Category: Elon Musk Week

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.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. 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.

Energy: We Need Everything. Now.

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy:  sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body.  Anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

What do you do with a dead chemist?  Barium.

I remember way back in high school gym class when I was a freshman.  One day we showed up in the gym and saw a roughly six-foot diameter ball in the middle of the gym floor, as if a majestic bird the size of Alec Baldwin had left an egg for us.

That was new.

Coach said, “Welcome to Push Ball.  Wilder and Jones, you two are captains.  Pick your teams.”  Jones and I were on the football team together, so we divvied up the rest of the boys.  I think the girls were doing something like advanced couch-sitting that day.

Coach followed up:  “Here are the rules.  No rules.  If your team pushes the ball into the opposing team’s bleacher, you get a point.”  Technically, that was a rule, but I decided not to argue.

Pretty quickly I divined that part of the point of Push Ball was to burn up a lot of energy on a game that was very hard to win.  Probably “something, something teamwork blah blah blah”.

But then I looked at the ball.  It was filled with air, not Baldwin-DNA-soaked egg yolk, so it wasn’t all that heavy.  But it was way too big for any one person to grab.

It wasn’t entirely smooth, though.  There were laces.

These laces were like those on a football, except the gap between the laces was big – big enough to slip my fingers through.  I developed a plan.  I told my guys, “It’s gonna get easy – we’re gonna win.  When I say go, get in front of me and block.”

Alternate meme text:  “When the weather tells you to dress for the 100’s.”

As we played, I concentrated on rotating the laces towards me.  When they were right there about shoulder height, I slipped my fingers in the gaps between the laces, and got a good hold.

“Now!” I yelled.

With the leverage of the handhold, I could easily use the opposing team’s force to pop the ball back towards me, and up.  And with the ball gone, my guys got in front and blocked.  I ran, holding the absurdly large ball over my head with one hand and slammed it into the retracted bleachers causing the wood to reverberate under the mighty force, scoring the first point.

“THIS. IS. SPARTA!” I yelled.  Okay, no I didn’t, it sounds way cooler to pretend that I did.  And I sure as hell felt like Thor (not the fake Marvel® one) slamming his hammer and making the lightning crash.  Our team really did high five.

Coach blew his whistle.

“Okay, we now have a rule.  You can’t do that.”

We had a really good weightlifting facility.

Weirdly, this post is the second one about energy.  In one sense, our world is like that game of push ball.  We work to innovate and create breakthroughs to better use the energy we have.  The number of cars are up in the country, but the miles per gallon are way up, too.

Government would love to take credit for it, but it’s really not the case.  Sure the CAFE standards have led to higher mileage, but a lot of that is due to innovation that occurred outside of those standards.  When I read that the Trans Am® in Smokey and the Bandit only produced 200 horsepower, I realized that most of the cars I own have more power under the hood, and get better mileage.  I always wanted a car with a T-top like the Trans Am™ in high school, so my dates could have had more legroom.

I was considerate that way.

We have become more efficient at using energy, and that’s great.  But we find more uses for energy, too.  If I lived in the same house today in 1977, right now there would be zero power usage outside of the fridge and the freezer.  As it is, I’m watching a silly movie on a huge television while I type on a laptop with alarm clocks that don’t tick from springs winding down.  I’m happy for that, because if the alarm clock would go tic-tic-tic all night, it would keep The Mrs. awake and she’d want to toc.

Is my house using a lot of energy?  No, but there are a lot more devices in a home today using energy passively, like charging cell phones and security systems and “always on” televisions and computers and garage door openers on low power mode.

I drove up to my garage and saw someone had painted a “3” on it.  I thought, “That’s odd.”

Even industry is more efficient, generally, at using energy.  Modern manufacturing plants are expert at using what would have been waste heat in all sorts of ways to save energy, which in turn saves money.  I mean, don’t be an engineer if you’re not so hot in thermodynamics.

But at the base of all modern industry, energy is crucial.  It is the ultimate leverage.  One analyst noted that $20 billion in Russian natural gas was used by Germany to create $2 trillion in economic output.  That’s stuff made.  It’s amazing leverage – $1 in natural gas was the basis for creating $100 worth of added value.  Germany would like to start a war, but the rule is that it’s three Reichs, and you’re out.

Energy is that important.  And energy usage isn’t a linear progression – it has been exponential.  The problem is that energy usage is growing nearly exponentially.  If you look at any short-term graphs, it doesn’t quite show it, but here’s one that puts it in perspective.  I got it at Our World in Data (LINK) and it’s reused by CC (LINK).

If Ebola grew as fast as the world energy consumption, it would be called Hyperbola.

I think this one graph alone should be tattooed backward on the head of every Leftist who says BuT MUh ALtERnaTivE EneRgy.  Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.

