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.

The Virtue Of Being Unreasonable

“I’m a reasonable guy, but I’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things.” – Jack Burton, Owner-Operator of the Pork Chop Express

I put some giant, big, huge, enormous bread in the toaster today.  I made synonym toast.

I remember hiking my first 14,000 foot (43 liters) mountain.  It was a spur-of-the-moment trip.  I grabbed two of my friends and off we went.  We intentionally spent the night above 12,000 feet (12 kilopascals).  The world above 12,000 feet (32 ergs) is strange, to say the least.  Water boils at a very low temperature due to the low atmospheric pressure and cools very quickly.  I’ll tell you – low atmospheric pressure certainly makes my blood boil.

The next day we finished the ascent as planned.  Also as planned, we decided to hike our way back out to the car.  We made our way back down, losing well over a mile in altitude, thankfully not all at once.  I had worn sneakers up the hill.  Those were perfectly fine for going up.  But when we started heading down from our camp, the bottoms of both feet started to feel a bit warm.

Some of you probably can guess where this is going.

After several more horizontal miles and several thousand more vertical feet, that warmth in my feet had turned into a blaze.  I looked forward to the creeks that cut through the trail, which provided cool water to cool my feed as we waded through.  It felt wonderful.

I met a moray that had been knighted.  Now that was Sir Eel.

I didn’t realize it then, but what was happening was with each downhill step I took, my foot slipped just a bit inside the sneaker.  Just a bit.  That slipping of foot against the inside of the shoe generated friction.  That friction was multiplied by thousands of downhill steps.  The primary location that friction showed up?

The soles of my feet.

Finally, we made the Jeep® that my friend had borrowed for the trip.  I peeled off my shoes when I got in the back.  The sole of each foot was covered in a single, large blister from heel to where the toes start.

One friend asked, “Why didn’t you have us carry your pack?”

My response?  “I carried it up.  I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to carry it down.

Hey, don’t laugh at those shoes – ATF agents have to wear those every day.

Certainly, that was more foolish than heroic.  I had in my mind that I wasn’t going to shirk my responsibility to someone else.  It certainly wasn’t a reasonable idea, but that’s okay.

Change isn’t made by reasonable people.  Real accomplishments are made only by people who are fanatics.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the weekly trip to the grocery store:  being Mad Max in the aisles is probably counterproductive.  But when working on trying to accomplish something significant, being reasonable has to go right out the window.

On the other hand, given how Biden has messed things up, this might be what shopping looks like this summer.

I was talking with Pugsley about diet (last week’s post was a taste of the conversation).  The Mrs. overheard the conversation.  “Ahhh, your dad has a case of the TB – True Believer.”  She paused, “Pugsley, if you’re ever around someone who used to smoke, it’s the same thing.”

And she is right.  Quitting smoking is hard.  Nicotine is highly addictive, and quitting, once started isn’t a reasonable thing.  It requires willpower.  And, like Mark Twain said, “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and it’s soluble in alcohol.”

It’s so very hard to quit tobacco that it often takes several tries – I know, I did it.  So, to finally quit takes fanaticism.  This is, in the end, the same sort of fanaticism that it takes for any significant change.  It’s the same sort of drive that makes Elon push SpaceX®.  It’s the same sort of drive that the Founding Fathers had when they forged a new nation.

Elon Musk is a bully.  He beat up NASA and took their launch money.

It’s the same drive that creates great teams.  Once people buy into the vision of what can be created, they give of themselves to further the vision.  If the goal is big enough and important enough people ignore their sense of self.  That’s when the magic happens.

Not only do we get amazing things done, we don’t really care who gets the credit.  Big goals create big teams, dedicated teams.  They come together and work towards success.  Do they always win?  Certainly not.  Sometimes the biggest goals are tackled by amazing teams and the team fails.

But not as often as you might think.  Let’s look at the difference between NASA and SpaceX®.  When NASA and SpaceX™ started working on a project together, NASA freaked out.  Why?  SpaceX© was going too fast.  They were achieving in a month things that would take NASA a year.

