Inflation Nation – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?

“One watch, gold. One cigarette lighter, gold.” – The Usual Suspects

I’d like to thank France for the help giving the United States independence. If it weren’t for them, we’d still be speaking English right now.

Tariffs are now in place, and in various stages of implementation. They are a very big change from the previous game, which was a seemingly sweet deal: Americans send cash that was just “printed”. Foreigners send stuff that they made. Since 1973, they have been super polite: they didn’t even ask us for gold.

They trusted us!

Essentially, this was an “Americans have nukes and are the unipower” tax. As I’ve written before, this had a negative impact on the composition of the American economy, moving from manufacturing to making accounting anomalies.

The rise of China as a manufacturing and economic powerhouse was the biggest challenge to the “unipower” concept, which was born out of the “sweet” deal – they sent us plastic junk while developing world-class manufacturing skills.

China is now number one in manufacturing, with 30% of the global output, as well as being the largest producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, and pork. This is despite the continuous headline of the last thirty years about “Now China Will Really Face The Music”.

No, not really.

To be clear, it wasn’t just Joe. Meme as found.

So, China has grown, but the United States overplayed its hand to make problems accelerate, and I’m not talking about Trump’s tariffs. No, I’m talking about when Biden embargoed Russia from the international payment system while taking Russia’s money and buying Ukraine something nice with it.

When Biden chose that action, the whole world took notes. Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system seemed like a good idea. Except China thought, “Hey, they still owe me for all those iPhones™ they promised to pay me for.” Immediately this bought the BRICS closer together, and they’re working on ways that they can more seamlessly work together – around the United States if need be.

The reason gold prices are up is that the dollar is worth less, not that gold is suddenly even more scarce. Trust in dollars tanked: people are looking for a hedge so that they won’t lose their wealth through exposure to meme dollars. The proof?

They don’t trust the dollar, or graphs. They think the graphs are plotting something. (graph via Dollarcollapse)

Gold didn’t take off in 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Gold took off exactly when Biden sanctioned Russia in 2022 after the Russians invaded Ukraine. Part of the game for the world using the dollar is that we wouldn’t weaponize it.

Oops.

That’s a card you get to play exactly once.

And it backfired. Bigly.

Tariffs are about changing that game, yet again. And it is possibly a pretty long shot, but when it’s the bottom of the ninth and you’ve got a man on first, the temptation is to swing away.

Tariffs have already changed the game. Imports in April are already down 40% year over year, and although a string of ships are still headed our way from China, rumors are that the numbers are down even more.

I first threw a boomerang when I was seven. I live in constant fear.

To give an example of an individual’s complaint about the tariffs, one father was buying his daughter a dress. To be clear, they didn’t specify it was a girl, but it’s 2025, so who can say. Anyway, the daughter had found the perfect dress to wear to a wedding on TEMU™. It was $19. But when the father went to check out, the price had gone up to $59 with tariff.

Now, since TEMU’s© slogan is “Shop Like A Billionaire™” it shouldn’t have mattered, though I can’t see Elon spending time on TEMU™ buying himself sundresses. But was the price reasonable?

Probably. TEMU® has been accused of copying and stealing designs from fashion designers and artists, so I’m sure that there’s no karma in this. Beyond that, though, if we want to be a nation that has consumed itself to death, we should avoid tariffs so TEMU© can grow stronger. So that’s in import.

TEMU® is for people who can’t afford Goodwill™.

Let’s switch to exports.

In one of the weirder stories, pork imports by China from the United States are down. That’s not weird because they slapped a tariff on pork, but the weird part is that this will probably hit the largest US pork producer the hardest. That’s Smithfield Foods©, which is owned by . . . Chy-Na. So, they’re not importing pigs they already own because they put a tariff on those pigs.

That they own.

Which means cheaper bacon in the United States at the expense of the profit margin for multinational corporations. I can deal with that.

Back to the big picture. The imports being lowered by 40% will have a knock-on effect.

Truckers will have fewer loads to transport across the country,
Which means that there will be less demand for diesel fuel,
Which means lower diesel prices.

Overall, the economy has been projected to have shrunk by 2.5% in the first quarter, and with a big hit to imports, chances are nearly 100% that the economy will shrink in the second quarter as well. That means a recession.

I don’t give money to homeless people because I know that they’ll spend it on alcohol when I could spend it on alcohol instead.

But don’t just take my word for it: when I mentioned that the economy would be hitting a recession, The Mrs. scoffed: “We’ve been in one for over a year. Maybe two years.”

She’s right. On a regional basis, and in the places where GloboLeftists don’t strap on the taxpayer money feedbag, the economy likely has been in a stagflation-recession for the last two years. Nobody at USAID noticed it, because they just got continual increases in salary like clockwork and a pension plan better than anything in the private sector.

Going forward, Biden’s sanctioning of Russia made it so we couldn’t print cash anymore: he killed the golden goose. To be fair, it was already sick. Trump (or somebody he knows that says nice things about him) realized it, and, boom, tariffs.

The game is afoot. Can we become net producers again before people don’t want dollars? It’s a race.

But there’s always gold.

Notice: This is not financial advice, since I’m an unpaid humor blogger that writes for my own personal amusement and if you do the things that I’ve done that might make you part of the punchline, and not in the good way. I am not an attorney, accountant, financial advisor, mime, or clairvoyant nor do I pretend to be and I have not stayed at a Holiday Inn™ Express© recently. This website is not a substitute for consultation with an investment professional that is saner and more stable than I am and who is actually, you know, an investment professional who hasn’t tossed back a few shots of bourbon. I expressly suggest you seek advice from a competent professional and accept no liability for any loss or damage that you incur. Gold has gone up in the past. It has also gone down. Not my job to make your decisions: it’s on you, bub.

