super Glue®, but I stuck to my guns.

And outcomes aren’t equal. There are winners, and there are losers. Merit matters. Talent matters. Work matters. If we remove the competition between winning and losing, and celebrate every loser like a winner?

You get a society of losers. You get a culture of losers. And who else but a loser would demand what Elon Musk has without doing what Elon Musk as done? It’s a culture that is built on envy of what others accomplish and greed for what others have.

It is a culture that celebrates and encourages failure. Even Leftists admit it. I had a discussion with an acquaintance. He’s a leftist. My conjecture was this, “So, should we wait a few years to start your socialist empire until we have a cancer cure and maybe some better technology? I mean, if you look at Socialist cultures, they aren’t really good at creating things.”

“You’re right, it would be better to wait a few years.”

Sure, there’s been corruption since the first human, but not every society is the same. And societies like the 1950s in America had less corruption than any communist society, ever. And, I would argue that society was far less corrupt than society today. The outcomes were better – in most places, a locked door wasn’t required. The outcomes of society have drifted negatively in many ways. You could name them, so I won’t go into what would be a very, very long list.

Who had the biggest gender reveal party ever? Japan. In 1945 they had a Little Boy.

There’s more to this, but now, the Left is attempting to drive this world towards a future that is based on nothing but a theory that is no more sophisticated than a three-year-old’s version of what the world should be. Is it any wonder that as we get closer to those fever dreams, things get worse?

As that author I can’t remember said, we all die in a strange country. I’m just hoping that it stops sucking.

Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time. I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons: don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday. It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night. As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year. Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject. Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special: memes that are on sale. They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another. So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale. Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

Thanksgiving Thanks, 2022

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

I knew an Irishman who used to sell lawn chairs. I’ll never forget Paddy O’Furniture.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I would share a few things that I’m thankful for. These are in no particular order.

I’m thankful that almost every single one of my problems is self-inflicted, and has a clear way to solution. I am where I am because of who and what I am, and I can change everything I don’t like, when I want to.
I’m thankful for being with The Mrs., because either of us with other people would be just an unending misery for them. I believe the Geneva Convention specifically lists being married to either The Mrs. or to me as a Crime Against Humanity.
I’m thankful for Elon Musk and the amusement he creates by stirring the pot. Do I think he’s on our side? But I think he irritates enough of the people who hate us to make me laugh, nearly daily.
I’m thankful for friends. I have a Polish friend who is a sound tech. And a Czech one, too. And a Czech one, too.

Or if I opened a trampoline in Prague, would the Czechs keep bouncing?

I’m thankful for standard time. Daylight savings time is the tool of the Devil.
I’m thankful for the “ringer and vibration off” switch on cell phones. And I should use it more. There’s something to be said for uninterrupted focus time. When going out to dinner, we often ditch our cellphones at home. This leads to this crazy thing called “talking to each other.”
I’m thankful that The Boy is home from Midwestia State U (located right next to Wassamatta U) and that he and Pugsley talk for hours when they’re together. A loyal brother can be the closest friend as you move through life.

I recently bought a toilet brush. Long story short: I’m going back to toilet paper.

I’m thankful that I got up late today, and that I’m writing this early.
I’m thankful that, right now in this place and time, my family is safe, and we are together. This is why Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday: there isn’t the stress from presents, merely a time to give thanks and be together.
I’m thankful for decongestants. I’d tell a joke about me having a virus, but I’m worried you might spread it.
I’m thankful that I live in a time that has the greatest access to knowledge of any place and any time in history, allowing me to read the thoughts of the greatest men who ever lived and the ideas that influenced our civilization and showed us what truth is, almost at a whim. Oh, and there’s also CNN®.
I’m thankful for cheese.

A Pomeranian puppy looked Medusa in the eye – he became pomegranite.

I’m thankful for living in a time and place where starvation is unknown, though the Left keeps wanting to put it back into play.
I’m thankful that The Mrs. talked me into buying the chair that I sit in to write these posts. I had to get rid of my old recliner. Me and my old recliner? We went way back.
I’m thankful for beer. It actually made one of my friends smarter, you know, Budweiser©?
I’m thankful for hard exercise, where when I’m done, I know I’ve given it my all. I try to use the workout the actors who played the Marvel® superheroes use, but I get Thor just thinking about it.

I accidentally hit my Nokia® with a hammer, and took it to Best Buy™ so the Geek Squad© could fix it. Best Buy® said they don’t work on hammers.