Although NASA still has people driven to get man into space, there aren’t many.  Most just want to keep a job until the Federal pension kicks in.  SpaceX™ just wants to get people into space, and it’s pounded into them daily.  The difference is a vision.  In the 1960s, NASA had both a vision and some particularly talented scientists that had some rocketry experience from previous jobs.  They achieved one of the most amazing feats that humanity has every accomplished.

Why do wolves howl at the Moon?  They don’t have cell phones.

Vision and fanaticism matter.  And they’re good things when the vision is good.  When the vision is dark, that fanaticism is dangerous.

I’ll change gears from outstanding feats back to my feets.  The blisters (one per foot)came off, and most of the fresh skin underneath was exposed.  It stung.  For a while.  A day later?  It was like nothing had happened.

Something did happen, though.  I climbed a really tall mountain.  Did I accomplish the goal?  Certainly.  And I was completely unreasonable in the way I went about it.  The good news?  You can be unreasonable, too.  Because if life is a hike, it’s only done at the end.  And to accomplish things?

Sometimes you have to do something unreasonable.

Human Chow: It’s What’s For Dinner

“Bachelor Chow™ . . . now with flavor.” – Futurama

I heard that it was projected that the next Muslim country to have nukes is going to be France.

It’s no surprise to anyone that the biggest health problem in 2022 isn’t the ‘Rona, it’s people who are overweight.  I’d imagine that most of you have seen the .gif that shows state after state with an increasing Body Mass Index (BMI) over time.  I just checked my BMI, and according to the chart I have to grow at least five more inches.

Part of my question as I’ve seen this epidemic unfold has been, why?  It’s not like the people in the United States suddenly lost willpower started consuming crap for no reason, though that would explain the popularity of Friends.  Although I think there are several other significant causes I think one of the biggest has been the rise of ultraprocessed foods.

Most foods (for all of my life) have been processed to some degree.  Ma Wilder didn’t feed us raw wheat – nope.  She used white flour in cooking and baking bread since mass-produced flour was cheap and lasted in the cabinet forever.  Ma Wilder told me that, since I was adopted, I would have to eat bread only from self-raising flour.

What’s the difference between Nic Cage and someone allergic to wheat?  Nic would never turn down a roll.

Processing of flour from wheat changes not only the nutrient profile – it pulled out the parts of the wheat kernel that don’t store well as flour – but it also changed how it acts when eaten.  An example:  wheat flour is made into the familiar powder that we’re used to.  This makes it easier to store and ship.  It also makes it pretty tasty.

The final thing I want to mention about flour is that mashing wheat up into a powder changes how quickly I’ll get to use the nutrients of the flour when I eat it.

Let me explain:

If I ate just a plain wheat kernel, I’d be able to digest most of it, but it would take hours of time and energy.  If I eat a piece of tasty, tasty bread, it’s available for use nearly immediately.

Especially the carbs.  I’ll save insulin discussion for a later post, but ultraprocessed foods have an amazing impact on insulin production.

And the physical form of the food can also make people fatter.  When rats were given (I assume) Rat Chow®, some bored grad student came up with the idea of feeding some rats plain Rat Chow©.  The other rats, however, they smashed up the Rat Chow™ into a powder.

Like I said, bored grad students.  Possibly drunk.

What’s the difference between rat poison and Diet Coke®?  Diet Coke™ has better advertising.

What happened?  The rats with the powdered food got fat and the rats that ate the “plain” food didn’t, even though both groups of rats were eating the same amount of calories.  The change in form changed the way the food acted in the rats – it made the nutrients available more quickly, which (again, because of insulin) made the rats fat.

Heck, it’s not even just the flour and powdered rat food.

An even bigger bomb to the body is sugar.  Sugar was once very uncommon as human food.  Our ancestors got it from berries (not a lot, but some) and, when they could fight the bees back, from honey.

If I get diabetes, will that make me a sugar daddy?

Domestication and widespread production of sugar didn’t occur until the folks in India figured it out in the early Anno Domini centuries (note to Zoomers, this was before the Internet).  They figured out how to take the juices from sugar cane (which can’t be stored or shipped well) and turned it into granulated sugar, which could be saved forever, and shipped across continents.

