Category: Fight Club

Less Is More, Plus Camping Fashion Models

“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club

The world spins on its axis.  That really makes my day.

I used to be a Scoutmaster®.  That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it.  I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.

Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.

I digress.

I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program.  I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.

The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program.  I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”.  The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.

I’m an armchair psychologist.  Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.

The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys.  I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.

Not on my watch.

The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention.  This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well.  The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out.  And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.

No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.

Me?  I got better and better at planning.

Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.

My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain.  I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.

After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop.  My loadout?

A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book.  Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks.  If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.

I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.

The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts:  first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2.  Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping.  Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.

Almost anything.  I’m quite fond of air.

That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program.  They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend.  That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.

Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point.  And doing without was the point.  And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.

In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.

If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.

Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized.  To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare.  I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.

I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it.  But in the future . . . ?

It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today.  Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things.  To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place.  Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read.  Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.

Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s.  Okay.  But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.

I hear that the iPhone’s® battery is called Apple© Juice™.

When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line.  As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.

In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.

Except booze.  Apparently neither the BSA© nor I turn that down.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Force Assessment

“That way management can assess who’s valuable and who’s expendable.  It’s just business.” – American Beauty

There’s a new urban reality show where judges free inmates who like fishing, called “Off the Hook”.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VIII, Issue 4

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., but given the lower numbers on the indexes and the lower number of violence and censorship events, will likely lower the level next month if violence stays low.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My 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 – Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0  – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 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 920 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0 

This is a longer piece.  Obviously, I don’t have a friend in the PLA’s Institute of War Studies who sent this to me (THANK YOU SO MUCH CHANG!) but I do have a large number of readers from the People’s Republic of China, so here’s a shout out to you guys!

Part of being in the United States is that we’re invested in the outcome of a potential future Civil War in a big way.  The Chinese?  They’re interested.  So, I tried to come up with what a somewhat neutral third party would say about Civil War 2.0.  I do know this about militaries, they have plans for everything, so I know that China has a document based on a future American Civil War, so I thought, Wilder, what if you wrote one from China’s perspective?  Here’s my attempt.  It’s dry.  Only one joke.

People’s Liberation Army
Institute of War Studies
For:  General Staff/Theater Strategic Research Cell
INTERNAL DRAFT – NOT FOR RELEASE

Subject:  Possible forms of large-scale internal armed conflict in the United States; relative combat potential; implications for our strategy
Character:  Contingency estimate and outcome review.  This is not a strategic directive.
Constraints:  No actual names of U.S. persons.  No executable strike list against the U.S. homeland.

  1. Mission and Purpose of the Estimate

This estimate reviews four questions:

  1. If the United States enters a large internal conflict between an inland nationalist, armed civil-society coalition and an urban–institutional–transnational coalition, what is the balance of war potential?
  2. On what time scale could the conflict unfold, and how cities and logistics could fail?
  3. How would outside states recognize, hedge, or feed both sides?
  4. What window and what risk does this create for our main strategic direction: Taiwan, the Western Pacific, energy and grain routes, and dollar clearing?

An American internal war is not two field armies advancing on a front, instead it is the splitting of a state machine.  From our viewpoint, the decisive prizes are fragments of nuclear command authority, which government foreign nations will still treat as a government that can sign contracts and that can keep ports and bulk food moving.  A rapid national reunification by either coalition is usually worse for us than a long dual-authority stalemate that cripples external power projection.

  1. Situation and planning assumptions

Assumption A.  The trigger is domestic:  a disputed transfer of power, a federal–state armed standoff, a nationwide attempt to confiscate arms or starve ammunition supply that states refuse, or a systematic civil-liberties crackdown that produces organized nullification.

Assumption B.  The active-duty force does not split cleanly along electoral maps.  State National Guard, some reserve components, veterans, and local law enforcement will show regional tilt.

Assumption C.  In the opening period, intercity trucking and regional electric service are interrupted for days and possibly weeks.  This follows from just-in-time urban design and capitalist logistics.  It does not require a precision sabotage campaign to create failure.

Assumption D.  We do not seek American territory. The task is window management, risk hedging, and competitive shaping.

The United States has on the order of 340 million people. Partisan identification is close. Cities hold population and a majority of output. The interior holds land, calories, and most onshore hydrocarbons. That is the base conflict map.

  1. Identification of the Two Coalitions
Label Center of Gravity Geographic Weight
Red Force, the state-rights /traditional Americans Rural and small-town population, a majority of veterans by affiliation, higher personal firearms density, many state executives and county law officers in the interior Heartland, Plains, Mountain West, much of the South and Appalachia, growing Sun Belt interiors
Blue Force, urban/ institutional/ globalist Dense metros, universities, much of media, ports, hospitals, finance, a large share of the federal civilian apparatus Coastal and Great Lakes cores, a few deep-blue states, the diplomatic and dollar-clearing nodes

 

  1. Relative Combat Potential

4.1 Numbers

Blue Force has the larger share of people and of high-value economic output in compact space. Red Force has the larger share of land and of counties that produce food and fuel.  Raw headcount favors Blue. Staying power on territory favors Red.

4.2 Age and Manpower Quality

Younger urban cohorts lean toward Blue, especially young women. Older cohorts and a large share of military-age males with weapons experience lean toward Red. Red Force’s core is older. Blue Force’s demographic is younger and has no experience with hardship, especially in field conditions.

4.3 Means

The largest force asymmetry is distributed firearms and veteran skill on the Red side.  This is counterbalanced by the institutional, financial, medical, and information infrastructure on the Blue side.

Personal gun ownership is on the order of twice as common in the general voter on the Red side as in the Blue aligned voters.  A key factor is the he national stock of firearms is measured in the hundreds of millions.  However, active-duty United States military services remain the only formation that can move at continental scale with aviation, logistics, and nuclear custody.  Their loyalty is the war’s hinge but it is not sure that they will follow either coalition.