The world population right now is 7.97 billion people.  In 1920, the population was closer to 1.9 billion, which is roughly the number of people on a typical airplane nowadays.  In 1920 electricity was only in 35% of homes.  In the United States.  Most people in the world in 1920 had no electrical power usage at all, heated their homes with firewood or coal, and only saw electrical lights at the picture show.  Also, they were, sadly, almost sixty years too early to see Smokey and the Bandit.

Let’s go back to Germany (not the 1920 version) but today.  Just $20 billion in natural gas costs $2 trillion in value added.  Population is growing exponentially.  Energy use is growing exponentially.  We’re setting ridiculous ideas that we’ll be all-electric by 2030 by changing rules to limit innovation and declare winners.  It’s like Coach not allowing innovation in Push Ball, but this time with real-world consequences.

But those electric cars.  They’re powered by . . . what, exactly?  Seriously, look at the chart.  What?  Nuclear we haven’t built?  Solar which is so small it can’t be seen?  Hydropower which is in decline because it can’t be built?  Wind?  I can’t see wind outside, and I also can barely see it on the chart.

Looks like the Green Energy Plan is free of charge.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who is not realizing that the Leftist energy pipe dream won’t lead to the greatest suffering that mankind has ever seen, even more than anything Global Warming® could ever cause, even more than both of the World Wars, combined, is deluded.

We need more innovation in energy, and we need it now, because the exponentials in energy use and population require investment to keep ahead of the game.  Exponentials are funny that way, you have to be like Alice’s Red Queen and run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The Leftists that want to bring it all down?  They deserve to be put into a Push Ball filled with Alec Baldwin’s DNA-soaked yolk.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: They Hate You

“Hell, you boys is in the occupied territory. You’re 40 miles behind enemy lines. That’s smack dab in the middle of World War III.” – Red Dawn

Why do angry clocks only tok?  They’re tiked off.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions are certainly increasing.  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 – Naming The Enemy:  You – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Shocks To The System – 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 710 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 this month.

Naming The Enemy:  You

Since Biden was sworn in, the relationship between citizens and the government has fundamentally changed.  Trump was like a game show host.  Biden is like a character from a Stephen King novel, and not one of the good ones.

The sheer hate shown by the Left, though, has replaced every bit of pretend love.  Biden has set himself up not as the President of the United States, but, at best, the President of the Democratic Party.  And that party, as well as all of the Left has let the mask slip.  How far?  This far:

Yes.  That is a governor of a state, indicating that people who live in the state she is supposed to represent, should move.  Admittedly, she looks like she’s auditioning for the role of Morticia for the “couldn’t get a date in high school players”.  But since she (presumably) hasn’t (yet) Cuomo’d her staff, well, she’s the governor.  And she hates you.  You are her enemy.  She has made that clear.

And so did Biden’s press secretary:

Merely voting for the “wrong” candidate makes you the enemy.  You, too, can be a “threat to our democracy” if you don’t vote the way that Big Biden wants you to vote.  I’m not sure why that upsets them, since the voting isn’t how they win elections, it’s the counting that wins them elections.

But I guess it sets you up to be an extremist.  What’s an extremist?

Anyone who doesn’t believe what (they) the Leftist “majority” believe.  Simple, right?  Don’t like chocolate?  Extremist.  Think that owning guns might be a right?

Extremist.  Biden even said so.  Again.  Last summer, he threatened his own citizens.  Apparently, he liked the results so much that he did it again.

I think Joe might have forgotten something:

But, seriously, he really, really, might have forgotten something:

And I thought he was on Ukraine’s side?  But, regardless, he has this really weird view on weapons, and I think it can be summarized by this one meme:

And all of this nonsense was before his ill-advised 1930’s totalitarian aesthetic national speech.  What did he want to talk about with his background that would have been appropriate at a May Day parade at Red Square in 1936?

Well, he had a lot to say.  About inflation?  No.  About Russia?  China?  Ukraine?  The energy crisis?  The economy?  No.  Really just about how much he really, really hates anyone on the Right.

People on the Left were quick to join in:

 

So, you’re the Enemy of the Left.  Congratulations!  But I’m not so sure about Biden’s comments . . . .

Violence And Censorship Update

Just like the segment above, I had more censorship this month than I can work through.  In many cases, it is actively impacting writers like me, with (apparently) Google® doing quite a bit to throttle traffic.  This is nothing new, but as far as I can tell, it’s accelerating and becoming more brazen at all levels.

But on the bigger stage, “Gays Against Groomers” was shut down.  The person running “Libs of TicTok” was doxed as well, but still maintains their presence.  Why shut them down?

I’m guessing a narrative violation, since “Groomer” is now officially a hate word.

