Feed Your Head – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Stability: On A Scale Of Zero To Drunken Uncle, How Bad Is The United States?

“As a result, our planet’s core became unstable.” – Man of Steel

I was on a horse being chased by a lion, and on my left was a giraffe. I decided to stop drinking and get off the carousel.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes a country stable, recently. I just can’t figure out why the idea of civilizational collapse keeps popping up in my mind, but, it does.

Why does a country remain stable? Not wealthy, but stable.

One rudimentary idea is commonality. Commonality of what, exactly? Be careful, this gets progressively more controversial as we go down the list and moves from “Taco Bell® mild sauce” to “Scorpion Chili Reaper Death™”.

As nearly as I can figure it, three things. There are more, but I think history has shown that these three things, when held in common, produce the most stable societies:

Religion. I know that most readers live in the United States, which was founded on freedom from state religion. That way Pennsylvania could choose to make Episcopalianism the state religion. Regardless of that, the United States was historically very much a Christian nation, as in historically 90% plus, and in “you can’t get a mortgage unless your pastor vouches for your” Christian.

I have standards. I won’t talk publicly about my sects life.

Have divisions among Christian sects caused difficulty? Certainly. Look at Europe post-Martin Luther and the religious wars that followed. There are even problems within sects, given what I once saw a beheading at a Methodist potluck dinner over a stolen potato salad recipe. To be fair, the potato salad was really, really good. I think it was the mustard.

But back to American politics: when JFK was running for president, there was a strong feeling that he wouldn’t be a good president because he was Catholic. Why? Because Catholics had to obey the Pope, and JFK would have something other than the best interests of the American people at heart – the orders of a foreign Pope. After JFK, religion seemed to not matter so much in a presidential candidate, especially after Bill Clinton, a member of the 1^st Congregation of If It Feels Good, Do It (Reformed), was elected.

Can people of different religions live together? Sometimes, especially if the religions in question aren’t, well, Islam and Christianity. Or Islam and Judaism. Or Islam and Buddhism. Or . . . hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.

Is a radical Islamic cowboy a yeehawdist?

It’s weird when I bring up a topic that I know is going to be contentious and I mention religion first on the list of controversial topics, but that should tell you about the minefield that follows.

The second leg of a stable society is Ideology. If we all believe the world through the same framework, that helps to create stability. A bad example of that is North Korea. North Korea is actually a really, really stable country for several reasons. Do they share the same religion? Certainly they do – the worship of Kim Jong Un.

They also share the same ideology. Do all of them like it? I’m fairly certain that the answer is no, but for most of them it is the only ideology they know, and the only ideology they’ve been taught. They might see problems, but they have no particular framework where they could even discuss them. If you asked them what they thought about Kim, they’d say, “I can’t complain”.

Shared ideology allowed he Soviet Union to live long past the best-by date printed on the carton for several reasons – again, it was the only real ideology presented, and second, through the 20^th Century Russia went from a Czar and a bunch of peasants to a nation with nukes and a pretty good spaceflight program that the German scientists they captured gave them. I mean, our Germans were better, but they still had pretty good Germans.

Remember, to an orphan, every selfie is a family photo.

How big was ideology in the United States? My grandfather-in-law was nearly 95 when we went to a meeting. They asked us all to stand for the prayer. He sat. No one thought anything of it. When it came time to give the pledge, though, he struggled to his feet to stand.

He had an ideology – and it was the United States and the 8^th Army Air Corps, specifically the one that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches. That ideology, his Civic Nationalism, was so strong in him that it was even stronger than his religion and gravity.

Ideology really is at fault for the Revolutionary War and the Civil War – both of them were from a fairly homogeneous population base, but the major difference was ideology. In the Civil War, especially, the ideology was one of an honor-culture (the South) versus the Puritan culture of the North. The North knows how to do iced tea, and the South knows how to do biscuits and gravy.

Outside of food, the South chaffed against the Puritan leanings of the North, and that ended up in war, because that’s what happens when you have a people whose culture is based on honor pushed back up against the wall. Because the religions and ethnicity of the sides were similar, the result was a nation that could be knit back together rather rapidly.

Can I tell you what ethnicity Napoleon was? Course I can.

Oh, yeah, ethnicity. The final leg of the stool is ethnicity. See! I told you it was going to get progressively more radioactive.

The long period of stability that the United States has experienced (with the exception of the Civil War) provided a false narrative – the idea that the United States is a proposition nation, and that everyone who came here would be assimilated and become American.

This is demonstrably false.

I still maintain that it takes three generations for a new immigrant family to really be assimilated, minimum. If Mom and Dad aren’t willing to name their kid Brandon instead of Hans or Abdullah or Chaim, they really haven’t reached American status yet. That used to be called assimilation, and it used to be generally considered to be good.

But not in 2023. Back in the ‘teen, Tom Brokaw had to apologize for suggesting that Hispanics had to work harder at assimilating to American culture. He had violated a new Leftist commandment that “Absolutely Everyone Doing Absolutely Anything” was defined as American.

Oh, and America doesn’t have a culture, bigot.

Of the three, I think ethnicity is generally (though not always) the strongest. The Danes might not agree on everything, but do they agree that someone who moved to Denmark from Afghanistan isn’t Danish. I could move to Japan, have kids there, and I would never be Japanese and neither would my kids.

All of this leads to what?

China is built on stability – it has a common religion – Communism, a common ideology, “what Xi said”, and a common ethnicity. When people point to a coming Chinese collapse, I point to articles from the last 30 years that have said the same thing. My bet: China is stable – it may not prosper, but it will endure.