4.4 Cohesion

Red Force coheres around land, faith networks, veterans’ organizations, and distrust of coastal institutions.  It fractures around personalities and between libertarian, populist, and traditional-conservative currents.

Blue Force coheres through bureaucracies, universities, city governments, and remaining national media.  It fractures among socialists, corporate liberals, and identity factions the moment scarcity arrives.

4.5 Command

No single chain exists at the start.

  • Governors command Guard forces until a federalization fight is won or lost.
  • Active-duty officers swear to a constitution, not a faction.
  • Blue Force has more practice running large organizations and talking to foreign ministries.
  • Red Force has more small-unit and land skill and more of the interior’s elected law officers.

Expected command picture:  federated, messy, multiple “capitals,” local strongmen.

4.6 Public Order

Urbanization predicts recorded violent crime better than party label. Dense Blue cores will face faster public-order failure when lights and food stop.  Rural Red areas will face their own disorder:  freelancers, score-settling, and local bosses.  Neither coalition is “the professional army” and neither is “the mob.” Both will generate both, though Red coordination structures are likely more resilient to the certain outages of power and information and less prone to the civil violence commonly seen among blacks.

  1. Environment: terrain, logistics, systems

5.1 Terrain

Continental distances, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Mississippi system, deserts, and northern winter all punish long supply lines.  The countryside is hard to occupy.  The city is impossible to live in without electricity and trucks.

5.2 Food and fuel

California leads agricultural production on a per dollar basis, but most food (grain, oilseeds, cattle, hogs) is produced in the Midwest and in the Plains.  Metros run on continuous inbound trucks.  Retail inventories of food in large cities are measured in days.  Western and southwestern cities are more exposed to food-supply shock than Midwestern and northeastern cities.

Onshore oil and gas are concentrated in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Wyoming, and similar interior producers.  Coastal Blue states are large consumers and are generally net energy importers.

5.3 Power

The bulk power system consists of three grids Eastern, Western, ERCOT.  Texas is nearly an electrical island.  Peak imports into California have already been source of unreliably during long durations of elevated temperatures.  Urban counties show higher outage burden than rural counties in recent published studies.  When bulk power fails, water pumps, sewage, hospitals, elevators, and card payments fail behind it.

5.4 Chokepoints of national significance

Interstate junctions, rail hubs, river locks, pipelines, a small number of container ports, and a small number of food-distribution counties. Blue Force lives at the receiving end of these systems. Red Force lives nearer many of the producing nodes.

  1. Urban System Under Multi-Day to Multi-Week Loss of Power and Food Shipments

Planning assumption: inbound freight and bulk power are unreliable for days and possibly weeks. This is enough to break modern metros.

“Collapse” means loss of municipal control and mass uninhabitability.

“Hold” means some authority, a port or river, nearby production, or milder climate keeps a fraction of the population in place.

6.1 Blue-aligned cores most likely to collapse first

  • Desert metros (Las Vegas type; Phoenix type).  No local water or calories at metro scale.
  • Hyper-dense coastal islands (New York type).  Four to five days of point-of-sale food in official city studies; extensive use of bridges and tunnels; and apartments that need electricity for water.
  • Inner Bay Area type.  Peninsula geography, little staple production, dependence on Central Valley corridors and imported peak power.
  • Los Angeles basin type.  Conditionally fragile.  Nearby valleys can feed it only if corridors and pumps still work.  Population scale and imported water make simultaneous failure catastrophic.
  • South Florida strip type.  Peninsula, heat, storms, imported food.
  • Boston or New England type.  Winter energy tightness and thin local staples.
  • Federal district core.  Political value high, local calories near zero. Survival depends on neighboring state authorities.
  • Hawaii. On the order of nine-tenths of food imported. Sealift and air cargo stop, stores empty in days.

6.2  Blue-aligned cores that may hold

  • Chicago type. The country’s central food and freight node beside Illinois–Iowa production.  Lake water still needs treatment and pumps. If farms still sell into the city, it lasts. If the farms withhold, it becomes New York.
  • Twin Cities type. Grain and protein nearby; winter without gasoline is the killer.
  • Sacramento type. Sits in the Valley rather than at the end of a long hose.
  • Willamette/Portland type. Actual nearby mixed farming.
  • San Diego type. Naval and port footprint; milder climate than desert metros; survival rises if naval authority keeps the harbor working and Los Angeles out.
  • Philadelphia–Baltimore type. Mid-Atlantic farms and ports; less isolated than Manhattan, yet in the midst of collapse already.
  • Great Lakes rust-belt cores. Poor social baseline, better food geography than the Southwest.
  • Atlanta type and other blue city halls inside mixed or red states. Resilience is political: the surrounding state may provision the tax base or quarantine the enclave.
  • Front Range type. Some nearby production; long truck bridge; water is the weakness.

None of these are self-sufficient if the regional truck and grid system is actually down. A collapsed city is not automatically captured by Red Force, it may simply cease to be a city.

  1. Victory Objectives

Neither coalition can cheaply occupy the other’s core terrain.

A Red Force win looks like: enough territory and calories to deny Blue a working national government; surviving state machines; a settlement, partition, or “restored constitution” that Red Force recognizes.  Occupying hostile coastal megacities would consume Red Force.

A Blue Force win looks like: retention of federal forms, the dollar, ports, and foreign recognition; isolation of interior resistance.  Occupying the interior against a dispersed armed population would consume Blue Force.

Most likely military-political outcome: multiple authorities, a humanitarian disaster, a poorer and less sovereign United States.

  1. External Actors

Outside countries will not “join a side” as in a treaty war.  They will protect their interests and choose to deal with the winner that best serves their national interests.

8.1 China’s Preferred Outcome

A United States that can no longer concentrate power in the Western Pacific, while still buying our goods and servicing dollar assets until a substitute currency system is in place.