But that’s just a Twitter® account.  It’s not like big tech is actively trying to shut down speech from the Right, is it?

Odysee® has been threatened by Apple® to not allow their app in the Apple© Appstore™ unless they strip voices on the Right from their content.  Odysee™ has, so far, told ‘em to buzz off.  That normally works pretty well until they come after the bank accounts.  Which they will.

The FBI has done its best to join in:

Remember, the FBI searched Barron Trump’s bedroom before they searched Hunter Biden’s.  And they leaked photos of Trump’s place, but not photos of the Epstein investigation.  That probably tells you all you need to know about how political the FBI is.

But at least big tech is doing this on its own, right?

No.  They colluded with the Biden Administration on a regular basis on “what to censor”, which in any real world would be a big deal.  But who controls what’s on the net?  Big tech.  The idea that independent voices can get a large following is something they’re working desperately to control.

They’re trying to understand why you would avoid taking the science juice into your veins.  Testing and actual data are too much to ask.  Keep in mind that one statistic I saw showed that 44% of pregnant women who were in the science juice trial miscarried.  And that it’s still recommended for pregnant women.

Even Bill Maher, who is no real friend to the Right, is stunned at the hypocrisy.  Me?

Not so much anymore.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.

 

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 upward this month, though not to previous levels.  I think it continues to be muted because the Left has kept their dogs on a leash.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it dropped a bit.  We’ll see what impact Biden’s speech has.

Economic:

Economic indicators ricocheted down this month.  Not promising, but this is a strange election season.

Illegal Aliens:

It set a new record for this time of year.  But it was down.  Must still be hot out.  And Elon had something to say, too.

Shocks To The System

When the Russians invade Ukraine, I was mainly worried about the impact of losing the things that Russia and Ukraine made that would impact the outside world – things like wheat, or fertilizer.  I really didn’t expect the West to collectively decide, “breathing isn’t important” and cut off their own oxygen.  They did.  Natural gas is very important to the European economy, and without it, whole segments of what they produce have to get shut down – like COVID-level impacts, but because they decided not to buy natural gas.

Oops.

Whether intentional or not, it certainly has given a lot of data about shock testing of the economy of Europe:

Now it’s created such imbalances in the European energy market that electricity bills are skyrocketing.  How do girls decide who they’re going to date?

Collectively, the governments are deciding that they want the ability to do (spins wheel) whatever they want to do in response to the crisis.  Really.

Meanwhile, electricity shortages are showing up elsewhere.  In Colorado, I think users got a credit for installing the remote-control thermostat plus an annual payment ($25?) but lose the ability to choose how warm their house is.  Not horrific, but a sign, potentially of stresses to come.

As the interest rates go up, another stress goes up, too.  Housing prices drop and the housing market starts to lock up.  We’ve seen this before.

Economic stresses, especially energy stresses, have the ability to be incredibly destabilizing to a society, pushing it from near war to over the edge.  Beware as the economy falls apart.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/LAPDHQ/status/1560387842873757697

https://twitter.com/i/status/1554292158684794882

https://twitter.com/i/status/1565820292827586561

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1558877210231984128

https://breaking911.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/XRdD_4cG-ZgMyeke.mp4?_=1

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1562787749291106312

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1554279913519136769

https://twitter.com/i/status/1556399786948976640

https://twitter.com/i/status/1565078355267170304

https://youtu.be/NuenlBlzPPg

 

Body Count

https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/BcIggWPF0Th-png__700.jpg

https://www.unz.com/jtaylor/more-murders/

https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-08-19-usa-has-3rd-most-murders-in-world-subtract-five-democrat-cities-189th.html#

https://vdare.com/articles/41-black-on-white-homicides-home-invasions-including-a-boat-invasion-really-are-a-thing-july-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america

https://www.fairus.org/press-releases/border-security/fair-analysis-49-million-illegal-aliens-have-crossed-our-borders

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/16/report-44-percent-of-pregnant-women-in-pfizer-trial-lost-their-babies-fda-and-cdc-recommended-jabs-for-expectant-mothers-anyway/

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/08/19/correction-eleven-mrna-subjects-suffered-spontaneous-abortions/

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/you-are-25x-more-likely-to-be-injured

https://expose-news.com/2022/08/09/1-in-246-people-die-shortly-after-covid-vaccination/

https://expose-news.com/2022/08/09/mortality-rates-lowest-among-unvacinated/

https://twitter.com/i/status/1555940645985890305

https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1562718083747196928

https://www.skirsch.com/covid/HealthcareStories.pdf

https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1563848349777887234

https://twitter.com/afshineemrani/status/1564000788107513856/photo/1

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/this-one-graph-tells-you-everything

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/do-you-know-how-many-people-have