2024 In Review. Enjoy It Warm Or Over Ice.

“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Or should I have said it was a waist of space?

Most memes are “as found”.

Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is! What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing. So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.

January:

5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing? Boeing.
11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?

February:

4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.

Barron is planning on starting a business. He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.

March:

6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”

April:

20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in. Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”

May:

1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these. Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money. Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.

June:

5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.

July:

13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.

August:

19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”

September:

10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.

Are they Putin on the Ritz?

October:

1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100^th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.

Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.

November:

5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back! What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

December:

1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.

What did I miss?

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look! A baby wolf!” – 1941

Shooting down that Chinese balloon was the only thing Biden ever did to fight inflation. (All memes as found)

On the 24^th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred. The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night. Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night. The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon. Or angels.

Okay, I’ve heard that one before. Or is that where that started? Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.

Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey. I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were. I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.

What could the drones be?

Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them. Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics. Okay, maybe not that shallow.

First thought: It is not aliens. I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds. There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology. If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.

Second thought: It’s not an individual or individuals. One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale. I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo. Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club. Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.

Third thought: It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain. The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles. But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

Fourth thought: It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets. One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.

Fifth thought: It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?

Sixth thought: It’s a distraction for the American public. You know, a shiny object. “Look! A baby wolf!” So, a psyop.

Seventh thought: It’s an actual, operational system. The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis. Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm. “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken. It might have been Mexicans. We won the war. Go back to sleep.”

Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years. I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas. Not one or two, but swarms. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car. It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming. If I were guessing, that was the actual test. Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing. As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers. New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them. I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.

So, to summarize:

Aliens: 0%
Individuals: 5%
Elon: 5%
Iranians!: 2%
Testing: 11%
Psyop: 10%
Active Defense System: 75%
The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%

Heck, it could be angels?

The Health System Sucks

“Life insurance pays off triple, if you die on a business trip.” – Fight Club

Now these are the results that a functioning health care system should provide. Including the hat.

The health industry in the United States is a mess, probably worse than a woke vampire movie where vampires use pronouns like undead/cursed and make their victims go to DEI training (Death, Exsanguination and Immortality) before selecting them based on their social privilege score. Talk about sucking!

But back to the point: the system is a mess. Case in point, the insurance companies are for-profit institutions. As, um, you might have noticed from recent events this leads to almost inevitable conflict between the patient and “their” insurance company.

This has created some really perverse incentives, especially for the company. If they can successfully deny enough claims, their profit goes up, so their best bet to make the most money is to not allow claims, just like the best way for some specialists and hospitals to make the most money is to do the most testing. “Hey, this is the machine that goes ‘ping’, and it’s useful to see if you have the Hong Pong flu.”

For no reason at all.

Oh, and lawyers? We didn’t even mention them. Lawyers just love to find that doctors missed giving the right test so that they can sue them. So, we have the groups all competing for an economic slice of the pie. How big is the pie? In 1960, it was a manageable 5% of the economy of the United States. The average life expectancy then was somewhere around 70 years old.

In 2019, healthcare costs were over three times as much, at 17.6% of the economy. Lifespan had gone up to almost (not quite) 79 years.

So, 12.6% of the economy for an extra 8 point something years? Is that a good deal?

Well, not exactly. Lifespan is certainly extended by modern medical care to some extent, but a huge amount of that uplift is due to factors that have nothing to do with the increased costs of health care. But some of it is better health care: much better trauma care has also made events like gunshot wounds and car accidents more survivable, so the average is going to go up because people aren’t dying young in car crashes as often.

What did the CEO know about the Clintons?

But people aren’t smoking as much, either. Also, cars and roads are objectively safer than in 1960 by an order of magnitude, and since car deaths are skewed to young men, that really helps the average life expectancy. And all of these things have increased life expectancy:

Nutrition
Clean Water
Sanitation
Neonatal Healthcare
Antibiotics
Vaccines

As you can see, many of these things aren’t healthcare, and with the exception of neonatal healthcare, they’re all stupidly cheap. So, a big part of why health care costs so much more is that people are living longer and consuming more health care. If a smoker didn’t die of a heart attack from smoking at age 45 at nearly zero medical cost, now they’re living longer and using medical care at age 80.

This is not a bad problem.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up dad jokes.

The other part, though, is that there are so many more vampires surrounding the money trough than there were back in the day.

Insurance Companies (as noted earlier, insurance companies actually make more “shareholder return” by denying claims and treatments, so if they spend $1 to deny $2 in claims, they’re still up $1)
Ambulance Chasers (attorneys produce great benefits against those who practice irresponsible care, but the lottery attitude of many juries giving ludicrous awards raises costs for everyone)
Big Pharma® (Goldman-Sachs actually asked the question if curing diseases is a sustainable business model, versus forever dispensing medicine to be people who are just sick enough to not die, so the model is to sell more drugs)
Hospital Administration (which has to be doubled to account for insurance claims, government required paperwork, Ambulance Chasers and managing television doctors)
The AMA (who has artificially limited the number of doctors produced by American schools to keep doctor salaries up and hide the stethoscope shortage)
The Government (who builds entire bureaucracies to regulate medical care and administer payments and . . . to hire more bureaucrats)
Illegals and Deadbeats (the system must treat them, by law, in an emergency setting, and guess who pays the bills?)

The current medical system is like a vampire-hydra: cut off one group sucking money out of the system, and another two will emerge.

In the 1980s, healthcare went from a still-manageable 6.9% (1970) to 12.1% (1990) – nearly doubling in size. This was largely driven by a 1986 law (EMTALA) that made emergency treatment a right at any hospital that receives Medicare, whether or not the patient had any ability to pay. It’s like saying that if I’m really thirsty, that McDonald’s™ has to give me an iced tea.