  • A fast Red Faction victory is dangerous if the survivor is coherent, energy-rich, hostile over Taiwan and technology, and still willing to use export controls and naval power.  It is less dangerous if that survivor withdraws from Asia.
  • A fast Blue Faction victory is dangerous if it restores a working Pentagon, alliances, and export-control regimes and insists on maintaining its cultural hegemony.
  • A long stalemate is the best of the bad outcomes:  while markets seize, naval fleets argue over which orders are legitimate.  During this period, Taiwan is isolated and external military force projection become impossible for the United States.

Therefore, the rational course for China is dual-track:  public language of stability and non-interference.  But we will fund either side with covert information, finance, and selected commodities to prevent a short decisive win.  We engage in recognition of whoever holds the UN seat, but will continue to provide enough life support to the other fragment to keep the split active.  We buy soy, pork, and energy from the interior and sell finished goods into coastal metros.

A famine that kills our suppliers and a coastal crash that kills our consumers are both to be avoided.  The best condition would be a managed paralysis.

8.2  Goals of Countries Hostile to the United States

Russia/Iran/Best Korea:  Aligned with China in wanting a weaker United States, and longer term Russia has designs on Alaska.

8.3 Neighbors of the United States

Mexico will prefer a Blue Force victory due to a need for an outlet for their excess population and as a source of funding.

Canada is more tightly bound to the United States since they are wired into the electrical grid, and export automobiles, grain and energy.  A non-functional United States is an existential Canadian problem, though a potential Chinese foothold on the continent.

8.4 U.S. allies

Pacific:  Japan, ROK, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand

They ask one question:  is there still a navy and a nuclear deterrent that will appear in the Pacific?  They will follow continuing command authority.  Their only win is for Red Force to win decisively and keep the fleet intact.  A Blue Force that holds ports but loses interior fuel and manpower looks will provide no support.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

European Union and the United Kingdom.

There is a cultural affinity with Blue Force.  They are in terror of Red Force abandoning NATO; and feel equal terror of a collapsed America.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

  1. Wild Cards
    Urban gangs and border cartels.
    Winter, hurricanes, western fire and drought.
    Nuclear and strategic-asset custody.
    Dollar collapse.
    A disease event on top of disorder.
  2. Implications for Our Strategy

10.1 The window

A United States arguing over which fragment owns the Pacific fleet is a United States that cannot run a two-theater war.  That is the operational meaning of this contingency for the first island chain.  As cracks open, we should have plans in place to take advantage of the advantage this will give us.

10.2 Risks to us

  • Financial contagion that destroys our reserve portfolio and export demand.
  • Loss of U.S. soy, pork, and energy shipments if interior authorities stop exporting or if ports freeze.
  • A surviving American fragment that is poorer, angrier, less legally constrained, and considering expansion.
  • Allied emergency coordination that freezes the map against us (United States bases stay manned by European allies).  This is unlikely.

10.3 Recommended posture for study

  1. Treat prolonged dual authority as the outcome to shape toward.
  2. Prepare recognition and trade channels for more than one U.S. fragment (ports, grain houses, energy terminals) without early exclusive commitment unless that commitment comes with extraordinary opportunity.
  3. Insulation of our own grain, energy, and payment exposure to a dollar seizure or a Gulf–Pacific simultaneous crisis.  Continue to build stockpiles of critical minerals and commodities.
  1. Estimate in One Paragraph

Red Force is stronger in distributed arms, veterans, land, food, and hydrocarbons.

Blue Force is stronger in people, money, ports, formal institutions, and the existing alliance-and-dollar network.

Neither can cheaply occupy the other’s core.  Desert and hyper-dense coastal Blue metros fail first when power and trucks stop.  Blue Midwest lake-and-rail metros fail later.

Outside powers will not crown a winner if they are thinking clearly.  Our interest is a United States that cannot concentrate, not a United States that has been replaced by a single hostile survivor.

Violence and Censorship:

War was declared on Spain, yet they’re not fighting back:

Ireland . . . excellent!

England, however, hates itself and is censoring it’s national symbol:

Never forget, the GloboLeftElite hates you.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery.

But all those data center jobs?

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 indicators are way down.  Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down again this month to a near-record low.

Economic:

The economy ticked up slightly last month but I’m concerned.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started, but remember who they are.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-dsa-is-using-coffee-with-comrades-and-socialist-softball-to-convert-the-curious-ffcbcc65
https://nypost.com/2026/08/15/us-news/socialist-ny-lawmaker-emily-gallagher-says-shoplifters-have-a-biological-need-to-steal/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democratic-socialists-openly-call-erasure-constitutional-government
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://twitter.com/i/status/2042031825887936702
https://modernity.news/2026/09/05/copycat-clancy-horror/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/08/09/mexican-influencers-murdered-live-streams/

GOOD GUYS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYSaeU5qC70
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2096564604646068341

ONE GUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpWxamM96bg&t=31s
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/08/26/trans-protestor-has-self-defense-hearing-over-drawing-gun-in-laramie-street/

BODY COUNT

https://www.dailymail.com/health/article-16044311/massachusetts-governor-maura-healey-abortion-law.html
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-how-the-american-population-map-will-shift-by-2050/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-08-12_09-25-50.png?itok=Ogu-3AuJ
https://archive.ph/LaP2e

VOTE COUNT

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgSnP_KD_CU
https://www.michigannewssource.com/2026/08/michigan-sheriff-receives-whistleblower-allegation-state-software-automatically-registering-noncitizens-to-vote/
https://www.themidwesterner.news/2026/08/citizen-only-voting-initiative-faces-monday-canvassers-vote-after-staff-recommends-rejecting-petition/
https://ballotpedia.org/When_states_can_begin_processing_and_counting_absentee/mail-in_ballots,_2022

CIVIL WAR

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1984801376
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/a-second-civil-war-and-the-country-fractured-in-two-thats-the-imagined-future-in-author-kurt-andersens-new-novel-xexbrf/
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/30/socialists-fight-aoc-2028
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/gop-plot-to-sabotage-jd-vance-2028-prospects
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/style/america-is-atomizing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4VA.1iQ7.eLCo7EZHLM8d&smid=url-share
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/socialist-leader-says-quiet-part-out-loud-affordability-pitch-masks-guerrilla-class-war
https://modernity.news/2026/08/09/uk-intelligence-warns-of-civil-war-plot-against-migrants-convenient-demonisation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6VA.oPoZ.in0JSEQwfHWI&smid=url-share

Top 15 Everyday Acts That Used To Be Normal And Now Count As Counter-Revolutionary.  Number 8 Will Make Your Spleen Explode!