But for most of human history, sugar was wickedly expensive, and only the wealthy could afford to have it regularly.  Now?  I can buy granulated sugar for $0.50 per pound.  Sugar prices are going up, sure, but I can buy a wholesale ton of sugar for less than $500.

The next category of foods that just weren’t available to humans were vegetable oils.  I’m not talking about olive oil which is pressed and can be used just as it comes off the press – I’m talking about corn oils, canola oils, soybean oils.  As produced in modern times, these are really chemical products that depend on chemical processes to make them usable.

Their history has been slippery.  Transfats – or fats that were unsaturated after being subjected to chemical processing, were supposed to be healthier than butter.  We were told so.  Now it turns out that they increased the risk of heart attacks.  Oops.  Now, instead of being promoted by the government, they’re illegal to put in food.  And butter is now good for you.

The main thing about these processed foods is that they are cheap to make.  Some combination of flours oils, sugars, and . . . well, let’s take a look at the Totino’s® Pizza Roll ingredient list:

What’s the difference between a bag of pizza rolls and a musician?  A bag of pizza rolls can feed a family.

It’s an amazing list of chemicals.  I just really hesitate to call it food, however.  It’s what the word ultraprocessed was made to describe.  I was watching a video by Dr. Pradip Jamnadas (cardiologist, and I do recommend his YouTube® vidyas) and he had a word that was even more descriptive for foods like this:  pre-digested.

A lot of the work that our wonderfully designed digestive system goes through to get energy out of food is simply not necessary with Totino’s© Human Chow Pizza Rolls.  In large part the food is designed to hit the digestive system, and flood the body with calories, ringing the dopamine bell in the brain.

I really do think they’re tasty.  I don’t plan on eating them except on very rare occasions, because when I look at the label now, I don’t see what looks like . . . food.  It looks like Elon Musk’s shopping list for when he’s trying to create artificial life.

But the real purpose of this is to sell as many Totino’s® Pizza Rolls as possible and make the greatest profit.  This leads to one question that illustrates an overlap between libertarianism and communism:  “How much sawdust can I put in the food?”

On my diet I can have a libertarian salad:  lettuce alone.

To a certain extent, these ultraprocessed foods have succeeded admirably.  They’ve allowed cheap ingredients (often made from low-value byproducts) to feed millions of people at a reasonable cost.  The problem, though, are the consequences that we see now:  the calories taken in impact the human system in vastly different ways than the food that we were designed to consume.

So, my plan is to eat as close to real food as possible – meat, fish, eggs, and whole veggies.

And, yes, an occasional pizza roll, too.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

What decongestant does the Federal Reserve© ban?  Sudafed™.

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India.  The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this:  Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead.  The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news.  Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish:  Tarp City) and looting them.  What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch.  Amazon® packages.  Best Buy™.  Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails.  Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them.  They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online.  Except for books.  And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast.  There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant.  Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in?  It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas.  Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks.  Oh, they have?  Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so!  Oh, wait, it’s completely so.  Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time.  You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000.  In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard.  They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No!  They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it!  They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws.  They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever.  (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility.  The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right.  No, farther right.  Yes, farther. 

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work.  Everyone not making big bucks?  Inflation is eating the raises of most people.  So who’s winning?  I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff.  Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless.  Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless.  Who owns things?  Rich people.  They’ve done very, very well.  Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars.  Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh?  Honestly, it’s not a stock:  it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something.  Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff.  Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why?  Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up?  No.  You sell a meme.  And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers.  We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either.  Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.

Predictions 2022: The Funniest Predictions You’ll See This Year

 

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

Hitmen sometimes make people tense.  Past tense.

Thankfully, by next week 2021 will be in the rear view mirror.  I’m hoping that 2022 will be better for everyone, but remember, when you say it, it sounds like 2020, too, so there is a chance that it will deteriorate faster into an incomprehensible disaster faster than a Joe Biden speech or a Hunter Biden crack weekend.  That being said, I managed to pull out the patented Wildervision™ Chronovisor 2000©, and have the following predictions for 2022.  Enjoy!