What do you call a talkative Columbian? Hablo Escobar.

And, like usual, everyone points to cheap strawberries as the benefit, but skips the $19.75 Tylenol™ pill in the hospital. Healthcare in the United States is so expensive (at least in part) because to so many it’s free. This increases the recordkeeping, and hospitals have to spread their bills on decent hardworking non-deadbeats.

So, it’s broken. How do we fix it?

On insurance, The Mrs. has a simple idea: make it illegal.

All of it. Medical services are cash on the barrelhead. You pay for the services you get. That sounds drastic, but when I really thought about it, this would eliminate the entire medical billing bureaucracy. We talk about a capitalism, but health care tied to insurance is anything but capitalist, especially with all the mandates and cost shifting from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

The Mrs.’ solution has some real-world evidence to show she might be on to something – real prices for services insurance doesn’t pay for like breast, um, augmentation and laser eye surgery have gone down in real terms. Force doctors to post prices, and for emergency services, well, I’m sure we can figure out ways that hospitals can’t create “pay $90,000 for this shot of anti-venom that cost us $125 or you die” scenarios.

They know a thing or two, because in hundreds of lifetimes they’ve seen a thing or two.

Cap malpractice awards to reasonable levels.

Pharmaceuticals are a bit stickier since we want to foster innovation, but how many of them take public institute research to make their drugs? And we can certainly streamline the FDA, especially for sketchy drugs that might help people that are otherwise terminal.

Get the federal government mostly out of health care, except to prosecute people for fraud. Like the people responsible for the Vaxx®. And make the penalties criminal.

Eliminate free care. If it’s so important to you that people who can’t afford to get treatment, get treatment, don’t use my wallet to assuage your feelings. Pay for it yourself, Sally Strothers.

A Christian cross might make a fictional vampire recoil in horror, but the lack of a money trough will make the health-care-hydra vampire wander away to try something else, hopefully by finding a real job, or, failing that, being paid to suck something else.

Doctor got his degree from Columbia. I told him I wanted one from America.

More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War. This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective. And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place. So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff. In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war. Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes. And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle. To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.”

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London? If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production. At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies. We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford. We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair. Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there. And airplanes? They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those. And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British. It worked. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types. At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers. That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint: It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls. Oh, and worthless university degrees. Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers? Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq? Perhaps not. Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now: LED displays. They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace. A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States. If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted. The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made. Is 1,000 a lot? In billions of dollars, yes. In fighter planes, no. Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day. Is that a lot? Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles. If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours? Probably. But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit. How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems. Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No. Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States. And by Europe. Combined. And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse. That was a good argument, in the past. China now sells more to developing markets than to the West. When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years. China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States. Oh, strike that. Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States. When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things. This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged. Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it. But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest. I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183^rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end. It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory. We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way. This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence. Hmmm. Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south. Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?

The Government: Killing You With Their Compassion

“I warned you about compassion, Bruce.” – Batman Begins

The people who were pro-vaxx say that our jokes about being right are getting old. Unlike their kids.

It has long been a theme here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise that compassion and charity are wonderful things. For me as an individual, there is something fundamentally uplifting about giving of my time, talent, or treasures to those that I can help. If done properly, this compassion and charity are amazing at lifting people up when they need it.

But the dark side is when someone is compassionate for you, with none of your involvement. This is a hallmark of the GloboLeftElite: they want to take your resources to give to other people. They then call that compassionate, and tell me I’m evil if I don’t buy into the concept.

In fact, if you look at people on the TradRight, we are far, far more compassionate with our actual time, talent and treasure than people on the GloboLeft. Donation statistics show it, and if you look at the people involved in actual charities and volunteer organizations (that don’t depend on other people’s money) they are overwhelmingly on the TradRight.

They don’t have blook banks in England, but they do have a liver pool.

But let’s talk about the Leech Class, a faction of the GloboLeftElite, who suck the cash and resources from all of us to support their “charitable” goals.

FEMA comes to mind due to the recent incident where DHS spokes-scrotum Alejandro Mayorkas. Only in the corrupt stages of a failing nation could a paperwork American (Majerkas) who was born of a Turkish father and a Romanian mother and who was born in Cuba be put in charge of immigration. Oh, and an anchor baby running for president.

But here we are.

This week, Madorkas said there wasn’t any money to help hurricane refugees. It turns out that under border-Czar Harris, the Biden/Harris Junta declared, proudly, that they were diverting FEMA funding to give to American “Blue” cities to support the teeming hordes of illegal aliens that they had invited and, in some cases, had flown into the United States (this is true, by the hundreds of thousands).

Is a short dog from New Mexico an Albu-corgi?

Yes. Biden/Harris created the crisis. Then, they pulled the cash from FEMA to give to their cronies to pay for these illegals. Where did the money go? In New York, shiftless illegals are living in four-star hotels with turndown service. They’re being provided with food at no cost.

And veterans have to fight for surgery. And the people of North Carolina are told that there’s no money for them.

But illegals, many criminal, and many not even remotely vetted, are living in luxury hotels.

This causes the prices of hotels to go up – FEMA is even paying for empty beds in these hotels. This causes the price of food to go up, you can’t add 10% population to a system and not expect inflation as more people fight for the same resources.

My urine is crystal clear. It’s 1080 pee.

But it’s compassionate. Compassionate to bring 20,000 Haitians into Springfield, Ohio. The Haitians have zero experience living in a civilized society, having been brought up in a country (that they created) where a good day is there’s enough mud to eat.

Springfield didn’t add 5,000 houses, so where are these aliens living?