“I mean, every part of a kaiju sells.  Cartilage, spleen, liver.” – Pacific Rim

How do you stop two blind bums from fighting?  Yell, “My money is on the guy with the knife.”

Number 1:  Telling a child “no”.

Children are not small adults.  Children’s feelings, for the most part, don’t matter.  We don’t let children drive, buy booze, select their own menu, or make life altering choices.  “No” is a complete sentence, and learning limits is required since no child is born with discipline:  that has to be learned.  And, that over time with enough discipline and effort, no can be turned into yes.  Corollary:  letting kids lose is important for similar reasons, because life is complex enough that they will lose.  Plus, I love to see them cry when I crush them in chess.

Number 2:  Demanding that visitors and new arrivals to our country follow our norms, not their own.

When I visit a friend’s house, do I walk to his fridge, open up a beer, impregnated his wife, and then demand to be given the remote control so I can watch what I want instead?  No, unless my friend is a GloboLeftist.  They don’t seem to mind.  And they don’t seem to mind it when foreigners do exactly that when visiting or invading our country.  Moslem women should feel shame when wearing their desert clothes in the United States, and Mexicans should be embarrassed that they don’t speak English.

The population of Modern Mayberry never changes.  Every time a girl gets pregnant, a guy leaves town.

Number 3:  Not pretending that fat women are attractive.

Yes, some people are fat.  Exactly zero of them are healthy, and exactly zero of them are more than a 3 out of 10.  I bring women as the rule, because no one has ever pretended that fat men are attractive.  It’s just (my guess) the feminine desire to reduce mating competition by telling their fat friends to “never change, you’re lovely as you are” so they can have a better chance at banging Chad.

Number 4:  Not letting your son quit.

Quitting is an addictive drug, because once a kid quits and sees no immediate repercussion in his life, it’s setting the stage for a lifetime of quitting.  And no one likes a quitter, except my doctor when it comes to me drinking.  And I keep telling him, if I’m a quitter, that will make me a hypocrite.  I’d tell you more but . . .

I’m throwing “son” out here in rule 4, but you could (I suppose) put in a daughter, but don’t try to sell me on suffrage for women.  That ship sailed over the horizon after they started celebrating murder moms.

When it failed, he was beside himself.

Number 5:  Looking down on “consumers”.

“Consumers” should be shunned.  There is no virtue in purchasing.  As Mojo Nixon musically noted:  You can’t buy cool.  You also can’t buy virtue.

Number 6:  Expecting young women and men to marry and have children.

This is their job.  If young women want to wreck society by having lazy girl jobs, they won’t like it so much when they’re cold, catted, chardonnayed, and unChaded.  This will revert, because if it doesn’t civilization will collapse.  My solution is to drop the drinking age to 18 and encourage illicit keggers in forests.

You know, for the kids.

Is something that looks like pasta, smells like pasta, and tastes like pasta but isn’t pasta an impasta?

Number 7:  Keeping your word, especially when it is painful.

Keeping my word is important to me, because the biggest pains in my life came from when people didn’t keep their word.  And me, if I promise to do the dishes, I promise, I’ll do the dishes.  There is no need to remind me every six months.

Number 7:  Understanding that legality and morality are not the same thing.

When the entire basis of a society is based on the exact letter of a law, you end up with infinity Indians scamming airports to get wheelchairs to jump the line or “buying” a punchbowl from Costco©, using it for the party, and returning it when the party is over.  These are people without honor.  This failure is not the complete explanation of why India is like it is, but it’s part of the explanation.

Number 9:  Acting like the country you live in was built by your ancestors and owed to their descendants.

A female lawyer in New York who wants to tell me that a “refugee” from Kheezewhizistan is just as American as my family, who have been here since before the Revolutionary War, is lying.  She’s trying to give away something that’s not hers to give, and we’re not mad enough about it.

We’ll know Europe is healing when the part of Europe taking in the most refugees is the Mediterranean Sea.

Number 10:  Saying, “I don’t know.”

I’ve observed that the best leaders with the strongest sense of self are unafraid to ask people to explain things, and to admit when they don’t know something.  I’ve also observed that people who know everything invariably don’t.  TrUSt tHe sCieNce!

Number 11:  Thinking that honor, bravery, and integrity should be the norm.

They should be the norm.  There’s a reason they started making fun of Boy Scouts©, then infiltrating them, then destroying them.  The Boy Scouts™ was a wonderful force to create good men, which is the last thing the GloboLeftElite want.  So they killed it.

Number 12:  Thinking as much about responsibility as liberty.

Responsibility is the brother of keeping your word.  It’s keeping promises you haven’t even made.  It’s investment.  Liberty is easy.  Responsibility is hard.

If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?

Number 13:  Teaching children that, yes, they will be judged by their table manners.

It’s true.  They don’t have to use them every moment, but they have to know them.

Number 14:  Admitting when you were wrong without explanation.

This is similar to number 10, but a step farther.  It goes beyond ignorance into error.  People who personalize and defend their errors are evil.  Maybe even Evil.

Number 15:  Incorrectly numbering a list.

Why We Can’t Do War Anymore

“You led us into a war zone with no way out?” – Inception

Also, when cats rebel in the Navy, is that mewtiny?

“Get there first with the most men,” is a quote that is attributed to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.  This was translated by the New York Times® in 1917 as “Git thar fustest with the most mostest” because, well, because of course they did.

