Dispatches From The Culture War

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” – Star Trek: TNG

My body is like a Greek temple as I age.  In ruins.

There is so much going on any given news cycle in the last few months that it’s now difficult to be amazed about anything.  Credible sourcing that Joe Biden took bribes?  When asked about it, he said, “Then where’s the money?”

That’s not the way that innocent people act, rather, that’s a taunt that’s similar to a mobster saying, “You got nothin’ on me, copper.”  Biden did it, might even remember he did it, and is now telling the world that he’s above it all and doesn’t fear anything.  Of course, he’s a thousand years old now, so he’s probably pretty deep in “old guy DNGAF” mode.

Certainly, Biden (or whoever has the remote control that makes Biden say thinks like a big flesh robot) gave the nod before Trump was indicted.  This was intentional.  There is something about Trump that the Left and Official Washington and Big Money despises that caused them to set up a propaganda campaign among their followers like few before it.  They even got high on their own supply, believing that the echo chamber that they had created was a reflection of reality, rather than just their own words played back to them on an infinite-repeat loop, like I play The Accountant, or Big Trouble in Little China.

Regardless, the split is deep, and, although I don’t think Pew® has updated their Left/Right split data, I think that the split has become ever deeper.  The Los Angeles Dodgers® can’t even fathom why Catholics would protest the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT+ group that openly mocks Christian faith.  They can’t understand why most Americans don’t want to go to war due to two oppressive Eastern European countries fighting each other over land that’s been fought over so many times that I think they’re on the Juneteenth Battle of Kharkov.

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

Trump embraced the LGBT+ agenda explicitly, so it’s not that.  His performance on illegals, while much better than Biden’s, looked more like Obama than Eisenhower.  So, it must be the war thing, since Democrats and the Neo-Con branch of the RINO party have been all-in on Ukraine for decades.

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO?  Sigh.

Whatever was the common core of America is no longer common.  Using Michael Savage’s mantra of borders, language, and culture to define a country (not a nation, that’s different) is a bleak exercise.

  • Borders: The Right would like some.  The Left thinks that borders are fundamentally racist and that everyone is a citizen of the United States, they just haven’t gotten here to vote for them.  Biden still thinks that Borders® is a bookstore.
  • Language: The Right would like just one, English.  The Left celebrates multiplicity of mutually unintelligible people.  A few years ago, I listened to an NPR® station that had a late night talk program that focused on the idea that it was racist if you couldn’t understand what some dude who just crossed the river or got off the boat said, regardless of how heavy and thick his accent is.  I mean, at least fish have an excuse for having a Finnish accent.

Archeologists never get married.  They’re only interested in dating.

Border and Language are in absolutely horrible shape.  Culture, of course, is the worst off.

One of the constant cries of the Left is that the United States has no culture.  This is patently a lie – fish don’t know about water because they’re surrounded by it, all the time.  So are Leftists, but they hate it.  But I said it was a lie.  Leftists do see the culture, and want to destroy it and rebuild it to fit their ideology because the last thing they want is to see happy people.  Here are just a few segments of culture, and what the Left is doing to try to destroy it.

A huge target for the Left has been the effort to dismantle the history of the West.  Slavery?  Even though it was far from a Western invention, and even though the United States fought a war to end it, and even though Great Britain used their navy to end the trade, it has been painted as only a sin of the West.  The effort is also in full swing to distort and demean every single historical figure that generations of schoolchildren idolized.  Why did the Left start tearing out statues?  Any previous hero must be destroyed so that the Leftists can choose new, acceptable heroes.

I kept making a statue of St. Peter and the city kept tearing it down.  Then they gave me a ticket – they said I was a re-Pete offender.