One rumor has it that a local politician/landlord booted out his American tenants who were paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month in a house, and replaced them with 20 Haitians who pay $250 a month for a cot.

Hey, profit, right?

And housing costs go up in Springfield. I guess they can make it up since the dogcatcher no longer is needed to round up stray pets.

But I’m probably not considered compassionate when I bring this up.

Why have one man, when you can have 80 cats?

Today, I saw some brain-dead GloboLeftist X® (formerly known as a Tweet®) that we should be happy, because illegals keep the prices of vegetables down.

First, no, they eat them, too. Second, if the base value of your philosophy is to bring in cheap labor to pick strawberries, you might have the morals of a slaveholder, but just with other hands holding the whip.

The final insidious nature of what we’re seeing is that this is the year that our national deficit is equal to the size of our economy in the United States. The last time this happened was in World War II, and at least we got lots of tanks, fighters, bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear bombs, and other cool stuff that I can’t buy on E-Bay®. Again, ATF should be a convenience store, not a place for LGBTQ people to scheme to take away guns owned by honest people.

No, we’re spending all this cash on . . . the acceptable compassion and charity based on the values of the GloboLeft. I saw part of a presentation today (on YouTube®) that FEMA put together so that the needs of people with non-standard sexual preferences were prioritized in the event of a disaster.

Prioritized. “Hey, that 10-year-old boy is hungry, but he’s white and was born male, so let’s focus on the thirty-year-old dude who thinks he’s a girl and wants to have sex with cats.” Yes. Emergencies don’t know skin color or sexual fetish, but FEMA sure does.

I stopped drinking, but then I bought a motivational poster and decided Wayne Gretzky was right: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

That’s bad enough, but they’re spending so much money on the groups that the GloboLeftElite want to shower with charity that it’s turning whatever capitalism that was left in the United States into a joke. Yes, people are still using cash to buy things, but the government is now buying more than the economy creates.

Mainly on charity. For people who are not me, and not you.

The final piece is that studies have shown that people who get this unearned charity often resent those who have more, and want the charity to give them the life of a Bill Gates, rather than just guaranteed food, housing, education, and medical care.

It’s so unfair! I still remember one woman who was a part of the first The Caravan of 10,000 people (what a dream, only 10,000!) was filmed after getting food aid consisting of refried beans, tortillas, vegetables, and a drink.

“This food isn’t fit for my dog!”

She was overweight.

Yup, that’s what governmental charity and compassion to the undeserving creates. Oh, and as a bonus it wrecks the currency and makes you and I poorer.

Wonder how that’ll turn out?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Silent Coup

“And after your glorious coup, what then?” – Gladiator

What’s a three-line poem that overthrows a government? A Hai Coup.

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

Volume VI, Issue 5

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Silent Coup – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The Silent Coup

Looking back at the last six years, it’s clear that there has been a silent coup. The coup had its origins in the results of the 2016 election. W, though just as demonized by the GloboLeft, played ball with the GloboLeftElite and was allowed to win, twice.

Obama was firmly a GloboLeftElite candidate from the moment of his selection – he was always in the pocket of the Washington and New York elite, and got his unlikely public image with the help of a fawning press.

Trump, however, broke the cycle. A ¡JEB! would have been a fine candidate for the GloboLeftElite, but Trump took everyone by surprise. They were so surprised by Trump’s victory that they weren’t able to cheat in time. Hillary, who had been promised her shot, instead had to blame it on the Russians, who did buy something like a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook® ads.

Since 2016, the Silent Coup has been a full court press against Trump.

The FBI set up Flynn for a phone call.
Trump was impeached for . . . a phone call, where he was asking about potentially illegal activities of the United States government.
The election results from 2020 were “fortified” by a well-funded group who did everything thing they could to skew voting so that votes could be harvested by the GloboLeft foot soldiers.
After the election, the war on Trump intensified, and a Special Prosecutor was illegally appointed to spend tens of millions of dollars to find something, anything, that they could charge Trump with.
A law was changed in New York eliminating the statutory period for lawsuits, so Trump could be sued by a woman that I would have turned down at her best, who couldn’t even remember the date of the assault, and, before her lawsuit, Tweeted™ about a question about people having sex with Trump for $17,000.

There’s more. All of it equally silly, and the pending felony sentencing is postponed until after the election making it moot.

Well, it’s not all silly: There have been multiple assassination attempts on Trump.

But the actions haven’t just been against Trump – they’ve been aimed at those who would support Trump. Most recently Hurricane Helene hit the western part of North Carolina. No, I don’t blame the Democrats for that. But the hurricane produced tragic flooding. Those areas are Trump +10% or +20% in a state that is crucial for both candidates to win.

What would the motivations be of a highly partisan government? Recovery? Or create enough chaos that thousands can’t vote in a close election?

What about allowing the sale (on an expedited basis in a way that has never been done) to George Soros of over 220 radio stations? Oh, and that over 25% of the funding for this purchase is coming from foreign sources?

Beyond that, the government has been shoveling hundreds of thousands of illegals straight into Red States. Why? When the make them paperwork “citizens” then their votes will replace those of heritage Americans, and then there’s no more worrying about the pesky people who built this nation and their offspring.

Violence and Censorship Update

Obviously, the big story is the second attempt on Trump:

And that the press is observably all-in for Biden Harris:

And that it’s obvious the plan once they get full power:

And that only approved media should be allowed to be made:

And why you should ignore what the press says:

And some names aren’t allowed:

And this is the plan to keep people under control:

And soon the laws will vary based on your race:

Biden/Harris Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. It’s like there’s a pattern here . . .

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is up significantly, and this should be higher given that Venezuelan gangs are turning parts of US cities into no-go zones. The meme below isn’t related to any of that, but I liked it:

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is up some.