This reached its zenith during World War II.  Defeating Germany and Japan wasn’t so much of a military operation but was rather an economic operation.  It was the economy that could produce the mostest fustest.

One example is the aircraft carrier.  The United States entered World War II with eight aircraft carriers, of which seven were “fleet carriers” and the other one was a small “escort” carrier.

It ended with 28 fleet carriers, 9 light carriers, and over 70 escort carriers, making (best guess) 101 operational carriers on in August, 1945 when Japan surrendered after we dropped two portable stars on their island.  This worked.  We could afford to build the planes, atomic bombs, and the ships while still having enough money left over to afford to get a couple of nice ribeyes.

We didn’t just outproduce the Axis, we outproduced them so thoroughly that by the end of the war we had more aircraft carriers than most countries have paved roads.

When the Navy recruiter asked if I could swim, I asked him, “Why?  Have we run out of ships?”

World War II and the following Cold War were economic wars.  How much capital could the United States and the Soviet Union throw into weapons programs to get there fustest with the mostest?  Well, trillions.  Ultimately, the sheer cost of Soviet weapons programs combined with their crappy commie economy caused the whole thing to fall over.

The United States had perfected Modern Warfare, which was really just having the economy produce millions of tons of weapons that we hoped never to use, and occasionally smashing a country with a few missiles or invading Iraq and Afghanistan a couple of times.  Our technology was amazing.  Our previous capital investments allowed us to win any sort of World War II battle we might run into.  You know, if Rommel and the Bockauge Korps appears from a parallel universe and decides to invade Ohio.

Yay!  I knew we could do it!

There’s a city in Ohio called Engagement.  It’s between Dayton and Marion.

But things change, and technology changes.

The biggest change to the world has been the cheap drone.  It’s not cheap when the military does it, since the military procurement process makes things stupidly expensive.  On Amazon®, there is a drone available that will carry a 30-kilogram payload.  An M107 155mm projectile carries about 7kg of explosive.  I have no idea what Comp B costs, but the drone is $15,000 retail, so a nation can buy those in bulk and air drop the equivalent of an M107 shell with ease and with precision for less than $20,000 a trip, and, say, less than $2,000 if you reuse the drone.

An M777 155mm howitzer costs over $4million.  To be fair, the Pentagon could turn that $15,000 drone into a $2million program if allowed to, complete with a 47 page PowerPoint© about diversity, equity, and inclusion plus the requirement that it have a non-gendered toilet.  This is our military’s true superpower.

I hear that in California they have a beach covered in frozen waffles:  Sandy Eggo®.

The capital model of build more stuff that gets there quickly that the Soviets Russians relied on when they invaded Ukraine broke down because it’s now changed.  A $4million tank can be taken out easily by the cheap drone.  In fact, I’d imagine you could get more than 300 of the drones for the price of one tank, and if you re-use them just twice, that’s 600 to 1200 shots perfectly on target, which isn’t warfare, it’s Prime Day© for explosions.

Sure, they’ve had to move to fiber-optics because of jamming.

The bigger problem has been the cheap drone plane, which are currently chewing up Russian refineries.  Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are using them to attack each other.  They’re cost is somewhere between $10,000 to $40,000 per unit, as a guess.  These are cheaply made fixed wing planes that carry 100-pound warheads.  Who needs a bomber?  Who needs a pilot?

Now, for $40,000, one of these planes can easily cause $10,000,000 damage to an oil refinery.

Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz.

The initial attacks on the vessels shipping sweet, sweet oil out to the world was done using $200,000-ish anti-ship missiles.  That’s expensive, so recently they’ve swapped out and are using Shahed® fixed-wing drones that the Russian fixed-wing drones are based on.  Again, cost is probably about $10,000 to $40,000 per unit.

The cost of the drones is probably about $750,000 to $5,000,000.

Total.

And what did that cost the economies of the world?

$1.5-$3 trillion.

That’s a 300,000 to 1 return at the low end.

If that works, it’ll be a crude awakening.

The previous models required men to be moved, and the more of them the better, with more guns and tanks and planes and bombs equaling victory.  Victory was about who had the most capital, and who could bring the most people to the front and build the most bombers and have enough pilots to keep flying them.

In the new models, a base within missile or drone range isn’t an asset, it’s a target.  The 11 supercarriers are now . . . targets.

They are very large, very expensive targets that need to be kept so far from the actual fighting that they’re mostly useful for looking impressive in press releases and photo ops.  At $13 billion a ship with 6,000 personnel on board, we’ve somehow created a weapon so valuable we can’t afford to use it.  It’s less of a warship than a very large, very slow hostage with its own zip code.

The final result of the “war is a capital competition” has produced a hostage with a flight deck that needs to stay a continent away from the fight and replaced thousands of men and billions of dollars with a guy, a laptop, and decent wifi.

And you don’t want to see the planned “Special Forces”.

War in an interconnected world has ceased to look anything like war from 1943.  Like in the book Dune, the idea to war now is to deprive your enemy of something they can’t live without:  “He who can destroy a thing, controls it.”

The Strait of Hormuz proves this, but it’s not the only inflection point where physical resources or the world’s economy is constrained.

Taiwan, for instance, produces 65% of the world’s computer chips.  Taiwan also produces more than 90% of the most advanced chips.

China is vulnerable, too.  The Strait of Malacca moves 80% of China’s oil.  There are others.  In a global, interconnected world getting there first with the most men is less important, or a navy that has to hide in a corner like my cat when I turn on the vacuum.

I never trust five star reviews on them, it’s really hard to get a perfect vacuum.

Now, the key is having the fundamental ability to control something your enemy literally can’t live without.

I’ll translate for the New York Times©:  Take thet stauff they gots to hav.

 

Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.

“Life’s short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” – Bloodhound Gang

Regardless, the people at his funeral will be called Paul-bearers.