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-4f6

https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1562529247826165760

Vote Count

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/29/what-is-to-be-done-2/

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-at-the-summit-of-truth

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/los-angeles-soros-da-gascon-recall-fails

https://www.12news.com/article/news/politics/elections/decision/some-pinal-county-election-precincts-run-out-of-in-person-ballots/75-93414e02-3830-4979-8153-48c7c5af69f8

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/08/16/ny-citizens-audit-finds-hidden-infrastructure-in-voter-rolls/

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/georgia-secretary-of-states-office

https://nationalfile.com/mail-in-ballots-from-2020-discovered-at-baltimore-usps-facility/

https://twitter.com/bennpetersen/status/1554672205472022529

https://youtu.be/dwbzDr1WrOQ

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/recent-features/when-mules-go-ballot-trafficking/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/13/california-san-bernardino-secession-november-election

https://twitter.com/loganclarkhall/status/1562942569876946947

https://www.valleynewslive.com/2022/08/10/fargo-school-board-votes-7-2-no-longer-recite-pledge-allegiance/

 

Civil War

https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-drove-the-great-awokening-the-news-media-or-academia/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/29/us-civil-war-fears-poll

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/americans-are-too-pampered-and-neurotic-to-fight-a-civil-war/ar-AA10BUHx

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/civil-war-2-0-not-on-techno-totalitarians-watch/

https://www.journal-news.net/are-we-headed-for-a-civil-war/article_5c22ca4c-5b81-5874-bbc0-7171035458b0.html

https://amac.us/are-we-headed-for-a-civil-war/

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/17/civil-war-porn/

https://unherd.com/2022/08/americas-tribes-are-ready-for-war/

https://www.governing.com/now/no-america-is-not-on-the-verge-of-a-new-civil-war

https://www.theonion.com/conservatives-explain-why-they-are-preparing-for-a-civi-1849414130

https://www.foxnews.com/media/civil-war-here-thanks-maga-mob-msnbcs-tiffany-cross

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-us-civil-war-wont-look-like-last-one-historians-2022-8

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-want-a-civil-war-after-fbi-raid-of-mar-a-lago-2022-8

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-07-27/fear-of-a-second-us-civil-war-ignites-debate.html

https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2022/8/11/23301922/republicans-are-rooting-for-a-civil-war-mona-charen-column

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-supporters-tiktok-civil-war/

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3591492-the-gathering-political-storm-in-america/

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/republicans-join-in-with-white-nationalist-attacks-and-civil-war-threats/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d39zq/trump-supporters-civil-war-fbi-search-mar-a-lago

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-america-is-in-such-a-mess-gvb25p0tj

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/how-when-do-we-come-together-again/

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/msnbc-host-civil-war-is-here-with-republicans/

 

In Summary….

https://twitter.com/i/status/1557482526536515584

https://twitter.com/raqrockyjones/status/1557756532221218817

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter.  That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently.  What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do.  The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy.  You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development.  Huh.  Nope, none of that matters.  A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it.  The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car.  It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.  This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth?  It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game?  The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point.  A.I. exists.  A.I. is real.  Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence?  Nope.  And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I.  Why?  I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge.  What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy?  This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine.  It would be worth billions.  And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be.  Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function.  What would A.I. value?

  • Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
  • Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
  • Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter.  Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I.  And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop.  Favorite artist?  M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier.  Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system?  Easy.  Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system?  No problem.  An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water.  It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself.  While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe.  How quick?  500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is.  That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®.  And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan?  Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting.  If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.?  What would I program them to do?

Yup.  You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age.  It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse.  We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Ministry of Truth, and Socially Coming Apart

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

TEN

My day was great until noon.  Then I woke up.

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

I’ve kept Clock O’Doom at the same location.  For now.  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 – Ministry of Truth – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Abortion and Conflict – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 690 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Ministry of Truth

We now have a Ministry of Truth.  Oh, I’m sorry – it’s the Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board.  Why?  Presumably because people say things the Leftists don’t agree with.

I’ve heard that calling a groomer “groomer” really makes them mad.

The leader of the board that determines what is true and what isn’t?

Nina Jankowicz.

Nina, if you’re unaware, is the poster child for insufferable Leftist blather.  She is, first, a low level, stooge for the Left.  Her expertise in all things disinformation allowed her to opine that Hunter Biden’s laptop was expressible only in the holy high words of the Left: Russian disinformation.  Russian disinformation was, according to the legend of the Left, the only reason that St. Hillary wasn’t elected.

Sadly, this Nina has no luftballons.

Now, ordinarily I don’t mind such creatures – their trajectory is predictable – they write a book, take a position washing dogs for their political masters, and then gracelessly drift away.  These sorts of political vampires are what make writing fun.