January

The big event will be the Supreme Court reviewing Joe Biden’s Federal mandates for “jabbing” people so that they can keep their jobs.  My prediction is this:  The Supreme Court (which is just regular court but with sour cream and tomatoes) will vote to uphold the mandate.  Here’s why:

All of the Leftist Supreme Court members plus John Roberts are all in favor of man-dates.  Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have not had man-dates in years, and are really aching for them and hope they are “hot.”  John Roberts approves of man-dates on principle, because, “love is love, or at least that’s how the NSA® tells me to vote.”

I suck at playing the trumpet, which is probably why.

The surprise swing vote will be Justice Amy Coney Island Barrett Browning.  She will twist her hair and indicate that, you know, with all of the lonely nights at the Supreme Court, “well, a Justice has needs, needs mind you for a man-date.”

In a surprise move, Justice Clarence Thomas will assume his final form (The Thomas-Hulk) and throw the man-date approving justices into an orbit where they come close to touching the Sun.  It’s really cool.  His robes split open and everything.

The orbiting Justices will still not be as hot as Dead Justice Ginsburg, who still can’t get the sulfur smell out of her robes.  The Justices will return and try to form The Justice League©, but be sued by Warner Brothers®.

February

The groundhog in Minsk will see his shadow, which means that it will only be six weeks of offensive required for the Russians to take over the tasty bits of Ukraine that they want.  When confronted by NATO, Vladimir Putin replies, “Oh, Crimea river,” while riding a bear equipped with hypersonic nuclear missiles through a forest on his way to invent a sport-utility vehicle made from combining a T-72 tank undercarriage combined with a Holiday Inn Express®, which used 458 gallons of diesel per mile.

When all you have is 45,000 tanks, every problem looks like a problem a tank would solve.  Which is (honestly) almost every problem, ever.

Also, Bill Belichick’s Tom Brady Clone© defeats Tom Brady in Superbowl LVII™.  Belichick’s postgame comments are short, merely noting that he has seven thousand Tom Brady clones and is planning on living forever in a volcanic island somewhere in the Pacific with seven thousand hot, sweaty Tom Brady clones.

March

COVID variant “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” appears in Australia.  As there were no tigers available, there are no infections.  Australian lawmakers are incensed, as they had planned to charge all “unjabbed” infected $50 (Australian dollars) every day when they put them into concentration leisure camps.  As $50 Australian is only enough for one Chicken McNugget™, it is estimated that the lack of tigers cost Australia up to seven Happy Meals®.

The Australians kidnap Harvard™ students to fill the concentration leisure camps, having them fight off against vegetarian Cross-Fit™ enthusiasts every week in cage matches to see who is the most annoying.

Reprinted with permission.

Also:  Russia increases natural gas prices to France.  France surrenders.  Russia fails to accept surrender, noting the number of berets, cigarettes, and baguettes of bread required could not be supported by the Soviet Russian economy and that they cannot make as many burkas as are required by France.

April

The Sun emits the largest solar flare since the 1859 Carrington Event, but damage is focused around Detroit and Chicago in the American Midwest.  The event destroys the electrical grid and moves both Detroit and Chicago into Stone Age conditions.  It is estimated that the Stone Age conditions are so much better than what was there, that over $15 billion in improvements have been made.

May

Bill Gates declares, “The War on COVID is over!  We have defeated the dread ‘Rona!”  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation© announces it has a new focus, getting Bill hot girlfriends in their early twenties.  The new plan is The Gates’ Dates Initiative™.

Bill happily announces it, “If you don’t offer up your attractive daughters to me, remember:  I have been working on smallpox and anthrax and lots of other diseases that end in ‘x’ and can ruin you all!”  Jeff Bezos announces that he is “all-in” providing that Gates will allow the tandem initiative, “Bimbos for Bezos®”.

How can you tell Gates released COVID?  Just like Windows®, every month there’s an updated version that installs itself automatically without your permission.