The customs and traditions are being erased.  Examples are everywhere, but just look toward the military of the United States for some particularly egregious examples.  I’m fairly certain the Marines will soon be issued Nerf® guns so they don’t hurt themselves.  Etiquette is also falling apart, where Americans are told that they have to conform to the etiquette of foreigners and Leftists.  Previously, it was accepted that aliens would have to adopt American customs and traditions.  In 2023, that is racist, of course.

The arts and literature of the nation are being changed.  Movies, which morphed from the pro-American fare of the Disney® era now is actively anti-American.  Thankfully, many of the ideologically driven writers, directors, and executives that are now in charge make horrible movies, but it’s clear that the last decade has brought fewer good movies than the year 1986 did by itself.  Literature now consists of horrible screeds against racism, but they’re not content with that – publishers are now actively editing works from the past to make them conform to Leftist principles.  Electronic media is all subject to that so books and DVDs might be the only way in the future to see the real deal.

Education is a cornerstone for any culture.  Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”  The commies have always focused on this, and they’ve done a really good job on the education centers of the world.  But it doesn’t happen all at once.  First, they grabbed the colleges.  Then, bit by bit, they grabbed each teacher that they could coming through the system and indoctrinating them into Leftism.  When I was in school, the real first wave of hardcore Leftists were hitting the schools, but it was just one or two.  Now?  Videos I’ve seen in big cities show they’re Lefty, through and through.  Even in Modern Mayberry are they attempting to take over.  Thankfully our school board is pretty good at keeping those zealots out.

And Joe is smart enough to figure out how to make a train go across the Indian and Pacific oceans!

I started writing this post on Fathers’ Day, and was amused because it’s not really Fathers’ Day anymore, it’s “I’m a single mom so I am both father and mother and this is about me” Day.  The destruction of the traditional and nuclear family structure is the first thing Leftists have attacked, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution to the communist version of Spain that Franco destroyed.  It’s a shame Franco didn’t have helicopters.  The social organization of a country is the what regenerates it.  Family structures and gender roles reinforce the culture.  Every wonder why those are marked for change?

Finally, the values and beliefs of a culture help define it.  It used to be that prostitution was a dirty little secret.  Now?  Leftists argue that “sex work is real work” and Moms spend time making money on Only Fans®.  Was there hypocrisy in old America?  Sure.  But shame and ostracism were powerful motivators to keep the rot down.

I did hear that Hunter was sad because he wasn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas.

This list could go on and on – I have over 10 more categories where I could go through the same exercise, but the answer wouldn’t change and this post would then be 4,000 words and I’d get no sleep at all tonight.  The Mrs. keeps reminding me that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, and I’ll have plenty of time to rest after I’ve died.

As I’ve recently been saying, the idea isn’t to conserve our culture, since it has been turned into a smoking crater by Leftists appealing to the vanity and pride of susceptible folks.  This will end as it has always ended, since the reason American culture was successful will cease to exist as American culture ceases to exist.  From there, there will be tears.

And then?  Our job is to rebuild and restore.  And most of the people that formerly fell into the Leftist trap of dismantling the success and wholesomeness of the culture will welcome that restoration, after having seen what their depravity has created.

Rebuilding a culture takes time.  It won ‘t be done in my lifetime, but probably will be in the lifetime of my children.  And that’s good enough for me.  Our job is to keep the fire lit, and to not let the Left get away with the lie and call the destruction they’ve created to be simply called “bad luck”.

Oh, and I almost forgot!  Don’t forget to celebrate Juneteenth!

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – May Edition – Lies and Immigration

Newspaper Headline: “Roman Moroni Deported to Sweden. Says He’s Not From There.” – Johnny Dangerously

How should they be deported?  Juan by Juan.

  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 V, Issue 1

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

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 – Immigration Crisis – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Spark, Part 2 – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 790 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Immigration Crisis

Immigration has been a continuing and contentious issue throughout my life.  The major reason people immigrate in this age is not due to mistreatment, but due to economic factors.  If it weren’t economic, the Guatemalans would stay in Mexico, which is culturally much closer.  But it’s all about money for the majority of immigrants.