Ireland? Not so much. It used to be homogeneous in ethnicity, religion, and ideology, if ideology can be summarized by the statement “drinking and fighting a bit”. But with a constant influx of immigrants who apparently have the ideology of “stabbing Irish kids is fine” it is clear that the future of Ireland is in doubt, less so if they start drinking and fighting a lot more.

What’s Irish and stays outside all year? Paddy O’Furniture.

Finally, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the United States. Viewed through this model, it’s clear: we have lost our common religion – in 2009, 77% of Americans were Christian. By 2019? Down to 65% (Pew®).

Ideology? The United States had been relatively homogeneous with respect to ideology, too. Compare the 1950s to the Leftist onslaught we’ve seen 70 years later. We are a nation divided ideologically.

Ethnicity? Thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act along with an amazing disregard for borders over the last 30 years, the United States has experienced an amazing increase in the amount of foreign-born people here, and that amount is estimated at 15%, but I’m betting that number is far closer to 25% because I believe the number of illegals is greatly understated in official numbers.

None, exactly zero, of these indicators lead me to believe that the United States will be stable for the next 30 years or can continue to exist as a coherent country. I’ve mentioned before that I thought the earliest dates for Bad Thing to happen were in the next 2 or 3 years. My prediction of everything breaking apart remains at 2032 or so, but I see no hope, at all, of the United States existing beyond 2040 unless a Caesar appears at the point of crisis or unless millions of immigrants are sent via trebuchet back to whatever place they came from.

To be clear, I don’t wish for any of this, this is just what every trend is leading towards, and this model is an “in progress” model. Your additions are welcome in the comments.

The good news?

I hear the Methodists now take a hard line on potato salad beheadings, which is odd, since they’re normally not against anything.

Think Movies Suck Now? You’re Right.

“Freedom costs a buck-oh-five.” – Team America: World Police

I’ve lost to a computer at chess, but never at kickboxing.

I write about movies (and books) sometimes because they are important – very important. They are a part of the myths and backstory that defines a people and a country. Part of this entertainment is (often) a reflection of who we think we are, or who we aspire to be – those are the characters and stories that endure and grow over time.

Comedies certainly have their place, as well. Comedies can be rooted to universal truths that are (more or less) unchanging with time, think greed, yappy women, and farting. Yes. The oldest recorded joke in history that we have yet discovered is a (not very good) fart joke.

Why can’t you make fun of Steve Jobs dying? It’s not PC.

Part of comedy, especially movie comedy, is the unexpected. For that to happen, most of the time someone is the object of the joke – the person who is being made fun of. In comedy in the 1970s, that person was almost always a white male, and almost always was the father and was almost always on the Right.

Why?

Feminism. Comedy of the 1970s and onward was almost always written from the Leftist perspective. Think Archie Bunker, who ended up being popular in spite of them trying to make him a buffoon. Who had the first flush of the terlit on television? Archie. To make fun of white men who were on the Right.

Another tip: don’t use the toilet brush as a microphone when you sing in the shower.

Heck, when I was in junior high and wondering why the only funny things were Leftist (I was on the Right, even then). Then I read P.J. O’Rourke, and understood that it was more than possible, it was far, far funnier than Leftist humor ever imagined it could be.

The Right is funnier because the Right has Truth on its side.

For a long time, movies have been propaganda of one type or another. Top Gun? There’s a reason that the Navy spent millions to help make the movie – they approved the script.

There have been wild cards – people who make fun of everyone and everything – think Airplane. One that really pushed the boundaries was Team America: World Police. South Park used to be funny, back when the stories were about the kids. When the stories started to be about the adults? Less funny.

But Team America: World Police was something else. It made fun of jingoistic movies while at the same time gutting hard-Left, virtue signaling idiot actors like Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Tim Robbins. They were all part of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G.

Yes. They went there. They also made fun of AIDS and homosexuals. And Moslems. And movies like Top Gun. The rumors are that the studio approved it because it was so politically incorrect, and might be cheap because it was made with puppets instead of actors.

I’m glad COVID didn’t come from a Chinese bear. Then we’d have had a pandademic.

Needless to say, making a movie that makes fun of any protected group is no longer allowed. Why are comedies dead? Because it gets really old, really fast, when the only person you can make fun of is the same person who buys all the movie tickets: heterosexual white Christian men who have XY chromosomes. You know, “literally Hitler”.

Comedy is now unfunny, mostly. Please feel free to leave exceptions in the comments. And movies as a whole are borderline unwatchable. Part of the collapse of the box office (and small theaters) was COVID. The other part is that movies suck.

The reason that movies suck is that they’re now just blatant propaganda, start to finish. The latest Marvel® movie, The Marvels™ is a commercial failure, and a box office flop. The studio is blaming the usual suspects: the actor’s strike, superhero fatigue, white supremacy, anti-feminism.

That’s easy.

Harder to face is that their stupid movie sucks.

This was even in his speeches . . . remember him saying, “Let me be clear”?

Why does it suck? It’s about women that don’t need no man. Oh, and couples who have kids don’t want to spend money to have their kids watch Gay Buzz Lightyear™ and ask questions about why Buzz© has two mommies. That’s it.

Who is the primary consumer of superhero movies? White men. Who is the primary consumer of movies for children? People capable of making children, which, for every year in the history of mankind before 2020, were known as “men” and “women”.

Yes, white men like to look at attractive women in skintight costumes, but only the most Leftist is willing to sit and watch a movie that makes fun of them and marginalizes them.

Why does Marvel© (and Disney™) lose money? Because they forgot who buys the tickets.

Men.

I’ve gotten to the point that, unless I’ve heard about a movie, if it was made in the last four years, it’s a hard pass, even if it looks interesting. The movies started going south in, say, 2018. My take is that was a reaction to Trump. It so triggered nearly everyone who writes or acts in a movie that all they wanted to do was attack a relatively Centrist guy who just happened to be President.