I’m thankful that the WD-40© fixed the front doorknob. I promise this really worked – it’s non-friction.
I’m thankful that Pugsley and The Boy are sons I can be proud of, strong and with their own opinions for their own reasons, and with exactly the character that I had hoped for. It wasn’t easy, and no matter what I do, German children will always be kinder.
I’m thankful for Ma and Pa Wilder, who, though gone, helped me become the man I am today. There was a time when I had a difficult relationship with them: when I was born, I didn’t talk to them for two years.
I’m thankful to have lived through some of the most interesting times in human history, and having seen amazing advances in technology. And Chia Pets®.
I’m thankful for the first sip of hot coffee on a cool morning. I’m thankful for the last sip of coffee on a hot day. I guess words cannot espresso how much I like it.

What was the subtitle for War and Peace? Tsar Wars.

I’m thankful for the troubles I’ve had in life, because those have made me better. When I was young, Ma Wilder called me a pirate when I was learning the alphabet, since I always got lost at C.
I’m thankful for the talents that I was born with, because those gave me capacity. In fact, I have one talent that I’ll brag about: I can always tell what’s inside a wrapped present. It’s a gift.
I’m thankful for winter. Winter is the time of year when things are quiet, and I can think. Sometimes I work on math, which makes The Mrs. say that I’m cold and calculating.
I’m thankful that I don’t have regrets, and go to sleep soundly. I often sleep without pajamas, which seems to bother them at work.

And I’m thankful to spend time with you folks every week. Happy Thanksgiving!!

There’s a Twitstorm a Brewin’

“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here. Apart from you guys.” – Silicon Valley

The Mrs. didn’t want to go to a fortune teller because they always looked so depressed, but we settled on a happy medium.

Twitter© has officially unbanned Donald Trump.

It’s unclear if Trump will ever return to the platform that, arguably, he used better than anyone else. That being said, Elon Musk, who made the decision based on a Twitter® poll, made it clear that he thought The Don could not turn down the offer (I actually verified this one, but not all Tweets© are verified).

I’m not sure if Trump will return. I think that the number of followers that he has is simply huge, and that’s enticing for him. But a contract that he signed notes that if he’s going to use social media, he has to use the Truth© platform first. After six hours, he can use the other media. I’m not sure he’s that good at waiting, and honestly, the power of the Twitter© platform is the instant gratification from watching the responses and likes showing up.

We’ll see. The number of followers (over 80 million) is probably too much for him to ignore.

But this has some folks up in arms.

All of the letters of the alphabet have been declared hate symbols by the ADL© except for the letter C. Why? The other letters are not c.

Some folks are really upset. I think this one is a parody, but, who knows?

Juneau he’s gonna be disappointed.

And even the Mayor of London can’t resist making the point that his speech is the speech that shouldn’t be banned:

If Sadiq Khan, so Khan you.

And though Musk isn’t going to unban Alex Jones, he is bringing back Project Veritas©. These folks don’t upset the Left as much as Trump does, but they are still Enemies of the Left.

I hope Veritas© does some investigations into hammers – that would be hard-hitting stuff.

Predictably, some Leftists have left Twitter™ and gone to other platforms; Mastodon® is popular. But the Leftists are upset that their Leftist ideas don’t get an invulnerability pass like they got on Twitter©.

Why can’t mastodons clap? Because they’re extinct.

Some Leftists are just upset that Elon has $44 billion in the first place:

And some called Musk a hypocrite for banning folks for breaking a simple rule he’d put in place:

The Chinese military was banned from using Apple® watches due to them being a security risk. One soldier cried, “But my eight-year-old daughter made it for me!”

But I’ll leave the last word to Kevin Sorbo (of Hercules and Andromeda fame)

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Midterms Edition

“$10,000. Is that all it takes to be elected senator these days?” – Used Cars

If you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to vote, but not to drink. But if an eighteen year old looks at the candidates, they’ll understand why the adults are drinking.

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after this election. 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 – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Vs. The Deep State – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 730 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge. Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals. The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part II

The hype machine is up on the Left and in full swing. I’m actually surprised at the amazing levels of hyperbole that are in swing. Here are some examples:

Rob Reiner seems frightfully unhinged, like he might hurt himself. As do the TV talking heads:

Bill Maher disappoints me. I had thought that he was actually getting to the point where he was not the reflexive Leftist he was back in 2000. Nope. He occasionally talks more reasonably, but he’s as committed as any other Leftist. Aesop (LINK), you were right.