This is difficult, because the people coming into the United States mainly don’t like the United States all that much, they like the money and free stuff – that’s why they have their flags held high as they march toward our country.

It’s the same in most other Western countries – the immigrants coming into Germany, for instance, haven’t helped as much as they suck from the economy – only half of the immigrants to Germany since 2013 have paid employment.

They want the stuff.

The numbers coming into the country are undercounted, significantly.  And there’s no longer any place to stack them.  New York is saying they’re full.  The black people in Chicago don’t want any more of them.  The average American voter doesn’t want them, and I’d guess the average Dane or Italian would feel the same way.

So why do they keep on coming?

Because the Left wants them – Leftist businesses for cheap labor, and Leftist politicians for a vote farm of poorly educated, easily led (because they don’t speak the language) voters.  And it’s not that the immigrants are choosing this themselves – millions of dollars (likely your tax dollars) are spent getting them to our borders.  This video shows the massive amounts of money being spent on them as they make their way north.  Similar groups are spending millions in Europe to destroy it in the same fashion.

Your tax dollars at work.

And the government is in on it in a manner that many might call treason:

Even in Canada:

The end result is a push towards greater chaos, which can end in nothing but conflict:

Violence and Censorship Update

This month is less about violence (the biggest events of the month were the NYC protests about Jordan Neely’s death – Neely was the Michael Jackson impersonator that went nuts on the subway).  The big takeaways is that government is lying to us and covering up for the Left.

I know, this is my shocked face.  First, the only people who didn’t do anything wrong in the “Russia colluding with Trump” lie are Russia and Trump.  The FBI lied.  I know that this isn’t surprising to anyone, since May has been just about the worst month for the three-letter agencies being shown to be partisan Leftist liars.  Let’s continue with more FBI:

It looks like the very best way to get fired from the FBI is to try to be honest and follow the law.  Thankfully the CIA is . . . oh.

Yup.  The CIA lied.  Shocking!  What about the DOJ?

Yup, them, too.  A loss of trust in government fairness and in-your-face corruption is often a precursor to Civil War.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  I guess he wants demolish everything so he can Build Back Better®.

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 jumped up – it’s getting warm out.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit, though people are thinking a lot more about Civil War.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back down, a bit.  The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

I’d say the border is wide open, but we have no border.  New York and Chicago are now irritated because they want these illegals to go back to Texas.  Huh.

The Spark, Part 2

Last month, I wrote about the idea that the very successful boycott of Bug Light® might be the beginnings of Americans realizing that they don’t have to put up with the culture that has been forced upon them for decades.  I am pleasantly surprised that this spark, this countering to the current culture is spreading.  In general, American media has controlled the messages that go out:

The Internet really changed the game and still allows people to put out alternate viewpoints, and memetic warfare is fighting for the hearts and minds of the people.  And it worked.

Bud Light® isn’t the only victory.  Here are some others:

When they call me an economic terrorist because I won’t buy stuff from people who hate me, it feels kinda good.

And every marketing executive now is afraid.  It’s no longer a cost-free proposition to pump Lefty ideas into your ads.  And I think they’re finally beginning to understand who they’re dealing with:

Can we fix the culture?  No.  I think it must be restored.  And I don’t think it will be easy, either, but we will win.

The Babylon Bee© and a wag on Twitter™ are pointing the way back . . .