Both Gates and Bezos are proud to announce that they have hired O.J. Simpson as their security coordinator, noting that “O.J. will allegedly take a stab at any problem we have.”

June

The Federal Reserve™ announces that inflation of more than 20% per month is “mostly solved” and that they plan to stop printing money and giving it to banks “just as soon as we run out our intense desire for piles of cocaine and attractive hookers.”

My name is Jerome Powell.  Say hello to my little friend, infinite money printing.

Donald Trump emerges from Florida to note, “My vaccine is the best vaccine.  I bathe in it.  Those who have avoided it?  Sad.  Sometimes, when I’m bored?  I inject it into my eyes.  And I have the best eyesight.  Perfect.”

Also, it’s “blah blah blah, Black Lives Matter© riots, billions in damage, hundreds dead, for some reason everyone but Black Lives Matter® people are to blame” season.

July

Joe Biden has regressed to the point where coherent speech now eludes him.  “Jo-jo gotta go-go now anna maka doodie INNNA SINK,” “ICE CREAM YABBA,” and “The need to increase illegal immigrants and social program spending” are now the topics of his increasingly deranged addresses to the American people.

Kamala Harris responds, “Ha ha ha!  You know (ha) Joe!  He’s (ha) always being (ha) Joe!”  An ABC News© poll places Biden in a heated competition with houseplants and ice cubes for “most coherent political speech” of 2022.

August

Crowds of Pfizer®-jabbed Americans now have been reported to have developed, “An insatiable appetite for human blood – the untainted blood of those not exposed to the COVID jabs.”  Anthony Fauci insists, “This is a completely normal side effect.  You expect people whose DNA has been modified by a largely untested agent to want to drink massive amounts of human blood in a vain attempt to make themselves normal again.  Which is, normal.  Wear a mask or six.”

Not mine.  I’m sad they didn’t mention vampirism.

Other noted and “completely expected” side effects of the “jab”, according to Fauci, include:  death, inability to cast a reflection in a mirror, extreme intolerance of sunshine, and the ability to turn into a Wuhan bat and fly large distances.  The unvaccinated are apparently to blame.

September

Skipped.  I’m pretty sure the United Nations outlaws it or something.

October

The Harvest Moon is upon ye!  Beware!  The veil between this world and the next is thinnest here.  There are times when ye cannot ken the vast forces that an uncaring cosmos has coalesced into beings that exist in the deep and dark space beyond the stars, where even light cannae go!

These beings walk, caring only in your obedience and worship as their corrupted thoughts infect all of spacetime and begin to slowly chip away at your everyday reality, making you doubt in your very sanity.  They seek only the vast amounts of power that they can siphon from your suffering, and would gladly make your existence from here to the last energy available in the universe is spent one of agony that they can feed on.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a cookbook, the Necronomnomnomicon.

Also, it’s October so make sure you change out your smoke detector batteries and don’t forget to go see the latest Disney® movies!

November

The Democrats lose all of their seats in the House of Representatives (except for the seats from California and New York City) as their mid-term strategy of “Appease the Great Horrific Beasts from Beyond the Cosmos Through Your Eternal Suffering” strategy (mostly) backfires.  Nancy Pelosi is outed as a trans-dimensional demon that sucks the souls of the unborn for immortal life, and gains three points in her latest election.

Democrats claim that they will pass laws so that psychics will be allowed to fill in ballots for “people who thought about voting but were too lazy to actually vote,” because “every thought about voting matters.”

December

December is filled with surprises:

  • Elon Musk announces he has created a time machine. His stated goal is to use it to go back and, “nail Farrah Fawcett when she was really hot.  And alive.  Or at least really hot.”

Yeah, I know, this joke has been done to death.