I bought the book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was a kid.  I still recall buying it as it was on one of the monthly trips we took to the book store when we ventured off of Mount Wilder.  Ma Wilder was horribly indulgent when it came to books or other healthy creative outlets, like model kits.  Books had an unlimited budget around the house, and she never particularly cared which books, as long as I was reading them.  As such, at two or three novels a week from age 10 to 16, I read a lot.

I still do.

Dune was one of those.  I read it before I started driving.  I remember reading it in the time after finishing mowing Grandma Wilder’s lawn and before I was picked on a beautiful summer day decades ago.  One thing that struck me is the description in the book of the planet Salusa Secundus.  As a kid I mentally pronounced it “Salsa” Secundus, and, well, it is a pretty spicy planet.

I was told to bring an extra jar of liquid cheese, in queso-emergency.

In Herbert’s description, Salusa Secundus was a hell world, horrible weather, murderous beasts, extreme temperatures, awful terrain.  It was also the Emperor’s prison where he tossed away the worst criminals of his interstellar empire.  “ . . . the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent.”

Yet, here was where the Emperor got his fanatical and tough warriors, the feared Hardeharhar.  Oops, different book.  I mean the Sardaukar®.

Why there?  Well, if you could survive there, you could survive on any planet that a man could live on.  And if you could make it though the gauntlet of prisoners trying to kill you, congratulations, you survived the initiation process.

The guards at Big Ben in London look tired!  I guess they’re working around the clock.

The idea isn’t a new one.  The Spartans had a similar story, as retold by Plutarch, who, despite his name, was not Mickey Mouse’s™ dog:

Another boy . . . when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him . . . hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered.  When the searchers were gone . . . [his friends] chid him roundly, saying, ‘It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life.’  ‘No, no!’ said he, smiling, ‘it is better to die than to be detected in a base attempt at theft.’

Our teacher told us this story when I was in second grade.  Yes.  They told it in a somewhat different variation, but they were telling it to seven-year-olds.  No trigger warning.  No safe space.  Just a story about a kid who was so tough that he’d let a fox eat his intestines rather than show weakness.

I think I have an idea where Herbert took his inspiration for the Hardeharhar from.

But at the Best Buy© in Athens you can get advice from the Greek Squad©.

This is a story that resonates, and the deeper it resonates the truer it is.  We don’t become strong by being bathed in rose water and sleeping on satin sheets and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ© every day, and sailors don’t become captains on calm seas.

We don’t become emotionally strong by never facing hardship.

We don’t become physically strong by sitting on a couch.

We don’t live lives of purpose without getting bruised.  Any thing of purpose and worth that one might do will be opposed.  Period.  Either the odds are against it, the gods are against it, or other people are against it.  Sometimes all three.

These are the good fights, if founded in the True, Beautiful and Good.  These are the things that are worth the time and effort and pain.  These are the things that my scar tissue prepared me for.  A life that is based on something that Epictetus said:

Don’t you understand that amounts to saying that I would so prepare myself to endure, and then let anything happen that will happen?

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

That’s a strong statement.  And in a life filled with challenges, it’s hard to understand sometimes why we faced the challenges we did, why we have the scars and bruises that we do.  I think it’s because if they didn’t break us and they made us better prepared.  Yeah, even Nietzsche was right a time or two, if you include his magnificent mustache.

What then, does this leave us with?

We have today.  We have this moment.  We have the amazing gift that we can do anything we wish to right now.  We can make vows to change the world, we can dedicate (or rededicate) ourselves to fighting for what we know is True, Beautiful, and Good.

And that’s why we’re here.  We’re not here for comfort.  We’re not here for leisure.  We’re not here for quiet.  A quiet universe is a dead universe.  A universe without conflict is a dead universe.  A universe without purpose is a dead universe.

How much mass is in the universe?  All of it.

We do not live in a dead universe.  We’re breathing, fighting, aberrations, statistical flukes and inconvenient, stubborn fools fighting against entropy and common sense.  We see the world and keep going, because, deep down, we have our choices, our reasoned choices that allow us to get up to fight another day.

Or give up.

Me?  I choose to keep going, come what may.

Besides, now I’m hungry and am looking for chips and salsa.

Extra spicy.  I think I’m ready.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house.  What was the result?  It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again.  Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh.  Is he right?  Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof.  We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II:  Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one.  Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world.  Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater.  I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney.  That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs.  It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors.  Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat.  We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up?  Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in?  Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort.  Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more.  Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it.  So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink.  I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped.  I was resisting a rest.  (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution.  Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us.  This is the case if it is successful:  essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right?  Well, maybe.  A bit.  If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse?  Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate.  No, I meant collapse.  The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work.  On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs.  The high is high, but it’s not broad.  This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.  Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed.  We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip.  Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet.  You know the one:  houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien.  Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart.  There’s no point in going to the movie.  I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world.  A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us.  They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right?  Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7?  Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong.  He has been wrong before.  Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions.  But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle.  It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch.  It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens?  I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6:  civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer:  I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead.  Silly wife!  They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot:  lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this.  The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops.  It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement:  you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done.  When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude.  And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner.  And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night.  I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome!  I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply.  North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks.  Compliance by force is easy.  Loyalty?  Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside.  That’s not a society.  That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply.  Remember 2020-2021?  It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it.  A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.”  Some complied, without believing.  Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior.  The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor.  COVID was the big opportunity.  Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned.  The goal was simple:  only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast.  The goal was:  brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim.  I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked.  Back then we had a shared set of values.  Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages.  Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures.  Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods.  But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids.  The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced.  Must help.  Must clean it up.  Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders?  Well, punishing it is so mean.  It just needs more care.  That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now.  Who’s crying the loudest today?  Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules?  The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods.  Bob replied, “You’re scared?  I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls.  Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse.  Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear:  your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean.  Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time?  “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on.  The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts.  What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy.  Societies don’t pivot on a dime.  There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture.  Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive.  The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly.  The lies have been lucrative.  But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®?  I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen.  He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple.  Turn left instead of right.  Take the red pill or the blue pill or both.  Eat the salad.  Quit the habit I want to quit.  But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change.  Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard.  Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch.  No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats:  “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it.  I’m stubborn.  Bull-headed, really.  Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus.  I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember.  They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes.  But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back.  The minute the spotlight moves, though?  Back to business as usual.  No buy-in.  No real shift.  Just temporary theater.  I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen.  I’ll admit it:  back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder.  I picked up trash and felt good about it.  But that was simple.  Today it’s different.  Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler.  It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic.  They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.”  No.  Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once.  The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father.  One minute the world revolved around me.  The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well.  That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion.  My values shifted:  “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”.  Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say:  “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor.  It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works.  It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™.  Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture.  He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want.  I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look.  Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda.  I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.”  That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants.  The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten.  But the final decision on what I value?  That’s mine.  Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid.  You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming.  But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda.  Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery.  It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined.  It’s a simple, stubborn fact:  I control the basis of it.  I always have.  And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The Academy Awards Suck: Who Should Have Won

“Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” – Back to School

Yeah, someone’s gonna tell me that M-16 isn’t Vietnam accurate and that Morgan Freeman never carjacked Miss Daisy.

This may be the last of the movie series.  I suppose I could do more in the 1990s, but movies today are just depressing.  I’ll likely just review a few series and movies when they really tickle my fancy.  Enjoy the list, it is what it is.

1985 Best Picture:  Out of Africa

Out of Africa is boring.  Really boring.  It’s 161 minutes of a woman talking about her problems.  I don’t want to hear anyone talk about their problems for 161 minutes, let alone Meryl Streep, who I hate with the fire of a thousand suns.  I.  Hate.  This.  Movie.  I.  Hate.  Meryl.  Streep.

1985:  Should Have Been Best Picture:  Vision Quest

This is such a low bar to beat.  A documentary on the production of aluminum foil would beat Out of Africa in my book, and by a lot, since that might be interesting.  How about Vision Quest?  It has a chick in it, right?  And it’s something much more than the dreary story of a woman in Africa who gets V.D. from her husband.  Nope, it’s about a man who is on a . . . well, vision quest.  Arthur Sido, frequent visitor had a great post on this a while back and I hope he posts it below because I’m too lazy to look it up.

1985 Best Actor:  William Hurt, Kiss of the Spider Woman

William Hurt can act.  He was really good in the TV movie of Dune.  But this movie?  It’s horrible.  It’s a commie talking to a gay guy after being put in a prison by a right-wing South American dictator, so real fantasy material for the GloboLeftistElite that vote on awards for this kind of crap.  Me?  I would have made a movie congratulating the dictator and asking if he got all the commies.

1985:  Should Have Been Best Actor:  Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator. 

You guys know me by now, and I’m a sucker for H.P. Lovecraft done well, and Re-Animator is perhaps the best.  Yet, best actor to a guy in a B-level horror movie?  Why not?  Seems like the last winner in 2026 was in a B-level horror movie, and Jeffrey Combs knocks this role out of the park, managing to capture the manic energy of crazed scientist Herbert West.  How good was he?  Combs could have remained famous for just this role.  If you don’t like horror, this one isn’t for you, but if like Lovecraft, jump on in.

1985:  Hottest Actress:  Kathleen Turner. 

Sure, she looks like Jabba the Hut® before Ozempic® now, but she was smokin’ in the 1980s, and Jewel of the Nile showed her off pretty well.

1986 Best Picture:  Platoon

I saw Platoon once, in a theater.  It was utterly demoralizing.  I’m not discounting the quality of the writing or acting or cinematography.  Those were there.  And Oliver Stone did spend time in-country and got two Purple Hearts, so realism might be there, too.  But I think this was a priming movie for the 1990s and making America doubt itself.  Making us ask ourselves “Are we the good guys?” is just one step away from “let’s import the third world to replace us, because we’re evil.”

1986 Should Have Been Best Picture:  Highlander

The joy of this movie for me is that it was so fresh, so new, and such a great take on an older idea of what would an immortal man do?  Queen’s® soundtrack meshed perfectly, and although it was a dud at the box office, it had long lasting cultural impact.  Plus?  It celebrates good people doing the right things.

1986 Best Actor:  Paul Newman, Fast Eddie Felson, The Color of Money

Just like Elon Musk forgot Bernie Sanders was alive, The Color of Money was a movie that I forgot existed.  It was meh.  And Paul Newman was a Hollywood GloboLeftElite favorite due to his hard-left positions, so they decided to give him a pity Oscar™ in 1986 for playing the same character he always played in movies.

1986:  Should Have Been Best Actor:  Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School

If you’re gonna give someone an Oscar® for playing the same character in every movie, who better than Rodney Dangerfield.  But he got no respect, let me tell ya.

1986 Hottest Actress:  Helen Slater, Ruthless People.  What can I say?  I have a type.

1987 Best Picture:  The Last Emperor

I thought I saw this?  On video, maybe?  But reading the summary, probably not.  An alternate title:  Sucks to be This Guy.

1987 Should Have Been Best Picture:  Predator

This coming-of-age story about a young girl in Victorian England and the struggles she faces with class . . . HA!  NO!  Bombs.  Guns.  Aliens on hunting trips.  Killing commies.  GET TO THE CHOPPA!  Again, more cultural impact than The Last Emperor.  I mean, did they make six sequels to The Last Emperor?  No.  I do think the last few sequels to Predator have been yet more targeted demoralization, but Predator?  No.

1987 Best Actor:  Micheal Douglas, Wall Street

Yeah, yeah, greed is good.  Whatever.

1987 Should Have Been Best Actor:  Arnold Schwarzenneger, Predator

Hear me out.

In that scene where Arnold is covered in mud and at the bank of the river and the Predator™ doesn’t see him?  I actually bought that Arnold was scared.  Rather than just being a big dude, he actually started acting in this movie.