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1661097342051942401

https://twitter.com/ArabChicago/status/1660324204502212609

https://twitter.com/ppv_tahoe/status/1654983449701220352

https://twitter.com/DeanPreston/status/1656023543333933057

https://twitter.com/DeIudedShaniqwa/status/1657507128322523139

https://twitter.com/i/status/1653398943978385408

https://twitter.com/i/status/1658857771217854469

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/canvasser-shooting-eddie-brokenbough-onepa-20230509.html

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/TheRightMelissa/status/1656861108697800705

https://twitter.com/KarliBonnita/status/1656862956896878595

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1661191693260165121

 

One Guy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/conservatives-hail-daniel-penny-as-hero-after-killing-man-on-subway/ar-AA1b98jg

https://www.foxnews.com/us/marine-veteran-nyc-subway-chokehold-death-faces-tough-legal-road-experts-say

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/05/the-lesson-of-jordan-neely-your-courage-and-sacrifice-will-be-punished/

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/man-arrested-after-he-returns-fire-at-car-thieves-outside-of-his-shelby-county-home/article_cb42209a-f354-11ed-a2c9-b7e1f051cd76.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/was-florida-man-justified-in-killing-gunman-after-the-shooting-stopped-a-jury-decides/ar-AA1bqiNy

 

Body Count

https://twitter.com/TVNewsNow/status/1657178704039034882

https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-chicago-clash-biden-migrant-141046631.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F05%2F04%2Ftitle-42-countdown-700000-migrants-in-mexico-waiting-to-rush-u-s-border%2F

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Fblog%2F2023%2F05%2Fless_than_a_week_before_511_migrant_rush_everything_is_going_swimmingly.html

https://nypost.com/2023/05/16/google-meta-amazon-hire-low-paid-foreign-workers-after-us-layoffs-report/

https://archive.fo/OwgOY

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/05/18/industrial-civilization-needs-a-biological-future/

 

Vote Count

https://headlineusa.com/maricopa-county-election-director-told-woman-to-abuse-voting-system/

https://www.libertynation.com/watchdog-reveals-how-easy-it-is-for-non-citizens-to-vote/

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/arizona-signatures.jpg

https://www.westernjournal.com/lake-attorneys-closing-argument-least-70k-votes-not-verified-election-must-set-aside/

https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1660717421710155780

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/11/the-voter-registration-machine-flipping-the-states-blue/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthestarnewsnetwork.com%2F2023%2F05%2F19%2Franked-choice-voting-proposed-for-pennsylvania-municipalities%2F

https://www.revolver.news/2023/05/rfk-jr-sparks-a-wildfire-us-election-fraud-becomes-a-blazing-issue-in-2024/

https://warroom.org/controversial-zuckerberg-group-purchases-storage-center-for-voting-machines-and-ballots-for-election-offices-ahead-of-2024/

https://redstate.com/kiradavis/2023/03/29/bombshell-james-okeefe-uncovers-massive-potential-political-money-laundering-to-democrat-campaigns-n723020

https://zarkfiles.substack.com/p/the-first-discovery

 

Civil War

https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2023/05/15/secession-is-not-the-solution-for-rural-oregon/

https://www.kuow.org/stories/pnw-secession-movements-arent-new-but-lately-eastern-oregon-is-feeling-idaho-curious

https://news.yahoo.com/rural-america-dreams-secession-eastern-011532936.html

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/allen-texas-shooting-white-supremacy-greg-abbott-20230509.html

https://www.wboc.com/news/state-senator-talks-secession-cites-underserved-southern-delaware/article_67541026-eebc-11ed-8c89-8bd0d754ba06.html

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-05-23-battlefield-reports-new-civil-war/

https://www.wpr.org/reporting-front-lines-slow-civil-war

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality.  This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology.  If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality.  If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”.  And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy.  The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming.  Yes, people died.  And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top.  Oh, and it wrecked the economy.  Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues.  There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances.  Yes.  In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.”  May 3?  The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings.  Huh.  Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes.  I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more!  This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality?  Doesn’t matter.  Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality.  There is a difference between the words country and nation.  A country is a group of people living under a government.  A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government.  Those two are different things.  Japan is a nation.  China is a nation.  Denmark is a nation.  That is clear.  Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese.  Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer.  Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging.  For InBev®?  Less so.  It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want.  Beer commercials and ads used to be cool.  Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer.  I’m not making this up.  I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right?  What else do beer drinkers love?  Hillary Clinton?  Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again.  Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer.  You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds.  He knew they were always after them.  Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share.  I think that they might be a bit upset if they do.  I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right?  That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano?  Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain.  The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak.  We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this.  I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what.  Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk.  Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint:  the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope.  We took pictures.  If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it.  The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean.  The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up.  Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill.  To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep.  Really steep.  Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different.  The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow.  The solution?