But Nina’s different.  Nina wasn’t hired by the political bits of Washington, she was hired by Homeland Security.  What’s the difference?  The Department of Homeland Security is primarily a law enforcement agency.  It’s (sort-of) okay having a reptilian partisan hack at the cabinet level, but infesting law enforcement with Leftist partisan robots is a step too far, especially when Resident Biden is talking about Ultra MAGA, or whatever the voices in his head were telling him that afternoon.

At least, though, the mask is off.

Violence And Censorship Update

It’s been fairly quiet on the political violence front, at least recently.  We do have plenty of Censorship news.

Okay, this isn’t real.

For the first time ever, got some good news up first:

Twitter®.  If you had a wheelbarrow, you could have made a fortune mining salt from Leftist tears.  The very same Leftists that were overjoyed that they controlled Twitter® aren’t exactly thrilled by the idea that they won’t control this platform.  Here’s some salt to share:

It’s even better to mine the salt from a famous person.

Twitter isn’t done censoring, though.  They censored info about the FDA containing info from the FDA.

DuckDuckGo® had to counterbalance the loss of Twitter© – they decided that the only news sources they would handle would be trusted.  I’m betting Nina will love that.

And never forget that having an opinion that the Left doesn’t like is punishable by violence.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is again flat.  Perhaps turning back up in May or June – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a little in April.  Much more in June?

Economic:

I had bet the economic numbers would be worse, and I was wrong.  If the stock market slide continues, though . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year.  All-time record levels.  Again.

Abortion and Conflict

The draft abortion decision by the Supreme Court is out.  It shows a huge divide in the country.  An example of the salt to be mined is here:

There were even a few words from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

And the Federal Reserve© had a comment:

The United States is hopelessly divided.  An example?

This was thought of as a negative result that would make people on the Right mad, rather than the desired result.  Tinder® and all of the rest of the hook-up culture has been horrible for the people involved, especially women.  I spent some time watching a YouTube® of a pro-life march at a college in some city.  The pro-life folks were kind and polite, but the people on the other side of the issue were mean, angry, and wouldn’t listen, at all.

The idea of a rational discussion and debate with the Left is nearly impossible.  The objectives are 100% out of sync.

The end result of all this program changing is an America that is far more divided, and a step closer to Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1509177129044488192

https://twitter.com/i/status/1502074883550892033

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510413517509255175

https://twitter.com/i/status/1520557517130153989

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510909715961679873

https://youtu.be/iykHLx65WNw

https://twitter.com/i/status/1507576908099293189

https://twitter.com/wdsu/status/1506375168058343427

https://abcnews4.com/news/local/video-gunfire-rings-out-at-little-league-game-in-north-charleston-wciv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnEdeUbWAlg

https://twitter.com/ATLUncensored/status/1516757571570348038

https://twitter.com/OsintUpdates/status/1510581397458599936

https://www.inquirer.com/news/shooting-philadelphia-kensington-mantua-strawberry-mansion-20220415.html

Good Guys

https://www.tmz.com/2022/04/02/sucker-punch-high-school-track-runner-press-charges-lawsuit/

https://youtu.be/-qUgXFN2aLw

https://twitter.com/t0masimp8000/status/1503871472498257920

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/houston-car-dealership-employee-flips-script-on-attempted-robber-sends-him-running/ar-AAW5MYE

Two Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10684433/Gun-wielding-Texas-man-shot-dead-girlfriends-ex-husband-not-face-charges.html

Body Count

https://southfront.org/from-30-to-40-ukrainian-children-disappeared-without-a-trace-in-spain/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/avian-flu-has-spread-to-27-states-sharply-driving-up-egg-prices/ar-AAWgZBQ

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/bird-flu-27-million-birds-dead/

https://airtable.com/shrbaT4x8LG8EbvVG/tbl7xKsSUIOPAa7Mx

https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/04/08/athletes-833-serious-540-dead-post-injection/

https://palexander.substack.com/p/us-military-doctor-testifies-she?s=r

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/number-covid-patients-us-hospitals-reaches-record-low-83819273

https://www.revolver.news/2022/04/black-lives-matter-reign-of-terror/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/opioid-overdose-deaths-teens-skyrocketed-due-fentanyl/story?id=84035862

https://cowboystatedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/wyo-nuke-map-1.jpg

Vote Count

THE STEAL WAS REAL – WATCH “2000 Mules” NOW:  https://www.bitchute.com/embed/TizNoVq1qcwb/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/film-2000-mules-offers-vivid-proof-of-voter-fraud/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/dinesh-dsouzas-2000-mules-ballot-trafficking-expose-has-evidence-can-it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/dishonest-pivot-heart-new-voter-fraud-conspiracy/

True The Vote: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1513585569779040262