How insane is the Left? They’re running John Fetterman, a person slightly more capable of holding a conversation than a bologna sandwich for Senate. When Fetterman was (rightly) attacked for not knowing the difference between a noun and a shoelace, the Left tried to paint Republicans as “able-ist” as in wanting someone who was able to say his own name without drooling.

He also looks like a Goomba® from the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers.

Luckily, he has a growth on his neck so he can appeal to both Eagle® fans as well as Steeler® fans.

At least he helps Biden look good.

Because Biden looks like you know, the thing:

But Biden is all about scaring people, too, and so is his Chief of Staff.

The Left, though, is setting us up for more ballot shenanigans:

If you spend a few moments looking at the picture above, you’ll see that in most states, the independents break a little for the Right, and a little for the Left. But if you look closely at Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of the independents plus some of the Republicans “voted” for Biden. This is 100% certainty of the fraud that mail voting brings. Will they cook the books this election?

Why wouldn’t they. And, you’ll note, fences are going up in Washington D.C. You can tell that a country is close to Civil War when the politicians live in abject fear of the citizens.

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, organized political violence has been fairly muted this month. That’s good. But the .GOV folks are scared – fences are going up all over Washington, D.C. Even the FED has been surrounded.

In case there is rioting, Ron Paul has been busy.

Stephen Crowder, who broadcasts from a position on the Right, has been banned from his primary outlet, YouTube™, just in time for the election. Why? Don’t know. YouTube©’s rules are vague, so you don’t know why they banned you even after they banned you. This has a negative effect on free speech since people have no idea where the boundaries are, they stay as far back as they can. This, in effect, allows even more speech to be banned.

Another person banned is David Icke. He, however, is a British citizen that’s banned from visiting Europe. Why? He is listed as a terrorist. What does he talk about? How the elite are literal lizard people. From watching him in a few videos, I think he sincerely believes that. But he won’t be visiting any European countries anytime soon.

Reporter James Gordon Meek had his house raided in April. He hadn’t been seen for months after resigning from his job. He even skipped going to get an award for his reporting of the pullout from Afghanistan. He was seen recently, though. Why did the FBI raid a reporter and cause him to quit?

And there has been some good (potentially) good news with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter™. If rumors are correct, it really has twisted a lot of knickers on the Left. I don’t think Musk is on the Right, but he sure is messing with the Left, which might be enough.

How upset are they? They want to see if they can keep him from running his toy.

The Usual Suspects are upset. The “blue check mark” was the sign of an elite. Now, anyone can have it. The first price point was $20, but Elon quickly dropped it to $8. This was hilarious, because people on the Left like, well, like Dick Durbin, who has no self-awareness, Tweeted® the below:

AOC was upset by all this, so much so that she quickly became the butt of jokes:

The ADL®, long known for tolerance of viewpoints they don’t agree with (yes, this is sarcasm), was quick to jump in with the Orwellian idea that, to have diversity of opinions, Twitter™ must ban all speech ADL© doesn’t agree with.

And, represented as a meme:

So, Musk started fact-checking. The Left was upset that one of the first persons fact-checked was . . . The White House. The White House was so embarrassed that they deleted the Tweet©. Official Records Act violation, anyone?

And Kathy Griffin was permanently suspended for pretending to be Elon Musk. Ha!

I guess we know how some people feel about that . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. I wonder if his new shipment from ACME will come in soon?

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided. Will November be spicy due to elections? A cold front is coming through, so I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – will November cause a spike?

Economic:

Economic indicators did a dead cat bounce this month. Inflation has caught up with the Market.

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.

You vs. The Deep State

You are being lied to and controlled. Not (only) by Google™ and Twitter© and Facebook®, but by all of those folks at the request of the government. Yup, the DHS, the child of the drunken meetup between George Bush and every congressman except for Ron Paul, has decided that they will be the group that decides what information you are allowed to hear on the big social media platforms. This is not me making this up:

This is how this shows up in a meme:

Sure, they’re private companies. But being leaned on by .GOV to shut you up? I have felt it. I can tell you the month that this page was downranked (not a misprint) by Google™ leading to a major dropoff in traffic from search engines. The biggest months of attack? On the months I made the most fun of Joe. But after a while, it no longer looks like a mistake:

It looks like they’ve been planning it. And thanks to Snowden, we know how deeply they’re hooked in with electronic communications:

They want it all: to spy on anyone, at any time, and to control what information you are allowed to see and hear. They’re willing to go to great lengths:

And if you wonder what they value, look at who gets sent to jail:

Oddly enough, we are winning. There is no reason that the DHS would need to enlist the aid of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to have them restrict the flow of information to over hundreds of millions of people if we weren’t winning. Yeah, I know they own the majority of the institutions in the United States, but they’re proving they know they don’t own our minds. They’re scared.