Economic:

The economy is in full juice mode for the election. There will be a hangover at the end.

Illegal Aliens:

September is showing as down, again, since (my take) the .gov folks are just making up numbers now.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://youtu.be/29JKG3OOV5A
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1837363341360046429
https://x.com/i/status/1837835644279652796
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-us-army-documents-thousands-violent-venezuelan-prison-gang-members-run-amok-across
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1839747244561461495
https://x.com/judiciarygop/status/1841908406702977486?s=46

Good Guys
https://x.com/realdschmidt/status/1835804388687852030
https://x.com/TONYxTWO/status/1836957753270567118
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835830627251441713

One Guy
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1832805912945496432
https://x.com/i/status/1836429342806806920
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r_xc09q9vo
https://www.ammoland.com/2024/09/chicago-woman-defends-her-daughter-against-home-intruder-police-take-her-gun/
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2024/09/16/jewish-groups-issue-travel-warning-about-massachusetts-county-where-man-charged-in-self-defense-shooting-n1226239

Body Count
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/USPopulationByRace_web.jpg?itok=xEy0RSJD
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-09-17_08-01-06.png?itok=-Wfnpo_M
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Counties-at-least-25-Percent-Dep.jpg?itok=0-ieqYQ5
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-gen-z-childless-money-finances-massmutual/
https://www.muckraker.com/articles/finding-the-feds-missing-children/
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4900734-us-suicides-remain-high-cdc/

Vote Count
https://electionbriefing.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/11/politics/early-voting-election-what-matters/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-non-citizens-say-they-are-registered-to-vote-in-key-swing-state
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651185/partisan-split-election-integrity-gets-even-wider.aspx
https://www.arcamax.com/currentnews/newsheadlines/s-3422282
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/widespread-problems-with-u-s-mail-system-could-disrupt-voting-election-officials-warn
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJ0TtjhBIQTDX0ZDApXCew–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTI0MDA7aD0yNDAwO2NmPXdlYnA-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/us.abcnews.gma.com/d034e5923caf1fc1883add9a80a79e24

The Future Of War
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1842138275726680357
https://x.com/AncientAlien01/status/1840339044804292657
https://x.com/ConnieLingus123/status/1784570453094178936
https://x.com/UaCoins/status/1756753637483647280

Civil War
https://screenrant.com/civil-war-2024-movie-streaming-ratings-success/
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/09/17/age-of-rage-26-million-americans-believe-political-violence-is-justified/
https://napolitaninstitute.org/2024/09/18/17-say-america-would-be-better-off-if-trump-had-been-killed/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/17/half-republicans-wont-accept-trump-loss-2024/75142477007/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-2024-election-is-a-tinderbox/ar-AA1qG4j0
https://archive.is/Bpkki
https://www.thefp.com/p/republics-unravel-rome-america-trump-jan-6
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/09/28/you-dont-need-a-weatherman-to-know-which-way-the-wind-blows/

Economics Of War, 2024 Edition

“Well, it seems to me, sir, that God made me a fine instrument of warfare.” – Saving Private Ryan

I guess that there’s no thyme to tell all his stories.

War is one of the natural states of humanity. Although we don’t have records back before when Grug was living in Switzerland before hot cocoa was invented, we do have Ötzi, a guy who died about 5,300 years ago.

What we can tell about Ötzi is that, first, he’s dead. Secondly, we can tell that he was almost certainly murdered. By who? Don’t know, but it’s a pretty good bet that they guy who inflicted the wound died, too. Unless he was killed by Keith Richards, who we should probably put on a space ship because only he could live long enough to travel to another star.

Why would I say that the murderer was dead (unless it was Keith Richards)? The Yanomami people of the jungles of South America are as close as we have to “pre-civilization” people, and they killed themselves in at an astonishing rate. About half of their men died in combat until fairly recently.

Do your part to keep him immortal.

The economics of the Yanomami violence are pretty simple – a bow, an arrow, a stone knife, and an enemy. Heck, they don’t even have money, so I have no idea how they can get a rental car.

In one sense, we are the opposite of the Yanomami and Ötzi. We have been fortunate enough to live in the Good Times, when the horror of nuclear weapons has thus far lowered the percentage of combat deaths since 1945 to what I think could be a historic low. Why?

War is like football. Everyone comes out of the huddle, and then lines up. What the team on the offense is going to do? Who knows. It’s the job of the defense to respond and stop them, though using snipers is considered to be unsportsmanlike. Creating surprise is now pretty difficult, especially surprise on a large scale.

My buddy said he made a voodoo doll of me. I think he’s pulling my leg.

Let’s look at the Ukraine Conflict.

It started out as a grand, strategic move like a great World War II battle with tanks and bombs and planes. That did surprise the West (me included) because it seemed so out of place given the safe world we live in – as /pol/ would say: “nothing ever happens”. The initial gains of the Russians were large, but by the time the Ukrainians got their feet under them, the Russians had a logistical snarl and found out that rubber tires rot if you just leave them in the garage for thirty or forty years.

Oops.

The war went from swooping strategy to what exists now: a series of mainly small-scale actions where when an infantry squad breaks through, it sometimes makes the news even though a gain of 500 yards is a big deal. Why? Because large troop concentrations are visible from space. And anything visible from space is a target. Neither side can effectively generate the schwerpunkt or focal point of forces required to break through and create a war of movement.

Are doctors who graduate online called Google® Docs?

Nope. The latest development is that small squads of Russians are now using small, cheap ($2500 or less) dirt bikes to get to the opposing trenches fast, disposing of them as they storm the trenches. This helps them avoid the ever-present drone swarms. It’s like The Road Warrior, but with fewer shoulder pads.