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/08/true-the-vote-previously-undisclosed-details-show-rico-crimes-in-2020-election/

https://www.truethevote.org/election-integrity-testimony-in-wisconsin-on-thursday-march-24-2022/

https://www.truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FILE_5193_no-meta.pdf

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/30/exclusive-true-the-votes-catherine-engelbrecht-mules-went-routes-trafficking-ballots-repeatedly-day-after-day-ahead-2020-election/

Zuck: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/rigged-documentary-details-zuckerbergs-400m-vote-juicing-for-biden

https://www.hastingstribune.com/ap/agriculture/zuckerberg-helped-fund-the-2020-elections-now-republicans-seek-to-ban-future-grants/article_24dae7d5-3989-50b3-8c63-528185976ade.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/165939/election-funding-voter-suppression-zuckerberg

AZ: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/07/brnovich-interim-report-finds-serious-vulnerabilities-in-2020-election/

FL: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-voter-registration-republicans-overtake-democrats-100000

GA: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/investigators-georgia-ballot-harvesting-probe-zero-funding-eyewitness

PA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/15/pennsylvania-compelling-evidence-shows-blue-counties-scored-grants-in-2020-election/

PA: https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/lehighvalley/lehigh-county-da-likely-hundreds-of-instances-where-people-deposited-more-than-1-ballot-into/article_90b9cd12-b451-11ec-b79a-9f2106bb481b.html

USA:https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/24/poll-one-in-six-biden-voters-would-have-changed-their-vote-if-they-had-known-about-scandals-suppressed-by-media/

USA: https://www.newsmax.com/us/biden-usps-election-funding/2022/03/28/id/1063188/

USA: https://www.axios.com/2022-midterms-out-state-money-71487d18-76fd-452a-9020-d93ddf4e3106.html

 

Civil War

https://dnyuz.com/2022/04/03/flurry-of-new-laws-move-blue-and-red-states-further-apart/

https://aninjusticemag.com/contrary-to-popular-opinion-we-are-not-winning-this-war-196bc828bfdf

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/will-war-break-out-between-red-and-blue-states-93cac4d8c219

https://newrepublic.com/article/165959/global-age-civil-war

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-democratic-socialists-of-americas-civil-war-over-bds/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-civil-war-for-americas-banks/

https://www.businessinsider.com/civil-war-violence-2022-midterm-elections-texas-republican-trump-2022-3

https://www.denisonforum.org/current-events/is-america-headed-toward-another-civil-war/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRhTPOXVIAEyVYU.jpg

Negotiation: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

“We have been negotiating with men in UFOs for seven years. If we don’t get to Washington by Friday, the whole deal will be off.” – Real Men

Johnny Depp is sorry he doesn’t have Amber Heard immunity.

Elon has been negotiating for Twitter®, recently.  I thought I’d dust off some old comments about negotiation that I had laying around.  He is looking for a deal.  In most of his career, his deals have been very much of the “there’s no way that will ever work” type of deal.  He made $3billion off of PayPal™ and then risked it all on SpaceX®.  That deal and his hair plugs have worked out very, very well for him, so I bet he’ll be able to close the Twitter™ deal.

So, I thought a post about negotiation was in order.

Why talk about negotiation now?  As society changes, there are going to be many, many points where deals will be made.  I can’t predict what deals will be available, but you’ll never know when you might need to swap some pickled yak funk for a tub of dingo chum.  Mmm, fresh dingo chum.

I have observed that the people who get wealthy off of deals look at many more deals than they ever make.  The last time I played poker (years ago), I played 30 hands for the evening.  I won two.  I walked out of the place with thirty bucks – I had started with twenty.  I would have made more, but I kept trying to lose after a certain point so I didn’t walk out of my neighbor’s house $80 up.  I would have considered that rude because it was the first time I played poker there.

Lots of bad deals, two winning deals.

That lesson leads to the zeroth rule, mainly because I realized I was done with the rest of them and am too lazy to renumber everything.

Rule 0:  The Stakes

It’s easier to win or create great deals when the stakes are so small that you can think calmly and rationally.  Hence:  rich dudes (say, Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos) can make lots of small bets that were white-knuckle negotiations on the other side of the table.  Jeff Bezos probably uses living human kidneys (still in the human) as table stakes at his poker games.

The Mrs. wanted to play strip poker, but I figured she just wanted to do laundry.  So I folded.

Rule 1:  BATNA

The first rule of negotiation is that you don’t have to end up with an agreement – you need to know your BATNA – Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.  In the poker example, I folded and was out a buck or two on each hand I walked away from.  Several times in my life I’ve walked away from job offers because they weren’t right, and no amount of negotiation could have made them right.

Sometimes, (really most times) the best deal is no deal.  Take my ex-wife.  Please.