Remember, this is in our hands, not theirs. And that’s what scares them.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Huh. Pre-Musk Twitter 404ed almost all of my Bad Guy links from private citizens by the end of October…

It’s almost like there’s suddenly a crime wave coverup ahead of an election or something…

These two are still up (for now – because they are from Blue Check TV news reporters?)…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582472383910117377
https://twitter.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1585595820077977600

Good Guys
https://youtu.be/akXJ_yuE-Ek
https://youtu.be/XRkpMhuXmZU
https://twitter.com/BornAKang/status/1584054864178339840

One Guy
Firefighter tries to be a good guy at a convenience store…
https://twitter.com/KcDiscover/status/1582552334994796547
https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-missouri-shooting-kcmo-firefighter-anthony-santi-charges/41693134

Body Count
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/47/95
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/19/daniel-bobinski-interview-embalmer-says-blood-has-changed/
https://icandecide.org/v-safe-data/
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-mortality-rate-is-up-17-across
https://chaosnavigator.substack.com/p/80-young-canadian-doctors-died-suddenly
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-surgeon-general-covid-mrna-vaccine-found-to-cause-84-increase-in-death-for-men-ages-18-39?utm_campaign=64483
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ob-gyn-laments-covid-jabs-massive-unprecedented-side-effects-for-pregnant-women-babies/
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/25-percent-people-received-covid-19-vaccination-missed-work-serious-event-cdc
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fborder%2F2022%2F10%2F12%2Fgraphic-mexican-cartel-gunmen-dump-4-human-heads-near-texas-border%2F
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/glock-switch-epidemic-may-be-rippling-through-americas-inner-cities
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-made-up-60-4-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2021/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-undercounts-number-times-armed-citizens-thwarted-active-shooting-incidents-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

Vote Count
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-trump-election-fraud/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/bxwz-o06.html
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/jawdropping-fraud-systemic-ballot-harvesting-in-orlando-black-neighborhoods/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F10%2Fdemocrats_are_aboard_the_big_data_emtitanicem.html
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/03/mayor-says-milwaukee-election-worker-fired-over-ballot-fraud/69616108007/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mail-in-pennsylvania-ballots-with-incorrect-dates-will-be-saved-not-counted-2022-11-02/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/new-york-has-more-3-million-voters-lacking-proof-identity-analysis
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/bombshell-texts-show-milwaukee-mayor-colluding-with-democrats-to-rig-2022-election/
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-voter-registration-delaware-constitutions-da8ac023e52da4a78c2ccb110750f8aa
https://whowhatwhy.org/deep-state/what-donald-trump-got-right-about-voting-machines/

Civil War
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1588262127105703936
https://resavager.substack.com/p/are-americans-still-a-people
https://unherd.com/2022/10/how-turbo-wokism-broke-america/
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/no-the-usa-is-not-headed-towards
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jordan-klepper-civil-war_n_63574553e4b051268c57fda3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/civil-war-mar-a-lago-violent-extremism/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/civil-wars-are-too-easy-to-start-just-ask-the-spaniards
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/10/14/donie-osullivan-civil-war-threats-extremism-zw-orig-contd.cnn-business
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-paul-pelosi-attack-latest-cold-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/podcasts/civil-war-belle-sebastian-narrated-articles.html
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/is-another-american-civil-war-possible/
https://currentpub.com/2022/10/31/how-to-avert-a-partisan-civil-war/
https://www.niskanencenter.org/americas-unfinished-civil-war-with-jeremi-suri/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1278293.shtml
https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2022/10/23/a-chronic-civil-war-is-raging-on-in-us
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/politics/jan-6-civil-war-violence-what-matters/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/13/no-we-arent-headed-to-civil-war-00061696
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/civil-war-isnt-on-the-horizon-the-original-battle-never-ended/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/dixon-democrats-destroying-america-in-revenge-for-civil-war.html
https://americanmind.org/salvo/become-undraftable/

Elon Musk: “This one weird trick drives Leftists nuts!”

“Can we stop twittering like fishwives?” – The Death of Stalin

Where did Sauron take his driver’s test? The department of Mordor vehicles.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter® finally went through. It’s almost as if he’s bored running a car company, a space exploration company, and managing his hair implants.