What do your get if you take an entire human digestive tract and lay it out on a football field? Arrested.

The reaction led to . . . crap. Every Leftist simply had to get their message out that trans was the new normal and white men were awful and stupid and that NASA stuff on the Moon was a fluke. Oh, they tried to take credit for that, too. Because white guys, you know, can’t do math.

I also noticed it with books. I was a lifelong reader of science fiction – I loved the ideas. Then, around 2010, I started to notice that the books in Barnes and Noble® mainly . . . sucked. I thought it was me. I thought I was old and jaded. But, nope, I read some of the old stuff and it was still great.

Science fiction was destroyed by The Narrative, too. The people who picked the books that made it to the shelves only picked Leftist crap filled with weak people who hated themselves and hated everything True, Beautiful, and Good. In this breakup, it wasn’t me, it was them.

They came for comics and killed them. They came for books and killed them. Lastly, they came for movies, and killed them. Every book and every movie has a message, and most are propaganda of some sort or another, for good or bad. Propaganda to get kids to brush their teeth? That’s good.

But propaganda to turn them into self-loathing transexuals? That’s 100% against the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

This was the 2022 “woman” of the year. Guess guys do everything better.

Watch what goes into your mind. Watch what goes into the minds of your children. Help them to aspire to be noble and virtuous and strong. Help them to understand that jokes about yappy, farting women have been funny for 4,000 years, and will be funny for as long as women fart.

There are still good books out there. There are still good movies, though they are uncommon, since the rot is very, very deep. But freedom?

It still costs a buck-o-five.

Shaving, Emotions, And Having A Good Day

“I have gold. What can I buy with gratitude?” – Game of Thrones

I’d tell you a joke about a broken pencil, but there’s no point.

I was in a meeting with a guy that I worked with. We were discussing a project and an everyday task that one of the employees would have to do. “Well, that shouldn’t be controversial. It’ll take, what, a minute for someone to do that every day?” It would have taken something like $50,000 to automate the function, and people would still have to check that the automation was working.

He responded, “John, that’s how you and I think. It’s part of our jobs, right? But I know these guys. They’re gonna fight this with all the power of Oprah Winfrey fighting Whoopi Goldberg to get the last piece of cheesecake on Earth. To you and me, it’s a minute of our day. No problem. To them? These are people who get up in the morning and think, ‘What, do you mean I have to shave? Every day? For the rest of my life?’”

He was right. We still didn’t spend the money, thankfully.

This comment about shaving . . . every day . . . for the rest of my life . . . always cracks me up. There is a category of people that are eternally and forever upset about everything, and get upset about every aspect of life, even (and maybe especially) for things they had no control over.

Those people? I avoid them as much as possible, and I’d rather spend a day chewing aluminum foil or having someone take a cheese grater to my spinal column (the bone part, not the fleshy bits).

Then The Mrs. asked me why I lost the whisk. I told her, “It beats me.”

Instead, I’ve just started a simple experiment to control my own mood. The first part of the day, I try, even before the toothbrush hits my teeth, to think about the things that I’m grateful for.

This is not the first time that I thought about feelings the first thing in the morning. That would have been in sex ed in high school, which I took because I needed something first hour and the teacher was so mellow, I don’t think he left any pot unsmoked in the 1960s.

One exercise that he asked us to do was to think about our feelings and make a (I kid you not) feeling wheel the first thing in the morning. As a man, I only have a small number of feelings available to me: salty, drunk, hungry, cold, and sleepy are the three that come to mind.

Newton walks into a bar. Or did the bar walk into Newton?

Other guys on the wrestling team in the class with me would, I kid you not, copy my answers for their feeling wheel. The other reason I didn’t have much to write is because I was 17. The only way I ever felt for every day of my 17^th year on Earth was AWESOME! Being 17 rocked. Gratitude? What was that, I was too busy enjoying life and feeling awesome every day.

Now I’m no longer 17. I find that, for no reason at all, something hurts every morning when I get up. I look in the mirror and can see I’m definitely not 17, at least after my eyes focus, but thankfully the mirror is blurry because I haven’t put my glasses on yet.

I could choose (and I see many people who do this) to feel a little grumpy. To be clear, I did notice that I was waking up grumpy recently. And I thought is this fun? Do I enjoy this?

No, no I do not.

If it’s not enjoyable to me, and it doesn’t serve any purpose, then why am I doing it?

I read that someone in New York City gets stabbed every 43 seconds. Poor guy.

So that’s why I started the experiment. I would, from the first moment that I got up avoid thinking about:

Things I wasn’t looking forward to that day.
Things that make me mad.
Situations that I couldn’t control.
How warm the bed was and how cold the room was.

Instead, I decided, I would think about something that made me happy or something that I was grateful for. It didn’t have to be a big thing – the way that the coffee was going to taste, for instance, or the idea that I was going to get ready for the day faster than usual, or a song I liked that I could play while I brushed my teeth.

I also learned that you should never brush your teeth with your left hand. A toothbrush works much better.

Instead of being mad, I would focus on something that made me want to get out of bed, something to look forward to, no matter how small. Maybe today I could do just a little more than I did yesterday, or serve just a little more than I did yesterday, or be just a little bit better than yesterday. It’s possible, right?

Immediately, my mood was better. Oh, I certainly wasn’t skipping down the hall, but I was not in the mood to complain, in fact, I was feeling happy about things that

I would think about something that made me want to get out of bed.

Oh, sure, the chaos of thoughts about things I had to do would come, but I could push those off until after I had a cup of coffee. Each day I have is a unique day, and the biggest variable is how I deal with it.