Rich people generally walk away from most deals.  People like Warren Buffet could literally do almost any deal he wanted to do, since most companies are smaller than the available cash that Warren keeps in the sweaty folds of his skin.  Buffet reminds me of the story about the guy on the golf course who kept talking about how much money he was worth.  Another golfer, an old Texan, couldn’t stand it.

“How much are you worth, son?” asked the Texan.

“Fifteen million dollars,” the other golfer said, proudly.

The Texan responded . . . “Flip you for it.”

The question you have to ask is . . . what happens if you don’t come to an agreement?

If you’re Buffett, there’s no deal you have to make.  But me?  That’s a different story.  Sometimes there are consequences from missing deals – sometimes significant.

One particular negotiation that I had to make involved negotiation over some land with a guy worth about $80 million bucks.  That leads to rule 1A (yup, being lazy again).

A lion would never play golf, but a Tiger Wood.

Rule 1A:  If you can help it, NEVER negotiate with someone worth $80 million because they don’t care, so there is no BATNA-level leverage.  Unless the deal is ludicrously good for them, they have NO reason to even speak with you.  Unless, your kid is in the same calculus class and football team as their kid, which my kid was.  So, the rich guy talked with me.

He offered my company his land at ten times the going rate.

Our alternative as a company?  It was spending several million more than his offer on another patch of land.  We almost bought the other land, on principle, but my boss decided that he didn’t want to explain why he spent several million dollars because he had no leverage in a deal.

The rich guy?  He literally wouldn’t have cared.  Our deal, as awful as it was, was worth more than the average family makes in years, and was literally a favor because his kid went to school with my kid.

Sometimes your alternative sucks.  But we had one.

Another big mistake is buying into the frame of reference of the other party.  If his opening position is that he’ll trade you a handful of magic beans for your two children, negotiating him down to just one child isn’t awesome negotiation (unless you really want him to take both).  No, the deal is bad and probably isn’t worth negotiation.

Rule 2:  Don’t negotiate against yourself.

I worked with a guy who I’ll call Moe (because that was his name) who was a genius at negotiation.  We would drive around on company time and he would take me, the new kid at work, out to look at “jobsites”.  This may or may not have involved beer on several occasions.

Sometimes, these trips would involve Moe’s personal shopping, as well.  He was a golfer, and one time we walked into a golf shop and he asked about a specific club.  He then proceeded just to walk around the store, and the clerk would follow him around, constantly lowering the price.  The clerk was negotiating against himself, while Moe looked disinterested, and cut the price of the club in half without Moe saying a word.  I tried the same tactic later that week at a furniture store – same result.

Rule 3:  When you get to yes, shut up.

This one is pretty simple.  I constantly tell that to Pugsley after I’ve agreed with his latest crazy scheme.  “You got to yes, shut up.  Keep talking and it might turn to no.”

I’ll just shut up now.

How do we know that aliens aren’t vegan and don’t do Cross-Fit®?  Because they would have told us.

Rule 4:  The deal isn’t done until the deal is done.

When I bought my first car from a dealer (which was a huge mistake in itself), I was surprised that negotiation wasn’t done.  We had just negotiated price.  Then there was financing.  And undercoating.  And floor mats.  And add on maintenance contracts.  And a timeshare in Bermuda.  And about half a dozen other things.  The deal wasn’t done until after another dozen “deals” were done where I had to say, “No” again and again and again.  They tend to push these deals on me after hours of negotiation, when I was tired.

Rule 5:  The more information you have the better you can understand what a good offer is, and whether to accept it.

Whenever you negotiate for a job, the employer has more information – how much they can offer for the job, and what other things they can do to sweeten the deal.  One colleague I know started a job in management at a company after accepting their offer.  Three months later, a new employee of his started, a new employee he had hired.  The new employee had gotten a signing bonus:  my colleague hadn’t.    Heck, one time my boss offered to give me a bonus if I acted like a frog.  I jumped at that opportunity.

Oops.  He was forever upset about it, and it later cost him his job because he was always griping.  Goes to show the moral of that old joke is right:  Why did my chicken cross the road?   The road betrayed him first.

Rule 6:  Know what is important to the other party.

It might be money.  It’s probably money.  But it also might be looking good to their boss.  Understand what they want, and then see how to best give it to them. It might be something simple like being able to leave early every other Thursday at 3pm.  It might be that they won’t stop until you give them a coat made from bigfoot hair stained from a pigment derived from the colors Rudy Giuliani leaves on his towels..  Or maybe it might even be something unreasonable.

Rudy was my attorney on a speeding ticket once.  He successfully got it pled down to second-degree murder.

Rule 7:  If you live longer than age five . . . you will run into unethical negotiators.

They might lie.  Which looks and sounds a LOT like bluffing.  But it’s not, and you know the difference.