  • Wilder, Wealthy and Wise© author John Wilder is Time Magazine’s® Man of the Year for being so very awesome, funny, and predicting the “whole vaccinated are now vampires that can only be killed by making them sign up for time-share condominiums” plague.
  • Donald Trump begins selling time-share condominiums, noting, “these are the best condominiums ever. You’re sure it kills them, you know, the vampires, right?”  No one reminds him Trump is a vampire.  Trump buys six condominiums, after asking Musk if can do anything about Natalie Wood.
  • China announces that their relationship with Taiwan is over. “You know Taiwan, it wasn’t you, it was me.  Cheer up.  I’m sure you’ll find someone.  There are lots of great hegemonies out there.”
  • Justice Clarence Hulk-Thomas begins his Justice Tour, and announces, “If I come down your chimney, you’d better pray.”
  • Hollywood announces that they are ready to make the first biopic of Joe Biden, “Ima maka dudie,” starring Ron Perlman as Biden.

Joe Biden’s Early Christmas Gift To The Right

“Well, you know, anything could happen. You could get run over, pickpocketed, . . . fall down a manhole, bump into people, murdered . . . imagine that. Or even just ridiculed.” – Flight of the Conchords

Bruce Lee had a son other than Brandon.  This son was a famous vegetarian:  Brock.

I’m betting that most of you saw the vidya of Alzheimer in Chief Brandon Biden taking a call from a parent about the tracking of Santa by NORAD.  At the end of the call, the parent says “Merry Christmas, and let’s go Brandon.”  You can watch it here (LINK).

Biden responds with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go Brandon!  I agree!”  The look on Jill’s face is priceless, like she had just eaten a tuna fish sandwich that had been fermenting under Joe’s butt for six days.  I know that Jill told the Secret Service to not let Joe sit on them that long, but to quote Joe, “They’re just so creamy and feel so good and cool on my buttocks and make my skin so supple.”

Immediately, the Leftist Twittersphere™ erupted with all of the impotent rage of a six-year-old that’s not allowed to sit at the grownup table during Christmas dinner.  A classic response is from the harpy known as Sarah Reese Jones.  Here is her Tweet™, which I have not seen on her Twitter© feed, and may have been deleted because it was so insipidly stupid.  I’ve seen it elsewhere, but if Sarah asks me to pull it down because it’s fake, I will.  She made plenty of other comments that are still up there that I can pull from.

Sarah would make her Tweets® longer, but she ran out of character.

The salt to be mined from Leftist tears could make anyone a millionaire, and it looks like Sarah needs it.  Whereas I have no idea if she’s had “work” done on her face, it looks like it has a higher composite chemical content than the re-entry surfaces on an Elon Musk spacecraft.

Yes, it’s a personal attack.  I sort of feel bad because I think my readership is higher than hers.  I know I look a lot less like Steven Tyler’s illegitimate child.

Why did the Leftists react so strongly to these bad jokes?  I know that my readers react to my bad jokes like Hawaiians:  A low ha.

I know that there are several things that drove instant hate to this exchange:

  1. It exposed the media’s attempt to cover up the way people felt. Let’s remember where “Let’s go Brandon” started – with a television host attempting to cover up a crowd of thousands of people saying “f**k Joe Biden.”  The clumsy cover-up caught fire, precisely because it was one of the most blatant lies of the year, outside of “Biden won the election.”
  2. It exposed that this never happened to Trump. The media routinely had him under a microscope, looking for every single thing that could be used against them.  In one instance, hundreds of stories showed up in the mainstream media that . . . Trump got one more scoop of ice cream than everyone else got.
  3. It exposed that Biden is either so insulated or so mentally lost in the fog of someone who probably could no longer qualify for a driver’s license that he would actually repeat a phrase that meant, “f**k me.” Either of these things is figurative poison for a politician.

NBC© did a pilot for a sitcom about Abe Lincoln, shot before a live audience.

  1. It exposed Biden to yet more mockery. This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  It’s Item 5:  “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
  2. The Left hates it when their playbook is used against them. They have to defuse it at any cost.  So, they either bury it (this segment is, I hear, already cut out of the transcript and official video) or attack it because it’s (according to them) inappropriate.
  3. The Left doesn’t actually even like Biden. He’s just the only guy that they could keep hidden until the 2020 general election, drawing crowds of dozens to Trump’s crowds of thousands.  He was the gluten-free, peanut-free, bread of the Left.  It may be made from sawdust, but at least it doesn’t offend anyone.