If someone gave me a dollar for every time I didn’t understand what was going on, I’d be like, “Hey, why are you giving me all these dollars?”

As I’ve mentioned before, I get to choose how I feel, and I get to choose how I react. In this world, sometimes those are the only things fully under our control. So, if I have to choose?

Today, I chose to be grateful. And, it felt pretty good. Maybe sometime I’ll choose to be grumpy, or angry, or mad.

But not today.

And the good news about having a beard? I didn’t have to shave today, either.

Great News: Everything’s Going Wrong!

“If we can stop him, we shall prevent the collapse of Western civilization. No pressure.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

How many contractors does it take to screw in a light bulb? I’ll let you know when I get one to call me back.

Many times we look at a mess, and think, “Well, that’s just so broken that nothing, nothing will ever be okay again.” That would describe my first marriage. I don’t write more about that bad marriages because bad marriages aren’t all that interesting unless it’s in Florida and involves an alligator, meth, and a Clinton. Besides, it’s over.

So, did it really matter?

In my case, yes.

When I sat back after it was all concluded, one of the things that I did was really think about it, and try to figure out what (if anything) that I had done wrong in the marriage. On hindsight, there was plenty that I did wrong. Though I’d love to blame it all on her since , I certainly played my part. In the end, I knew I’d never find anyone like my ex-wife again. Of course, that was my goal.

There I was, recently divorced, in debt, underwater on my house, and with a stack of bills that were immediately due. It was the worst place I’d ever been in my life, with the exception of being married to my ex. Why are divorces expensive? They’re worth it.

Do divorcing stoners get joint custody?

I realize now that this wasn’t as bad as I thought it was then, but back then it looked like a jet had crashed into my life.

What did I do?

I put one foot in front of the other, met The Mrs., paid off my bills (that took four years), had first one kid and then another, and sold the house right as the housing boom was taking off. None of this was predictable to me at the time of the divorce.

But this isn’t about me.

What kind of eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie? That’s a moray.

When you look at, say, Japan in 1945, it was almost worse than my divorce. Almost. The land had been nuked, bombed, and about 4%, nearly one out of twenty, of the Japanese population had been killed in the war. Their industry had been devastated; their army dismantled, their anime undrawn.

So, they gave up.

No, just kidding. They didn’t give up. They buckled down and became the economic growth story, leading the world in the production of quality cars and electronics by the early 1970s, just a little over a generation after the end of the war and the devastation.

You could not have predicted that Japan would have been so successful that by the late 1980s people were expecting it to have an economy that many felt would soon be larger than the economy of the United States. Luckily, the Japanese discovered mascot suits, and have settled back into being one of the largest, most functional, highest standard of living places in the world who is also a bit crazy.

Why did U-Boats in World War II have dogs as mascots? So they could have a sub woofer.

The point remains – you cannot guess the end by the beginning.

As I look around the world now, I see a world that is filled with conflict, some of which is horrifying. Some of the conflict threatens to change the entire world balance of power. Some of the cataclysmic changes we’ve seen in society have ripped apart the basis for stability of the atom of society – the family and have created new structures that are actively against every virtue and celebrate their opposites.

All of that is true. And yet, I still am optimistic. Why? Because, when I look back through history, we’ve driven to the cliff, again and again and even tried to jump off. When the Roman Empire fell because of many of the same things ailing Western Civilization today, the game wasn’t over. Europe rebounded and eventually (after a lot of struggle) reached heights that had never been seen before in the history of mankind. The setback of the fall of the Roman Empire had been the catalyst for the rebirth of Europe.

Was everything the same?

No. But the foundations for a stable society that can create wealth, freedom, and exemplify virtue haven’t changed since civilization itself was formed. These things are necessary. Humans have changed since civilization started, but the basic things that motivate us and keep us going when it’s cold and dark out haven’t: the things that give us hope are family, religion, and the will to create – something far more than just the will to survive – amoeba and Leftists can do that.

These things don’t include so much of what we see being indoctrinated into the culture today, things that are anti-child, anti-family, and anti-life. These are now being celebrated as virtues, and it’s devastating and causes civilization to unravel.

Surely that burning oil could have created a full tank?

This unravelling, however, will end up being the basis of something new and wonderful: although all great civilizations rhyme, they don’t have to look exactly the same. I really believe that, perhaps, the greatest and most golden age of humanity may be before us, rather than behind us.

You really can’t see it now in a world that’s falling apart because of the absolute inversion of values, but I assure you, it’s there. We will win. Deep down, Kipling knew it over 100 years ago when he penned The Gods of the Copybook Headings (which I’ll trot out once more, full poem below).

We cannot lose because those values that make civilization worth living have nothing to do with the cultural change being forced down our throats. The irony is that, by weakening our culture they bring their defeat closer to them, faster. Hormone treatment of children has not, is not, and will never be a way to create a stable society. It is, in fact, a way to create a crushed number of people that are so broken and confused inside that there is no way that they can create any sort of civilization.

No, everything is breaking apart, and it will lead, inevitably, to the next stage, which is going to be wonderful, though the route won’t be easy. Be of good cheer. I’ll put it in better hands than mine to point out what’s coming:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings, by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Field Guide to NPCs

“I had no idea those beer cans were going to blow like that.” – Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

I’m unique – I can always tell when there are groups of lions around. That fills me with a sense of pride.

(All memes “as found”)

There was a time, back before the rhetoric was so heated, that I would actually seek out to have political discussions with Leftists I knew. The idea was to try to understand their position from their point of view. I see now how wrong I was. In most cases when they were logically cornered, they would get a funny look like they ate a bad PEZ™ on their face and “reset”. They’d never admit that they were wrong, and would hold on to the same opinion they started with.