His purchase of Twitter©, though, is different. It’s made all of the Leftist intelligentsia as crazy as evening visitors to the Pelosi house.

Of course, Elon Tweeted® about that:

But when he was challenged, clarified:

Hillary Clinton responded that she was outraged:

And members of her party were puzzled:

The reason Leftists are upset is simple: Twitter™, though it’s never been horribly profitable, has an outsized grasp on public attention. We’re no longer in the world where the Lincoln-Douglas debates where each candidate would speak for a total of ninety minutes in a three-hour debate. Nope. Twitter™ is a platform that allows no more than 280 characters in a Tweet©.

It does match the attention span of the audience, and it has a format that’s very simple for amplifying very short ideas. It’s like taking an idea or an emotion and distilling it down to the smallest bite. If the Declaration of Independence would have been a Tweet®, it would have been, “No way, dude. Make me.” It seems to lose a bit of the majesty that way, but Franklin would ReTweet™ it to King George with a woodcut picture of Washington’s wife’s butt.

Twitter™, then, is important to the Left. The primary reason it’s important is that, until Musk bought it, it was entirely owned by the Left. For a while, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter©, maintained it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” and most content that wasn’t illegal was a go.

Gradually, though, the Left began to hate that. No matter what Trump may or may not have done in office, he was the master of the Tweet©. He could, in a few short words, eviscerate an opponent in such a way that they could never recover. And it was an unfettered way to reach millions.

And the Left hated that. Since they had captured the media, both print and broadcast, they hated anyone who could escape their gatekeeping. Someone like Rush Limbaugh or a group like Fox News™ had to be co-opted, tamed, and turned into a loyal opposition. Rush Limbaugh of 2002 was just a shadow of Rush Limbaugh 1992. And Fox News© never veers too far off of the mainstream.

But Twitter©? It could go to any topic, and ideas could spread at the speed of the Internet across the globe. Any idea could spread this fast, and it could be amplified by tens of thousands. It was important enough that bot nets were created to retweet and comment to give oxygen to topics that certain people liked, while attempting to bury content that certain people didn’t like. How bad are the bot nets? Elon now has the receipts:

On one hand, this was a massive amount of intelligence that I’m sure made the CIA and NSA and FBI very, very happy. Not since Facebook™ had such information been available to them: names, places, private conversations, email addresses, locations, and beliefs.

I stopped using Twitter® and just started yelling my views in public. I have three followers now, but I think two are FBI.

Trump, though, showed the danger in this system. The wrong ideas, unapproved ideas, could begin to spread. The result was that banning for ideas started. Alex Jones in 2018 was the first, and his accounts had over six million followers. Why? Because his accounts had over six million followers.

Steve Bannon was banned. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for not liking an actress. British politician Katie Hopkins was banned for badthink. Marjorie Taylor Greene (a sitting member of Congress) was banned for daring to share her belief that the 2020 election was hacked.

Those are obvious – but dozens of people have been banned for opinions about the COVID-19 “vaxx” that have been proven, over time, to be 100% true. But they’re banned.

70,000 accounts were purged in January, 2021, for sharing QAnon stuff.

There have been Leftists banned, sure. But Twitter© had become the official mouthpiece of the Leftist oligarchy. Have an opinion that drifted too far from the accepted window of opinions? Banned. And the Left loves it. Check out a list of their demands:

I demand to be recognized, too. I identify as non-Bidenary.

This illustrates the mode of operation of the Left – free speech is their stated goal, right until the minute when they have power. Then? Speech must be controlled, in ever smaller boxes, until the only opinions one is free to share are the official and accepted opinions of the Left. To be clear, this is nothing new. Freedom of speech was officially part of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, but actually attempting to use it would nearly certainly result in voluntary visits to the GULAG if not just a single accidental 9x18mm Makarov shot to the head.

That is the way the Left likes their free speech. But Elon messed up their plan.

To be clear, I don’t think Elon is a savior. He’s just, like Trump, a wildcard that the Left didn’t anticipate. He’s been willing to play their games. Tesla™ made money early because of tax incentives. SpaceX® makes billions a year from government contracts. And Elon’s hair was developed in a secret government lab, like COVID-19. And like COVID, it’s growing wild.

In the end, I think it’s another iteration of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – if there are two possible outcomes, the most amusing outcome will be the thing that happens. I mean, if Jimmy Kimmel is mad at you, you know you’re doing something right.