The irony was palpable:  the same people that had made a (not so) huge balloon made of Trump in a diaper were all twisted up about a phrase that no child would understand.  Of course, the tombstone for the Right (in the very unlikely chance we lose) will say “Imagine if it were reversed.”

To make this clear:  we don’t care because they don’t care.  The games that they play are just that, games.  The rules for civility are long gone.

To be fair, the biggest inflection point is either hot pants Clinton’s impeachment for perjury (which you could squarely blame on the GOP©) or George W’s election victory.  Both of those enraged the Left in a way that they’re not over today.   – they felt they had been robbed of their glorious forever lock on the halls of power, despite the fact that W had more in common with the Left than JFK ever did.  Me?  I think Alinsky killed them – and the Left has been playing for keeps.

Looks like someone made a measurement error when ordering the balloon that would “ToTaLLy oWn TrUmPz!”

“Let’s go, Brandon” had probably run its course.  It had gone on for months, and eventually, every joke (like Joe) gets old.  This probably gave it another month or three.  But it doesn’t end here.  There is more to come, and that’s what we must never, ever give up on.  We must mercilessly ridicule the Left at every chance.

Why?

  • First, they hate it, they cannot stand it, it makes them stupid with rage.
  • Second, it’s fun.
  • Third? The Left has to react.  And when they do, regardless of what they’ve taken over in society, the mass of the people will understand the foolishness we face.  They are power.  Speak Truth to them.  Ridicule them.  Have fun with it.

Sometimes, they do all the work for you.

Oh, and one more thing:

Let’s go, Brandon.

The Five Laws Of Human Stupidity

“Don’t call me stupid.”  – A Fish Called Wanda

I hear of you hold a pistol like that, you can hear the Rittenhouse.  Alternatively, this might be an Alec Baldwin gun safety video. 

Carlo M. Cipolla is a dead Italian economic historian.  So, not a dead economist, because we know that a dead economist was at least right one time.  I don’t know much about him, outside of:

He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker.  He’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, he rests in peace.  If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.  His metabolic processes are now history.  He’s off the twig.  He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  This is an ex-economic historian!

Sorry, I went full Monty Python on you.  Never go full Python, unless of course, you’re pining for the fjords.

But, Dr. Cipolla is dead, as I think I have abundantly established.

About the only other thing besides his condition of demise is that Dr. Cipolla is most known for writing a goofy little essay called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  He wrote this essay originally in 1976, which proves that he might have had time to meet Joe Biden before writing it.

What do you get when you cross an economist with the Godfather?  An offer you can’t understand.

Text in italics (and those in quotes) beyond this point are direct quotes from the former Dr. Cipolla, except the snarky things I say underneath the memes I have handcrafted in the Wilder Meme Lab.

The First Law:  Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Tongue in cheek, Cipolla notes that “any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate.”  So, it’s clear that there exists a nearly infinite and inexhaustible supply of stupidity in the Universe.  I have observed this in action:  I have been to the DMV.

The Second Law:  The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.  

Cipolla felt strongly that stupid people weren’t made stupid, they were born stupid.  And, just like the First Law would predict, they are numerous and everywhere.  They inhabit colleges (I think Harvard™ is full of them) the government, and the Pentagon.  Stupidity can also be found at McDonalds®, but that’s excusable.  If When someone is stupid at McDonalds©, an order gets screwed up and I get not a Sausage McMuffin® without the muffin, but just a warm muffin (this happened) at the price of a Sausage McMuffin©.

When someone is stupid at the Pentagon?  They get promoted after the cover-up.

It has also been my experience that if you ask the right questions and listen to the answers, it’s amazing where you will find intelligent people.  Just like there is no bound on where you will find stupid people, there is no bound on where you will find intelligent ones.

Roses are red, violets are blue; no one in Washington cares about you.

One personal example is that every time (not occasionally, but every time) I felt full of myself, soon enough an intelligent person from a place I’d least expect would correct me.  The lesson I learned?  Listen.  Ask questions.  Just as idiocy hides everywhere, gems of wisdom are often when you don’t expect.