And tank warfare? For now, at least, it’s gone. Just like bat is the “chicken of the cave” so is the tank now the “aircraft carrier of the land”. They’re mainly just expensive targets, and a variety of cope cages, turtle shells, and electronic jamming have been field-innovated to try to protect them.

But when you lose a tank, you lose a pretty big investment. Russia can only make (depending on your definition of tanks) about 1,500 a year, along with 3,000 other sorts of armored vehicles. A big chunk of those tanks are modernized and rebuilt Soviet-era tanks.

A Russian T-90 tank costs about $4.5 million. A drone with bomb costs less than a thousand dollars. One economist estimated that the Russian tank losses alone was about an $11 billion dollar hit.

You do the math.

Remember when the Biden/Harris administration shot down the Chinese balloon? At least they tried to stop some inflation.

Likewise, aircraft have had to stay well back because of surface to air missiles, of which the Russians produce a pretty good variety. The Russians claim (heavy emphasis on the word claim) their radars can easily see the F-35 and F-22. Claim. An F-35 costs about $109,000,000 per aircraft. An F-22 cannot be replaced – we lost the tooling. Fun fact: $109,000,000 in quarters would weigh five and a half million pounds, or the equivalent of the weight of pre-printed Biden ballots the Democrats had to dispose of discreetly after Joe dropped out.

As of January, 2024, we have 234 operational F-35s. We have 187 F-22s. And, yes, those babies can unleash a lot of havoc in short order, but missiles are cheap, and if it takes dozens to knock one of our fighters down, it’s dollars ahead. And, let’s be clear: they’re not always flying. The US response to the Me-262 wasn’t to try to dogfight a German jet with a Yankee prop, nope, our aces hung around the German air bases and shot them as they had to land.

Is a boomerang their weapon of choice?

Every weapon has a weakness, and rarely can those weaknesses be overcome by papering them over with hundred-dollar bills. But just as the object of making weapons has gotten bigger and bigger, our ability to fight a World War II style war has gone to zero. One anecdote is that a captured German fighter pilot was bragging about shooting up a large quantity of American planes on the ground at an airbase. Being at the airbase, the US officer took him outside and noted, “They’ve already been replaced.”

The German reportedly said, after a heavy sigh, “And that is why we are losing.” That, and my great-grandfather, Johan von Wilder, who was responsible for downing five German fighters by himself. Worst mechanic in the Luftwaffe.

The trend, though, is less $100 million fighters, but now seems to be looking towards large numbers of inexpensive, nearly disposable weapons that are cheap, lots of missiles that cost a few million bucks, and fewer “so expensive it’s silly” systems, except for those that give the really important part of the battle: information – satellites and radar and the like.

But for all of that, the goal in war seems to have changed. Rather than breaking stuff and killing people, the goal is more based on long-term fights whose goal is to cause the enemy to become unstable to topple their own leadership for someone more favorable. I’m betting this is really a legacy of the Cold War.

I put my desk in the elevator. I hope it takes my career to a whole new level.

I don’t think that we’re in any shape to fight an actual war against a determined opponent in a conventional sense for longer than a month or two, and wholly incapable of fighting in an area where we don’t have uncontested air dominance. From an industrial standpoint, our ability to make more stuff isn’t serious: outside of small arms and helmet and clothing, I’m not sure that there’s a weapons system that we could make without the help of overseas firms for critical items.

We just don’t make it here anymore, and building the basic industries to allow us to do so will take decades and trillions of dollars in capital invested. I think we’ve reached the point where our primary weapon is financial. There’s a precedent that situation can last a long time – the Byzantine Empire lasted in one form or another for over 1,000 years.

The Byzantine Empire had a gold stash that would make Scrooge McDuck® do whatever it is that ducks do when they’re happy, however. We don’t. Our wealth is based on paper and mathematics, and can move across borders in milliseconds (megafarads if you want an SI unit).

What would Ötzi’s people think about that? I don’t really know. I guess we’ll have to ask Keith Richards.

Alaska, Reparations, Bad Economics, And Football

“If nobody comes down and buys a car from me in the next hour, I’m gonna club this baby seal.” – UHF

Karl Marx never finished college, either. It was a class conflict.

When we lived in Alaska, one of the nicest things about living there was that we unplugged. Essentially, in Alaska we tuned out things that were happening “Outside”.

While Outside might conjure up images of John Wilder shivering in a cold car as the heater slowly went from blowing negative 55°F (8,321 Kelvin) air to 20°F (2.54 centimeters) air, you’d be right. But to an Alaskan, Outside meant any place that wasn’t Alaska.

The consequences of this mindset were very relaxing. National politics down in the lower 48 is a constant buzz in the background, but in Alaska, almost all of the news was local news – who had seen a brown bear, when the cat show was, and where the burning of Ronald McDonald™ in effigy to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve was scheduled to be. The only time national politics showed up in the news was when it had a direct impact on Alaskans, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

I hear this grizzly got fired – he was only doing the bear minimum.

ANWR has been a controversy since the 1970s, but it certainly isn’t much of a controversy with Alaskans – they’re in favor of it since oil drilling in the state literally put money into the pockets of local citizens. The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer. Remember Alaska’s motto: “Step off of the tour bus, and into the food chain”.

As I recall, drilling in ANWR was so popular in Alaska that the movement against drilling in ANWR was based in Seattle so the activists weren’t sacrificed to the wolves.

Yup, almost all of the opposition to drilling was from people from Outside.

The perspective I got from living in Alaska, though, was that ANWR was just a political football. The GloboLeftElite loved ANWR because they used it as a perennial fundraising tool: give us money or evil people will cover this baby seal in oil and then not let the Haitians eat it, which is their right as Haitians and is perfectly normal, you know.