1987 Hottest Actress:  Kim Catrell.  Fight me.  Loser has to bench press 2026 Kathleen Turner.  Or we could make it a contest:  Kathleen Turner-Overdrive.

1988 Best Picture:  Rain Man

I guess Han Zimmer’s music was good, especially for a movie that’s all about taking advantage of your retarded brother.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

1988 Best Picture Should Have Been:  Willow

I had no preconceptions when I walked in to watch Willow.  It’s a charming Tolkien-esque story about dwarves and brave men (Val Kilmer) who bang hot women (Joanne Whalley) who aren’t nearly as tough as they think they are.  It also stars Warwick Davis, who I really have no desire to imprison in my basement and torture with hand tools during a thunderstorm.  No desire at all.

I promise.

The Warwick Davis digression will make sense to about three of you, but that’s okay.

1988 Best Actor:  Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man

Another proof (like Forrest Gump) that you always win an award if you go retard, but not full retard.  Dustin Hoffman is tool who starred in demoralization movies for most of his life intended to destroy the basic fabric of American life, plus he’s an insufferable gaping GloboLeftElite member, probably only second to Richard Dreyfuss in this club.  Outside of that I’m sure this talentless commie hack who hates you is an okay guy.

1988 Best Actor Should Have Been:  Chevy Chase, Funny Farm

Chevy Chase is another person who has a reputation as being insufferable and serving the GloboLeftElite, but at least he’s funny and racist.  This is easily his best movie, and he plays a self-absorbed liar who is pretending to have talents he doesn’t actually have.  So, it’s a natural for Chevy.  Good movie, and I can’t imagine anyone better to play the part.

1988 Hottest Actress:  Kathy Ireland. 

Yes, she’s hot, but she can’t read so therefore doesn’t know any of her lines.  But she’s hot, which is what this category is for, not acting.

1989 Best Picture:  Driving Miss Daisy

Who was this movie for?  Why was it made?  It’s a made-up story that is (again) a demoralization show about how awful Americans are.  The only thing good about this movie is that, again, Hans Zimmer did the music.  I don’t remember the music, but, Hans Zimmer sounds like a name that could have been a Prussian infantry commander against the French in 1871, and I’m really in favor of that.  All the copies of this movie should be dropped in a pit and everyone involved in the production (except Hans Zimmer) should be sent to Tuvalu without air conditioning until they write 100,000 words of apology without ChatGPT®.  I am likely alone in this opinion, but the rest of you can just be wrong.  Also, how damn long has Morgan Freeman been 70?

1989 Best Picture Should Have Been:  The Experts

John Travolta and Arye Gross and Kelly Preston and Deborah Foreman and James Keach.  What a cast!  The plot?  Stupid Americans from New York are kidnapped and drugged and taken to “Nebraska” which is really somewhere in Siberia to a Soviet spy camp.  Their job?  To teach Soviet spies how actual Americans act.  The hidden remoralization:  the “experts” end up corrupting the Soviet spies who were raised based on a 1950s set of American values.  The ending shows that those values are far superior to the 1980s “modern” values.  It’s a comedy, not a documentary, but, damn, it’s funny.

1989 Best Actor:  Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot

Never saw it.  Daniel Day-Lewis should be banned from Oscar® contention because he can’t figure out what his last name is and he’s Irish Catholic.  Or Irish Protestant.  Whatever.  I guess he was okay as Batman®.

1989 Best Actor Should Have Been:  Anthony Edwards, Miracle Mile

I think about six people saw this movie, which is about a guy who picks up a wrong number at a phone booth (two things that don’t exist now) and discovers that nuclear war (one thing that still does) is inbound in an hour or so.  Or is it?  Great tension, and Anthony Edwards really knocks it out of the park, especially when he pretends to be attracted to Mare Winningham.  Seriously, why would you name your daughter “Mare”?  Good movie.

1989 Hottest Actress:  Kelly Preston, The Experts

Pump it up, homeboy.  Indeed.

That’s all folks.  Foodfight below.  Where are you wrong do you disagree?

Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose

“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club

Why are mathematicians always happy?  They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.

“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus

Think back to the moment that were really content.  Happy.  Maybe it was after a nice steak.  Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar.  Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.

Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything.  The moment is complete.  It is as it is.  I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with.  I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee.  In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.

W.C. Fields:  “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite.  With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”

This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time.  It’s simple.  Stop wanting what you don’t have.

Done.  Easy.  Unless it’s air.  I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it.  And water, yeah, I need that on occasion.  Food?  Not an issue.  Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.

So, happiness is easy.

My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long.  They’re now tanned gents.

Why then, are most people unhappy?

They want what they don’t have.  In some cases, they want what they can never have.  Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her.  That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.

So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy.  If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy.  But, no, she’s made herself unhappy.  And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible:  she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have.  In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.

After A.I., how will programmers make money?  Selling their laptops.

This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her:  she made it up.  So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason:  reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be.  You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

The post is outside of me.  It’s something I made.  I can choose what I can do with it.  I can abandon it.  I’ve done that about five times, I think.  I can decide, “You know what, good enough.”  I’ve done that a few times.  But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy.  Very happy.  I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.

If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it.  I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done.  That’s why weed and vidya games are bad.  They give bliss without accomplishment.  It’s the easy road to happy.

But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment.  I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about.  I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control.  If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.

When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?

But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.

That’s the definition of purpose.  It might be small, like mowing the lawn.  It might be big, like changing the world.  But I get to choose.  It should fit my talents.  And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is.  Well, at least to me.  YMMV.

I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist.  It’s overwhelming.

It makes one feel small, sometimes.

But me?  I keep pushing.  I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence:  “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.”  So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.

Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?

Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword.  It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside.  But this is one that I choose to carry.  It’s one that I wish to have.

I control (mostly) my emotions.  Being happy means not wanting.  Except when I choose what I want.  And right now?  I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.

In that order.  But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.