Great stuff.  But what, exactly, is stupid?  That’s what the Third Law is for.

The Third (and Golden) Law:  A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The third law is what really caught my attention.  Here, Cipolla defines what stupid is – and this is an especially interesting definition:  a stupid person screws something up, and doesn’t get any benefit.  At all.  Here Cipolla constructs a chart to define it:

One of my girlfriends in high school was arrested for bank robbery.  She made out like a bandit.

Cipolla dices up the world into two parameters: do they help or hurt society, or do they help or hurt themselves?

Help Self, Help Society:  This is the quadrant that Cipolla reserves for the intelligent.  They end up creating a harmony where they help not only society, but end up helping themselves in the process.  Take the makers of PEZ®, for instance.  They make money by selling the sweet, sweet PEZ™, and society benefits, because, PEZ©.  In this instance it’s a win-win.  Society wins, and the makers of the product win.

These are the people that create the upward drive for society.  They make things better, and they make the people around them better, too.  This is SpaceX® Elon Musk.  He’s revolutionizing space transport and making it cheap to hit orbit ($25 a pound within 10 years???) while raking in piles of cash.

What next?  The helpless.  Helpless people, by Cipolla’s definition, are those that make bad deals.  The bad deals end up helping someone else (even society at large) but end up hurting the people making the deals.  Note:  this wouldn’t be people who help others and get joy from it – they’re getting a benefit.

The biggest group I can think of that represents the Helpless group in 2021 are Biden voters.  Man, I’m thinking they’d take that back if they could.

Joe Biden’s press staff is mainly women, I guess because he doesn’t have to pay them as much.

So, that’s two out of three.  That leaves most politicians bandits.  Bandits, according to Cipolla, come in two flavors.  The first is the net zero bandit.  A net zero bandit just takes $20 from one person and keeps it to spend on themselves.  Bernie Madoff and most conmen are net zero bandits.  They take money and then enjoy it themselves.  Society as a whole (outside of the trust and breaking the law things) isn’t hurt.

Bernie Madoff may make a lot of rich people angry, but he’s not going to create the fall of western civilization because his clients can’t afford to donate money to Harvard© so Harvard™ will let their third-rate children in.

The worst kind of bandits are the asymmetric (my term) bandits.  These bandits cause an outsized amount of trouble for a small gain for themselves.  I can’t think of any real-life examples, but what if some politicians subverted the monetary system just so they could buy votes for themselves while causing massive inflation?  Of course, something that crazy could never happen, right?

That, of course, leaves the subject of the essay:

Stupid People.

Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavors.

Stupid people, Cipolla opines, are even more dangerous than bandits, because they screw everything up.  Stupid people take wonderful ideas, destroy them, and then hurt themselves in the process.  They’re the equivalent of a six-year-old sticking a knife in a toaster and getting knocked out, and then doing it again.  Repeatedly.

Think of it as evolution in action . . .

Again, from Cipolla:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

And because there’s no rationality to the attack it’s impossible to defend.  How do you defend against a naked person covered in sex lube attacking you with a rubber chicken?  No, really, how do you do that?  I don’t ever want to be in that place again.

This takes us to . . .

The Fourth Law:  Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

This should be called the Rittenhouse Law.

Kyle was attempting to help society.  And, perhaps he did because I don’t think the world is a worse place off after he was done, but stupid people managed to ruin his night.

And, remember that stupid people vote.

Stupid that night, stupid on the stand.

The Fifth Law:  A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.  Corollary:  A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Here is where Dr. Cipolla might have lost me, but only because, perhaps, he never imagined that bandits could operate on the scale that they do in 2021.  What if you could steal from everyone at once?  Just print money, and you can.

What if you could get yourself two (or six!) more years at a job in Washington, D.C. and all you had to do was bankrupt the country?  That’s banditry that, perhaps, aspires to stupidity.  The end of the system will end up being the end of their banditry.

See?  Stupid.  So, maybe he was right after all?

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.