Glissading.  Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”.  Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”.  The way we glissaded was to:

  1. Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
  2. Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
  3. Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain.  I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it.  We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society.  To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years.  Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends.  An example?  The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day.  There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on.  Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great.  But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth?  I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000.  I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit.  Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped.  People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward.  In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff.  With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth.  And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left.  I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie.  I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call.  Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom.  What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West.  What’s going wrong?  Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

  • Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
  • Declining heritage American birthrates,
  • Declining two-parent families,
  • Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
  • Increasing de facto censorship,
  • Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
  • Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
  • Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
  • Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
  • Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb.  Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny.  Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse.  And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it.  But all of them together?  We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West.  These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline.  Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope.  If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West.  We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall.  I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger.  What will we lose?  The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life.  Give the West hardship?  We shine.  When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more.  That’s okay.  The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists.  The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1st, so long ago?  It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Waiting For A Spark

Too much fuel, not enough spark.” – Ford vs. Ferrari

This clock tells when the next Civil War will be. This clock is so accurate, the military keeps it in Afghanistan.

  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.

Point 9., until this issue, used to be point 8. I’ve changed it out based on the idea that we’ve clearly passed point 8., but are not seeing the opposing structures required. I do not do this lightly, since this list was created after quite a bit of research.

It’s clear that the Right has no governing/war structures in place. Might someone be putting those in place? The Left thinks so, but I (and other readers) doubt it. By my observation, putting these structures in place does not take long, as I’ll write about below.

I’ll repeat this from the last Civil War Weather Report: The Right is being hunted, and punished for pushing back.

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 Spark – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Two Nations, Two Worldvies – 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 770 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The Spark

In research of Civil War over time, it appears that the conditions exist that start Civil Wars for some time before they turn into outright Civil War. Often, one group finally comes to the conclusion that they are out of power, will never be in power again, and are being treated unfairly, that feeling builds up. It’s waiting for a moment, a spark, that allows the emotional feeling to turn into action.

A recent example is Bud Light®. Bud Light’s™ recent ad campaign with a transexual person hit at just the wrong time. What’s the definition of the “wrong time”? After another transexual shot up a church school senselessly killing several people (and disappearing from the news in record time), people had enough. The killing was the last straw, after trans activists had worked to (among other things) set up transitioning children as young as toddlers, and remove pedophilia as something to be dealt with other than by fire and woodchipper.

People were done. They had no real way to protest as the Left came up with an unending number of ways to twist the sexuality of kids. Here was something, though, they could do, right now. Just don’t buy Bud Light©. That’s it.

The spark was simple – a narrative that had been pushed down people’s throats for a decade, on people who had no real way to push back as they were continually told they were wrong and evil if they didn’t want to jump into the child’s game of pretend where the G.I. Joes™ were really princess dolls at a tea party.

It’s not a big spark, but it’s one that should scare the Left. People are waking up, and questioning The Narrative. It’s not a big jump from there to the Left taking another step too far, and getting pushback. As I have said before, the most logical one in the United States is ownership of firearms – there are more guns in private hands than there are people in the United States, and if that’s pushed, I’m imagining that would be the spark. Remember, the Shot Heard ‘Round the World was fired on redcoats that were out to . . . take guns.

Violence and Censorship Update

The stories about why Tucker Carlson got fired are multiplying as time goes along. First? The Dominion lawsuit. Second? Describing Fox® executives using naughty words. Third? Some broad said he was sexist. Fourth? Robert Murdoch was scared of him. Fifth? The Ukrainians don’t like him. Sixth? Someone at Fox® had a case of the Mondays.