I hadn’t changed their worldview at all (which wasn’t my point in the first place) but I did notice the behavior. It was repeated, again and again. When the meme showing Leftists as NPCs hit, it started to click. Leftists talking about politics are NPCs.

NPCs are “Non Player Characters” in video games. They’re there for exposition, or to assist in a video game task, or even for comic relief. What they aren’t capable of, is independent thought. That’s up to the player.

The Left got very, very angry at the NPC memes. Their angry reaction is how you can tell it hurt them to the core. That’s how you can tell that there’s truth in a meme – it pulls an emotional reaction from the target.

I can fix the wage gap. Wagegap. See? That wasn’t hard.

But let’s get at the core of what it means to be an NPC. I would bet that everyone reading this post is a person that’s grounded pretty well in reality. We observe reality, then we process around it. An example: we observe that illegal aliens are more likely to commit additional crimes when they get here, don’t contribute much (if at all) in taxes, cause more complex public service needs (forms in multiple languages), and make little effort to assimilate. They’re expensive, make the country less safe, and cause it to be less cohesive.

An NPC, however, will just love illegals because they’ve been told to love them. They don’t observe the world and then adjust their ideas, they just take their ideas from an approved source.

Here’s an example: The Leftists were told to hate James Comey because he released that the FBI was reviewing Hillary’s email right before the election. It was programmed into every Leftist that Comey was a bad guy. Fast forward a few months, and one of the Late Night Funny Joke Men was doing his monologue. Colbert announced that Comey was fired.

The audience erupted in cheers.

Colbert reprogrammed them, immediately: “What, are you all Trump fans?” Within 90 seconds, Colbert switched the old “Comey Bad Man” program into the “Comey Friend” program.

What language is most used in computer programming? Profanity.

It’s clear – Leftists don’t have the ability to judge between one thing and another. This is the most basic part of what makes us human – the ability to seek patterns, come to conclusions, and then act on those conclusions. Leftists can’t tell who is a friend and who is an enemy unless someone tells them. And who do they trust the most? Talking heads on television who go out of their way to only send out approved information.

They can’t come to the conclusion that illegals are bad because everyone tells them how good they are and how nice tacos taste and you’re a racist if you don’t want to import absolutely all of Guatemala.

This results in me feeling a bit of epicaricacy every once and a while, when a Leftist fails to see dangers that any person who isn’t spoon fed their ideas would see, yet the first programming put in is that there are things that they’re not supposed to think about. Their brains shut down when they hit those items where thought is not allowed, and they’ll change the subject as fast as they can – certain inputs are simply not possible. Certain ideas are forbidden.

Newton’s Third Law of Emotion: For every male action, there is a female overreaction.

And a lack of ideas is the problem. People are reading fewer books, and the Leftists don’t need to burn them (though they censor quite a few) because people aren’t reading them anymore. Anything challenging or requiring any study is just too hard.

It’s easier to have an emotion, and Facebook™ and CNN® and the rest of the mainstream media are great at popping out emotions and reprogramming and hiding ideas that aren’t approved. The NPCs can, therefore, not worry about there being any hard thoughts to have or thinking to be done. They can live their lives never thinking about the news. They can live their lives aspiring to nothing. They go to work, eat the things they are told to eat, and feel bad about global warming climate change because they’ve been told to worry about it, even though they only have the vaguest idea what it might be.

Is there a cure?

I once swallowed the cat’s pill. Don’t ask me-ow.

Only for some, and most don’t want to be cured. The cure is the Red Pill. The Red Pill is uncomfortable, but it’s also irreversible. And when The Narrative is finally questioned in the brain of the NPC, it cascades. Once the first Big Lie is seen, the process is started. There’s no going back, if the Red Pill lands with someone who really does want the truth.

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Mental Health

“Who is Poppy Adams? After graduating Harvard Business School, Adams was briefly held for serious mental health issues before disappearing without a trace.” – Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Every day I tell my family I’m going out for a jog and then I don’t. It’s my longest running joke.

FYI – minimal humor and memes in today’s post due to subject matter – it just didn’t fit.

We’ve driven the kids nuts.

I don’t necessarily mean you or I, but the change in society has caused a great decline in the mental health of the kids. It really started showing up in 2009 or so, when the emergency room visits for kids started a sharp uptrend. The kids (ages 10-19) were going to the hospital due to self-harm spiked by over 60% in a single decade.

For girls it was worse – it spiked nearly 100% – doubling in that time period. The rates of depression doubled in that time frame as well.

What I’ve seen when I talk to kids is that many, many of them have huge anxiety issues. Many are on psychoactive drugs. Many are visiting therapists regularly.

I look back to when I was that age, and I’m not sure I knew even a single Gen X kid who was seeing a shrink. I’m sure that it wouldn’t have been something they’d have shared, but it was a school, so that would have gotten around. Also, as far as I know, there was only one girl on any medication, and as I recall there had been some significant family tragedy.

Suicide? Only one kid tried it in the decade I spent in that age group. And I knew a lot of kids. But, to be fair, something like 30% of kids with mental health issues drop out of school so I never would have seen them. However, the numbers really do show that this is certainly the most mentally ill generation in the history of the country.

What’s changed?

Luxuries are available today that would have boggled the minds of my generation when we were growing up. Kids today can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Listen to any song. Watch concerts of their favorite bands. Yet, with all the information, connection, and amusement available, something is horribly wrong.

My first guess at a major factor is a simple one – the iPhone™ came out in 2007. Given two years for smart phones to become more or less everywhere among the teen set, that correlates pretty well to the start of the increase in mental issues.