But I didn’t do it on porpoise.

It’s still that way to this day. No, not Haitians eating crude-covered seals, but drilling in ANWR.

The answer, despite being approved in 2017 or so?

No, not today. The GloboLeft keeps putting the ball down, and as Charlie Brown (AKA, Conoco©) gets ready to drill, the GloboLeft pulls the football out of the way at the last minute. It’s not exaggeration to say that this has happened literally fifty times since I’ve been alive. People in Alaska already know the score. Conoco™ is never gonna be allowed to kick that football.

The same thing is true with reparations.

Reparations are a really hideous joke on the black community, because they play off of the very worst of emotions – greed and victimhood. First, who doesn’t want someone else to provide them with all the money they could ever want? I mean, my hand would be among the first up, though I do know that there’s something corrosive to the soul about taking money I haven’t earned from people who haven’t wronged me, but, hey, free money.

The inventor of autocorrect died. The funnel will be helped tomato.

The more pernicious part of the reparations deal is that it establishes a narrative of victimhood and implies helplessness. Be a single mother with six kids by five different baby daddies? It’s the fault of slavery. Be convicted of seventeen felonies, be released, and then finally have to go to jail for life because no one stopped you from killing someone? It’s the fault of 300 years of systemic oppression.

Yup, and this isn’t an exaggeration. And, I guess they’ve got a point. Look at how oppressed Barack Obama was in being forced to be president. It even turned his hair white!

But reparations will solve literally everything, every problem. And let’s ignore pesky and inconvenient facts like the crime rates among blacks, and the relative success of nearly every other minority group in the nation except blacks. Oh, and we should look at how wonderful it has been for native Americans, because we gave them reparations in the form of reservations and unlimited Bureau of Indian Affairs welfare. Like communism, I’m sure it would work next time.

But, for a second, let’s pretend that if we gave out reparations, people would finally shut up. Think that would work?

No. I recall one ludicrous proposal (California, I believe) that would have given black people something like $3,000,000 each. The response? “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.”

This is Dr. Evil level of economic understanding . . . .

What’s enough? Nothing is enough. There is absolutely no amount that will ever be seen to be enough, because there has been a force-feeding of victimhood for decades into the black community, and to say, “Okay, white guys, we’re even now,” would be contradictory to every bit of victimhood that they rely on to get them through the day. From personal experience in dealing with victims, they relish the pity, and will do absolutely anything to hold on to their victim status.

Also, there is no way that black people will ever get the sky-high sorts of compensation that they’re looking for (millions of dollars in cash, freedom from taxes, a free house, and $70,000 a year for 80 years was one proposal). Perhaps they might get another MLK, Jr. Street or a George Floyd Square, but they’ve already got two national holidays plus Kwanza.

Whatever Kwanza is.

Teach your children about Kwanza in a responsible manner.

No, just like ANWR was a football to money-farm GloboLeft-leaning women with too much disposable income who wanted to virtue signal that Haitians should be allowed to eat all the seal meat they wanted, reparations are a mechanism to vote-farm the black community for whoever promises them the best package that they’re never going to get.

And even that won’t eliminate the “economic understanding gap”.

I’d make a comment here about the ludicrousness of printing another few trillion dollars and then just giving it away as a cure to inflation, but since we’ve long since ceased being a serious nation in any respect, I’ll skip it. Perhaps we’re hoping to spend ourselves into the relative economic prosperity of, say, Spain or Mauritania, where they still have tens of thousands of slaves.

Dang, I shouldn’t have mentioned that, since now the Mauritanians will want reparations from the United States for slavery since I’m sure that somehow the United States is responsible for blacks enslaving blacks 4,017 miles (16 kilograms) away from the United States.

ANWR will likely never be drilled, and black people will likely never get more than a token sort of reparations. And that’s fair, because no living black person was ever subject to legal slavery in the United States, though now we do have unpaid internships. At charities. That don’t want us to drill in ANWR.

I guess you could say the drilling system is rigged.

Are We In The Middle Of A Planned Revolution? Yes.

“Day 93 under the dome. With necessities growing dangerously low, who knows what spark will set off this powder keg?” – The Simpsons Movie

I saw two men in matching outfits so I asked them if they were gay. Turns out that doesn’t make the NYPD happy.

A phenomenon that has sweep the world in the early 21^st century has been the “Color Revolution”. This is characterized by a “grassroots” movement whose aim was theoretically to create a liberal Western democracy on the European model. An example would be most Western European countries, with the exception of the Islamic Caliphate of France.

What methods were used in these “peaceful” revolutions?

Leadership by Non-Governmental Organizations Civil Disobedience
Civil Disorder/Disobedience/Protests
Total Lack of Chill
Use of the Internet to Organize
Heavy “Student” Participation

When I read that list, I see a single conclusion: the CIA did it, sometimes with the help of George Soros.

Probably one of the first places that this method was used was the Soviet Union. All of the “spontaneous” protests at the beginning were likely anything but spontaneous. The wonderful part of this type of operation is that if it works, great, an enemy is off the board. If it doesn’t? Everyone involved can put on their “so sorry that happened to you, buddy” face while preparing for the next one.

To be fair, I don’t think that most of the people that were trying to get the Soviet Union to collapse thought it was going to work as well and as completely and as quickly as it did. One minute, the Soviets were all “Viktor Drago” and the next they were all “Trotsky after meeting an icepick”.

What do you call a man with an ice pick in his head? Anything you want – he clearly doesn’t control the security apparatus of the USSR.

But there is more at play here. Ricky emailed me an article from 2014 that talked in depth about Color Revolutions and their mechanics by Andrew Korybko which inspired this post. You can find that article here.