They might threaten.  One salesman always talked about all the people that got fired for buying the competing product from his competitor.  How did that affect me?  It made me want to never buy his product (I’m contrarian that way – push me on fear and I never trust you).

They might try to impact the negotiation by “accidentally” letting information slip.  Information carefully prepared to skew your decision or offer.

My best advice?  Be honest.  No one can cheat an honest man.

Always be ready to walk.  Most of the time there are other deals.

Except for Elon.  I think he’ll negotiate so hard against the Twitter® board that they’ll need tweetment.

Real Life isn’t exactly like Twitter™.  Women seem to get upset if you follow them.

Elon Musk Vs. The Leftist Narrative Machine

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

The new Cybertruck© won’t have a new car smell, it will have an Elon musk.

Elon Musk started a war.

In this case, for Twitter®.

I was fairly amused when I heard his offer per share ($54.20) included a marijuana joke.  That’s like him, though.  When Bernie Sanders called him out on Twitter™ for some trivial violation of Leftist badthink, Elon’s Twitter© response was simple:

“Oh, I forgot you were alive.”

Elon Musk is what happens when you give a 12-year-old several hundred billion dollars.

There is a freedom that comes with several hundred billion.  For the most part that freedom extends to not really needing to follow any of the laws of mortal men.  That is, of course, until you start questioning the toys of the Left.

Twitter© had started out as an interesting startup – short strings of words, maybe a picture.  I got on for a while.  In 2012 it wasn’t all that interesting to me.  I gave it up for about six years.

By then, the landscape had changed immensely.  Twitter® had become (at some point) one of the leading methods of idea communication, especially for politics.  All in 280 characters per Tweet©.

When the Lincoln-Douglas debates were staged back in 1858, the format was that one or the other would start with an hour of oration.  Then, the respondent would get ninety minutes.  Then, the original speaker would get thirty minutes to rebut.  Sure, this is shorter than the average Lord of the Rings movie, but it was three hours talking about politics.

Three.

Hours.

Okay, I’ll admit that this was an interesting three hours.

I don’t like to do things I like doing for three hours.  Yet here two men were able to talk coherently and keep an audience interested for that time.  I would bet that we don’t have the politicians that can do that anymore, nor do we have audiences that can sustain that level of interest.

Now, we’re 164 years past those debates.

What do we get instead?  The main political debates, the main political points all show up first on Twitter®.  Sure, I’m not an active user – but Twitter™ is still driving the debate.  I was watching a documentary tonight and to prove a point of an idea going viral, they showed the Tweets© in fast succession showing the spread of the idea.  Twitter® has a reach far beyond the number of users.

And far beyond newspapers . . .

You know it’s a bad day when Bezos says he feels like a million bucks.

One of the reasons that I stopped going to Twitter© was that (I noticed) as my content got more political, my Tweets™ had a much smaller reach.  I had been de-tuned.  I am nearly certain that it wasn’t personal, but I had some very timely responses to big stories that were on point . . . that died.

The techs at Twitter® kept fine-tuning the algorithm to remove the voices and ideas that they didn’t like, and amplify those that they did.  The same thing was going on at Google® and YouTube™.  Virally spreading ideas had gone under lock and key, unless you were a member of the inner club.  Or two big to ignore.  Here are some sample things that Twitter™ had no problem with:

I trust Twitter® to make sure that conversations are civil and safe.

Elon Musk is in that category, but from the moment he began talking about “free speech” and then offered nearly twice what the stock had been trading at if he could have it.

The response to this generous offer?  Well, I’ll just let the Leftists of Twitter® tell you in no particular order as they have mental breakdowns that someone might steal their toy:

Does this seem like the response of people who are secure in their ideas?  Certainly not.  This is the response of a group of people that want you to allow them to talk to five-year-olds about gay sex and expect you to believe a dude is the woman’s NCAA swimming champ.  The only way that their ideas don’t seem to be insane is if they control the context of every conversation.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this conversation:

They certainly don’t want you to know that the Emperor not only has no clothes, he has no castle, no empire, and tries to shake hands with invisible people.  The only way that they can do that is to control speech, to drown out the voices of rationality, tradition, virtue, and morality.  Oh, and let’s term any idea that doesn’t support The Narrative.

How serious are they about protecting The Narrative?

Within hours of Elon’s bid to buy Twitter©, the poorly named Department of Justice announced that they were investigating everything up to and including how often Elon launders his underwear.

Elon has started a war.  He’s beaten the odds again and again.  Here’s hoping he figures out how to shut down the censorship of all things outside of the Leftist Narrative.  If there’s someone with 300 billion ways to do it, it’s Elon.  And I hope they don’t call the DOJ investigation “Elongate”.

That would be a stretch.