The designers of social media and games aren’t stupid – they absolutely manipulate the way the apps work to make the user addicted. “Someone read my FaceGram© or InstaSpace® and liked it! I’ll go check and see who it was! I Tweeted®, er X’d™. Did someone repost it?” The system is designed to make sure there are small, frequent doses of dopamine kicked out by whatever is in the human brain that kicks out dopamine.

This shorter-term focus, the smaller “bite size” ideas make something that was typical decades ago, like reading a book, seem like forever. Not being able to tune out and relax can’t be good.

Social media also has another insidious function – it is designed so people show off only the glamorous and nice things that happen to them. Who spends a lot of time posting about their pain, and sorrow? In the end, it makes a certain segment of the population feel that everyone is doing great except for them. Me? With my friends we spend as much time talking about the rough bits in our life as we do the great things.

Online friendships are also shallower, so the real bonding that kids get when they’re on adventures is lost. Add in that porn of the vilest types is available to most any kid with a phone? How are they not messed up in ways that no other generation has ever been?

2009 was also the dawn of Obama. Obama started defending traditional marriage and ended in full Pride® mode. Gender confusion wasn’t really something that was very big when I was growing up, except for Dee Snider. Now people are talking about transitioning toddlers, and somehow these people are being taken seriously and not being strung up on telephone poles.

To be sure, not all kids are a mess, but enough are that there’s a very big problem – I’ve seen one statistic that 44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness. That’s a big number – I do think that, perhaps, the kids see some of the same things coming that we do – I do know they look at the economy and think, perhaps correctly, that they’ll never do as well as their parents.

I’m not sure how to fix those millions of kids that have already passed through their teens and are now in their 20s. From the outside, the one thing I’ve seen with most psychiatrists/psychologists is that they never really cure their patients, they just keep coming back, week after week to pay for the therapist’s BMW®. And I’m exceptionally skeptical of many psychoactive drugs. Yes, I know that some of them work very, very well for certain conditions with a physical cause.

What now?

The solutions to preventing a lot of these issues in the first place are fairly simple, but a big step for many:

Religion gives life a greater meaning. I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that as church attendance declines, mental health problems increase.
Be involved.
Technology control (i.e., limit the damn phones), especially for young girls who seem to be more impacted.
Remove the gender confusion – homeschooling or a decent religious school would be good options.
Make sure they learn skills that allow them to be useful. Start small, and build up. Don’t coddle them or walk them through every step. Make them work for it.
Make sure the boys are involved in sports, especially if they don’t want to be. Get girls involved in something like 4-H or the church youth club.

The Zoomers (Gen Z) have had a tough time of it, and this will be another factor (along with their horribly messed up dating and sex lives) that is already impacting the economy.

Let’s not screw up another generation.

Dunbar At The Fall Of Nations

“Dunbar, not Dumb Bear.” – Dances with Wolves

If beer makes you smarter, that didn’t work out for Budweiser®. (meme not mine)

People are funny. And I’m not talking, “John Wilder after fourteen beers at Chili’s when someone mentions that we’ll have to give up PEZ™ to meet CliMAtE ChAnGE GoALZ” funny. No, I’m talking about the way that we’re wired to react as people, and yet pretend we’re not.

Out of all of the aspirations of the way that we want to think about ourselves, there are some constants. Except for Mark Zuckerberg, we all need air to breathe. We all need food. We all need something to drink. I’ve heard some people drink water, but I keep wonder why they do that when mankind made civilization so we could have a nice beer.

The other thing most of us need is . . . people. Although everyone is slightly different, there seems to be something hardwired into us as to how we deal with people.

I told the doctor I didn’t trust him to stitch me up. He said, “Fine, suture self.”

Robin Dunbar (Grad student for Dr. Batman® Von Unterober) is a British Psychologist. He looked at the various sizes of primate brain, specifically the neo-ocasio-cortex. Er, just the neocortex. Sorry. The neocortex is the most recent delivery to the brain, and allows humans to do complicated things like talking, brewing beer, heating up frozen pizzas in the oven, giving each other chlamydia, and writing columns while drinking beer.

Dunbar sliced up a lot of primate brains, and compared the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate tribe. There was a correlation. Dunbar then said, “Hey, humans are primates, even though we are so very sexy, so what size would a human tribe be?”

His result based on math and brain size, and, I’m guessing a few pints of Guiness®?

Stable human tribe sizes should be about 150 based on Dunbar’s math, and this number is called Dunbar’s Number. I wrote about this before in this post (LINK) where I have the original (as far as I can see) hypothesis that some mental illnesses might have helped small groups survive back when we were killing mammoths to survive, and I write a bit more about Dunbar’s Number in that post.

My friend’s wife is leaving him because of mental illness. Or at least that’s what his cat told him.

This 150 person (let’s be generous and say it’s somewhere between 100 and 250) group size seems to show up wherever I look. Huge corporations may have tens of thousands of employees, but each of the actual operational chunks is small. Most that I’ve seen have been . . . less than 150 people. Even operating locations I’ve been to that have 500 people or more break down into groups. Office staff versus day shift versus night shift, or people who forgot their pants versus people who always remember them, or something similar.

Many folks might say, but Wilder, my country has hundreds of millions of people in it. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t seem to apply. Dunbar himself theorized that this number would only be exceeded when those groups faced extreme survival pressures, like invading Huns or women wanting to vote.

I’ll toss in a different theory here: larger groups than Dunbar’s number can exist when there’s a great degree of wealth that requires cooperation to maintain. My theory was (and is) that civilization was formed so we could make beer (LINK).

So why is it so big now?

How is Alexa® like my ex-wife? She tried to listen to everything and pretended to know it all.