The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of the Core Mechanics

When we look at a Color Revolution, it’s like looking at an iceberg: you only see the bit above the water but miss entirely the part that’s going to cause James Cameron to make a billion dollars and inflict those stupid Avatar™ movies on us. No, Color Revolutions are years in the making and start with:

Ideology: In the Color Revolutions to date, all of them have been based on the attempt to create a Western-liberal style of government, hence my suggestion that this was the CIA attempting to export “freedom” to a group of people who have consistently and convincingly desired to not be free. Sure, some Egyptians want to live in a Western-style democracy, but most of them don’t. Hell, most of the Muslims that have moved to Western Europe don’t want, at all, a Western-style democracy.

They want Sharia law, they want a government based in Islam, and they want all the wealth that the Western-style liberal democracies seem to create. They want to live in Cairo on the Thames, not the actual, crappy Cairo on the Nile. Why did Egypt’s Color Revolution fail? Why did Libya’s? Why did Syria’s?

They didn’t want that Western liberal democracy ideology, they just wanted the stuff.

Telling a good joke about the French Revolution is all about the execution.

Cash: As NASA astronaut Gus Grissom said in the movie The Right Stuff, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers®.” In a Color Revolution you could say, “No simoleons, no Napoleons”. That’s as close as I can get unless I retcon Stalin’s first name to Moolah.

But money has to come from somewhere, and most of the people that make up these Color Revolutions are poor college students who live on ramen and despair.

Where did BLM get money? According to the Claremont Institute (LINK), Microsoft® pledged $244,400,000 to Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization pushing radical GloboLeftElite disruption.

Against . . . you.

That’s a pickup line that could work for Boeing, too.

People: There is always an inner circle of leaders of the Color Revolution, probably hand-picked by the funders. The are willing and passionate about the Color Revolution, primarily because they see themselves as the ones who will get power after the event. Because someone has to drink the Kool-Aid®, there are also followers. Those are broken into two groups – the troops and the members of general public that are sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Propaganda: First, the message is crafted. It is prepared in advance for the moment it will be communicated, and the People mobilized. The propaganda may already be in place, sitting on websites prepared by and for the movement. It may have been trained into the foot soldiers of the Color Revolution. Regardless, the message gets out, and the goal is to get sympathy and support as the revolt proceeds. In the United States, mainstream media is fully onboard with the GloboLeftistElite plans – would anyone be surprised to find out that ABC® gave Kamala the debate questions? And answers?

I do think the debate about Mobius strips is a bit one-sided.

Spark: Once all of the above are in place and ready to go, all that’s needed is a spark. George Floyd, for instance was a spark. It wasn’t George Floyd, it was that there was a video of a dying junkie that met the needs of the Color Revolution, which was already prepared and ready to go, complete with Ideology, Cash, People and Propaganda, complete with a complicit media to fan the fiery but non-violent flames.

Once these all came together, Floyd’s death was chosen and someone, somewhere, said, “Perfect. Go.” It doesn’t matter that Floyd was going to die due to the incredible amounts of drugs in his system. All that mattered was what the video showed of his on-camera death.

Korybko suggested, back in 2014, that examples of these Sparks included (all of these are direct quotes):

A rigged election
The jailing of an opposition leader
The signing of (or failure to sign) a controversial piece of legislation
A government crackdown against the opposition or the imposition of martial law
Declaring or being involved in an unpopular war

Of the three Sparks that Korybko suggested, the top almost certainly happened in 2020, and the second and fourth are being implemented in some fashion against Trump and/or his supporters. The list is, obviously, not exhaustive, and the event need never have happened in reality, as long as people can be convinced it happened.

After the event, the protests start. And grow. And spread. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Floyd Protests were an attempted Color Revolution in the United States that was called off after the mechanisms to secure the 2020 election for Biden were in place, and, perhaps a warning of sorts to Biden that he’d best do what he was told if he could remember.

I was listening to a podcast tonight and Eric Weinstein noted that he had been assured that Biden does not have access to “the football” and that the United States is currently being run by a committee of the powerful. The same committee, no doubt, that has put Kamala at the brink of power. Note that Biden only dropped out after the (first) failed assassination of Trump.

Occupy Wall Street challenged the money powers of New York (not sure who was funding them, China?). This was not to be allowed, so, to counter it, Trayvon Martin was used as a Spark, moving on to the “Gentle Giant” Michael Brown, and finally to George Floyd.

The fact that the clear self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin was used to get the hippies and AntiFa® out of New York and have them start protesting for black people instead of against bankers. I guess the bankers got scared, and hippies and AntiFa® have a short attention span, or their leaders just like money. They had to have something to do, and since it’s always easy to stir up a racial fight, that’s what the bankers picked, because a class fight might have endangered actual bankers.

One stolen joke is a coincidence, two is a pattern. Thirty is an Amy Schumer standup routine.

These movements aren’t popular, and aren’t spontaneous, though they’re staged to appear so. They aren’t even permanent – most countries that have had a Color Revolution revert to their old styles of government with just a little bit of time and often a lot of chaos. Egypt went from its military government to a very brief “democracy” and then right back to a military government because that’s what Egyptians seem to want.

This may sound as crazy as predicting the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, but the government of the United States is nearing collapse, and the Color Revolution technique, or something like it, is being employed against you and funded by people like Microsoft® to guide the fall into, they hope, a situation where bankers can frolic freely.

That’s the rub – the importation of the endless hordes of illegals, the economic devastation of inflation and the contrived energy and housing crises and continual cultural provocations are cracks, big ones, setting the stage for a major change. And, again, each and every one of them is intentional, and it’s gone far enough that I still believe we’re entering the danger window in 2025, with the early to middle 2030s the most likely time when the final Spark hits.

Beyond the Spark?

It’s up to us.