Wealth, technology, and order allow Dunbar’s Number to get immense. If every small town in the United States has a McDonald’s®, then life gets simpler. We have built around an economic “sameness”. Similarly, people watch the same NFL™ teams or NCAA© college teams based on regions. This economic homogeneity is based on wealth and technology.

If you’re a fan of {INSERT SPORTS TEAM HERE} then if I’m a fan of the {SAME EXACT TEAM} we’re not so different, we’ve created a commonality. Dunbar’s Number is short-circuited, and a shallow trust is created.

But what happens when wealth (and the hope of having it) goes down?

I think we’re seeing it. Trust shrinks. People we once put inside our group are now put outside our group because the competition for resources increases. An example is probably in order: if everyone has a job and all of the PEZ™ and Hot Pockets© they want and big houses with swimming pools, having the odd illegal immigrant doesn’t bother them much. But when times get tight and jobs are scarce and Hot Pockets® cost $10 each, the “in-group” shrinks.

The Mrs. cringes every time I call them “Squat Pockets®”.

The greater the stress on the people, the smaller the group gets. Who do I trust? In my circles, it’s my family first. That number is small. Then my close friends – those that I know, based on experience, that I can trust. That number is bigger, but still pretty small. Then there are those who I have strong reason to trust. Then those in the neighborhood. Then . . .

Well, you can see, the tougher the situation, the smaller the circle. If we go back to our history, this is what we find – somewhere between 100 to 250 of us in a group trust each other, and can work as a group. When times are good, technology is in place, and the NFL® is playing that number can certainly be bigger.

I tend to think we’re past the point of Peak Dunbar. As things get tougher, you can see the friction already started as violence has escalated. As jobs disappear, and as hope disappears, this will increase.

But at least right now, I can still have fourteen beers at Chili’s™.

Experiments 2023: Wilder Is The Guinea Pig

“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy hitting buttons randomly.” – Phineas and Ferb

At dinner sometimes I pretend to gag. My kids know it’s just another dad choke.

There’s a time for odds and ends, and Friday is as good as any since a lot of them are on the health side. These are sort-of random, and are around a central theme of experiments that I do to myself and some of the results. I’m not going repeat the one where I replaced my arms with animal limbs – that idea still makes me mad enough to rip up a car with my bear hands.

First: Humans have been taking drugs for at least 12,000 years. I have written (and stand by the idea) (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com)) that the reason that civilization was formed was so we could have beer. If you look at the artifacts found at Göbekli Tepe you’d find that one of them is a stone trough perfect for making beer, with residue from making beer. People have also been ingesting or smoking various things for millennia from coffee to mushrooms to the Devil’s Lettuce. Humans are drug using – it changes our mood.

I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week and he led off with an interesting comment. “Music is a drug,” because it alters our moods. I was working the other day with earbuds in and found myself really happy. Why? Music. It put me in a great mood and I was amazingly productive.

I hear wind turbines are big metal fans.

Adams is right, music acts like a drug. But there’s more: literature and television and Twitter™ I mean X© all fall into the same category. When I was dating in high school I also (accidently) found that horror movies were an amazing aphrodisiac for the girls I dated. Who knew?

I watched a LOT of horror movies on dates when I was in high school. I guess you could chalk that up to Pavlov’s libido.

I have made this point many times: be careful what you let into your head. It can act like a drug, and the wrong drug at the wrong time can be fatal. Choose wisely, and avoid things that make you feel despair.

Second: YouTube® recommended an 8-hour dreaming track that they promised would allow me to have lucid dreams. For those not aware, lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming, but you’re fully conscious. It’s an odd state – it’s not like being hypnogogic, where you’re in that twilight zone between being awake and being asleep. Nope, you’re dreaming but you’re fully conscious.

My boss said I was on the Dream Team! He also asked me to stop sleeping at work.

Sounds like something good, right?

The first night I tried it, The Mrs. reacted very negatively. “What on Earth were you playing last night? It gave me awful dreams.” I persisted for a few weeks. Normally, I go to sleep quite easily, and just like Epstein’s prison guards, I can sleep through almost anything. I still found it easy to go to sleep with the “music” but my dream quality really changed over several weeks. My dreams became incredibly dull. Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.

Aaaargh! I love dreaming when I’m a pirate, or hanging out with Tom Cruise having adventures or being asked by ZZ Top® to play bass at a concert because they were desperate. Those are good dreams. But being at work doing normal day-to-day crap?

It was awful. And I was conscious during the work dreams. Sometimes I’d end them, but end up going right back to work. In my dreams.

That was bad enough, but the final straw that ended this experiment for me was that I would wake up at 4am and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d be there hours, awake in bed. Or so I thought. In reality, I was dreaming that I was trying to get to sleep, but I was fully conscious. I figured this out one morning when my alarm went off during a dream about trying to get to sleep.

That was weird.

I cannot recommend this sort of “music”, unless you want to relive a boring day at the office without being paid for it.

After I stopped, within a week my old sleep patterns returned.

Third: I was the victim of a plagiarist this week. Oh, sure, I’ve actually seen that someone tried to make .pdfs of my posts and (maybe?) sell them a few years ago, but that isn’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about someone taking one of my posts and re-writing it, beat for beat, even using the same analogies.

I’m still mad at the guy who did it.

Surprise: It was me.

Sometimes I take notes (I used to use notecards, but don’t have the same set up, so don’t anymore) for posts. Other times? Walking around, or snoozing, and a post idea hits me. I’ll often work it out in my head, and then write it out.

Plagiarist? Their words, not mine.

I did the latter in this case. Then I saw an old post of mine getting traffic with a really similar name after I posted the piece I had just finished. I clicked on it, and it was amazingly similar – the algorithm that suggests posts based on the post I have up suggested it. That post was also four years older, so I guess my main defense was that I’d written somewhere north of 600 posts (nearly 750,000 words) and slept over 1300 times (1260 if you discount the lucid dreaming nights) since then.

Fourth: I’m really enjoying doing the podcast. This isn’t a commercial or anything, since if only one or two people listened I think we’d still be doing it because it’s fun. It’s a livestream now, but I think it’s pretty tightly produced, so we don’t end up with a lot of the awkwardness you’d expect with an amateur like Shawn Hannity. Nope, we’re professionals. Also, I’m thinking this makes us journalists. For legal reasons. You can watch it here (LINK).

I bring it up because a) I can prove The Mrs. actually exists, and b) it’s something we have a lot of fun doing, and it’s creative and we mostly have our clothes on when we do it. As far as you know.

Fifth: I used to hang out with The Mrs. at lunch, but since her schedule changed, I don’t. Instead, I’ve packed off my laptop and tried to be productive wherever I am during lunch, and it saves mileage and I just don’t eat, so that’s a bonus, too. I’m writing this at lunch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far since I tend to do the first drafts and then when I get home later I do the research and edits and add the (bad) jokes.

Actual German joke: “Why are there so few crimes in Germany? Because it’s illegal.”

It may not sound like a big change, but it shaves hours off of my writing time, and those are hours that I can sleep instead rather than building up a big sleep debt and paying it off on the weekend. Plus, I’m fasting at lunch. In reality, when I went home I’d eat, but I find I don’t miss it at all.

I also think I might get a better overall quality since I’m writing during my most productive time, and editing and cracking jokes at my sillier times. We’ll see.

As always, YMMV.

Memes And Your Mind

“No, for God’s sake! You’ve got it all backwards! AIDS, the Ebola virus? On an evolutionary scale they are newborns. This virus walked the planet long before the dinosaurs.” – The X Files Movie (‘98)

Greta has made a real difference in electrical usage – every time she’s on the TV, I turn it off.

One of the more interesting ideas that I ran across was when I was first exposed to the idea of a meme. It’s really short for mimeme, which means “imitated thing”. Richard Dawkins described it as the idea that ideas would be faced with the same sort of pressures that biological entities face in the world – they either reproduce, or they die.

Regardless of how I feel about Dawkins’ other ideas, this one has always intrigued me, because it’s about the fundamental relationship between people and information and ideas. It’s the place where ideas propagate and are passed on.

Or not. An idea that’s passed on, lives. One that isn’t passed on, dies.

The doctor said I had Peekaboo virus. He said that sends most people to ICU.

Now, that really may not have any relationship with the truth of an idea. Let’s take a meme that has been artificially boosted to the point where it’s known by virtually everyone:

“Diversity is our strength.”

Well, not so much. It turns out that diversity is our diversity, but probably not our strength in that when you have a bunch of people living together that don’t share a common ethnicity, “social trust” drops. It turns out that if you want to live in a society with high trust, it’s probably more reasonable to say, “Diversity is our weakness”.

What about another great meme, this one from our Founding Fathers, “All men are created equal”.

My hairline would beg to differ.

Now if the meme had been, “All men have the same rights” I would have been right on board, and I think that was the original intent. But people are decidedly unequal. Some are short, some are tall. Some are smart, and some are Leftists. All men may have the same rights, but all men aren’t the same.

Why are all the corporations hiring female Equality Officers? They’re cheaper.

How about this one: “majority rules”?

That’s one I remember having been well drilled into the brains of fourth grade kids when I was one, typically when I lost the vote on the movie to watch in class. Why wouldn’t a bunch of fourth grade kids not want to watch Tommy?

But “majority rules” is a horrible way to run a society. Doubt me? Look around. The idea that has been the most stable (outside of Kim’s Best Korea Solution) has been a constitutional republic, not a democracy. But, hey, who needs a constitution when people might have bad thoughts? Majority rules is mob rule, and that defines the worst of us, a place where the passion of the moment takes over from the rights of all of us.

The ideas here are simple, and the phrases have an amazing lifespan even when they are observably false. There is a place for Truth, and it isn’t in a meme. Just as a virus doesn’t have to be virtuous, neither are ideas that are spread by memes. What they are though, is excellent persuasion material.

Oh, Garfield! And here I thought you just wanted to be Nermal.

But just like all people aren’t created equal, all memes aren’t created equal, either. One could make the argument that Trump’s victorious election in 2016 was partially due to fun memes. I’m sure that you saw some of them. Remember The Deplorables meme?

I’m sure Hillary would like to forget it.

Memes are often effective persuasion material, and effective propaganda, true or not. Advertising, for instance, is entirely made to try to create memes and pump them directly into the heads of consumers. How many ad jingles can you think of in the next sixty seconds? I’m lovin’ it®, and I’d be happy to give you Helping Hands™ to Bring Good Things To Life©.

It’s not a mistake that these are memorable.

The Internet has not made this better. In many ways, the websites (especially social media) are created to be addiction pumps by manipulating your emotions – and brain chemicals.

The good news is that we aren’t simply blank slates for corporations, government, and universities to imprint on, we have free will, and most importantly we get to choose what goes into our heads, what information we watch, and what thoughts we consume.

As Garfield® taught us, we aren’t immune to propaganda.

But realizing it’s there is the first step to understanding it, to taking a step back, and to evaluate what I think.

I asked my librarian if they had a book by Shakespeare. “Yes,” she replied. “Which one?” I asked. “William.”

Is that my thought? Did I put it there? Is it consistent with what I know? Is it consistent with the truth?

Is it consistent with the Truth?

When I think about just what a meme might be imitating, I keep coming around to the same idea: the Truth. And what is propaganda, but an idea imitating the Truth?

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Repost from 2019 . . .

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?