It’s irrelevant, really, because all of the people with the politically correct viewpoints (the Pentagon, the ADL©, the Soros family, AOC) all wanted him gone. Tucker provided one of the things that the Left can’t stand – someone to stand up to them. So? He’s gone. How much did they want Tucker gone? So far, FOX™ is down nearly a billion in market valuation.

So, they wanted him gone a lot.

Tucker’s already got a $100 million offer on the table, so, I think he’ll do fine.

Tucker was pretty big news, but there were some other events worth tracking as well. Being correctly labeled as “State Funded Media” NPR® and PBS© decided that they’d leave Twitter® because NPR™ falsely claimed that they like the truth and Elon proved that wasn’t the case.

JPMorgan® wants to take your things. Doing it through interest rates is too slow, so they just want to take the stuff.

A trial in Texas convicted a man for defending himself. Why? Because he was defending himself against Antifa®. Expect a pardon on that one.

The FBI thinks if you use the word “based” you’re an extremist. Don’t worry about keeping up with that yourself, they’ll track it for you.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Biden announced he was going to run for President. The only person that wants him to win is Jill. I think she has some parties planned, and the White House is good for that.

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 jumped up, ahead of schedule. May and June are generally bad months, we’ll see what happens in 2023.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was up a bit.

Economic:

Economic numbers are back up, a tiny bit. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

I’d say the border is wide open, but we have no border. New York and Chicago are now irritated because they want these illegals to go back to Texas. Huh.

Two Nations, Two Worldviews

The United States is currently very polarized ideologically – a key fact in the tensions that may very well lead to Civil War. I wrote earlier in this Update about The Spark. The Spark mentioned above centered, at least partially, around children. That’s a powerful subject, and it is one that is fundamental at the civilizational level. No children? The civilization dies.

And yet, the Left is going all-in on gender ideology, reaching out to kids who would eat nothing but Cadbury Cream Eggs® and suggesting they are capable of making life altering decisions. In California, legislation has been suggested that would allow the state to take away any kid who feels that their gender choices haven’t been respected.

The United Nations jumped on this idea. Thankfully, the United Nations is little more than a knitting club, but they are absolutely in tune with The Narrative. Thankfully, someone spent the time and looked at exactly what words the New York Times® is attempting to put into The Narrative, and they showed up by frequency. Here they are:

There has been, and there is a continuing effort to propagandize Americans to accept The Narrative, and stories from the New York Times® are picked up worldwide. Here, you can see The Narrative, in its full glory, as the Times™ tries to shape the people it is supposed to inform.

It’s your mind, keep in mind what people are trying to sell, and make your own choices, and remember that together, we’re stronger and have more ability than anyone imagines.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11997863/RETURN-ECO-ZEALOTS-Tyre-Extinguishers-wreak-havoc-Boston-deflate-43-SUV-tires.html

https://twitter.com/wherescrewed/status/1647633030662483975/photo/1

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1647339038850859010

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645377339058970625

https://twitter.com/i/status/1647598422667456512

https://twitter.com/i/status/1647421259272052737

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645205129518301187

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645567760750227456

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645470144439754752

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645638282938662913

https://twitter.com/i/status/1646317391285047297

https://twitter.com/i/status/1644132885740367873

Good Guys (And Gals):

https://twitter.com/i/status/1650665339389132800

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645250939480158214

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645261569482428418

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1648058674919936000

https://abc13.com/houston-crime-shooting-4-hurt-hpd-investigation-circle-k-valero/13124992/

https://twitter.com/i/status/1644181952671653888

One Guy

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/24/second-amendment-still-about-armed-self-defense-as-these-11-examples-of-defensive-gun-use-show/

Body Count

https://twitter.com/personalrespon1/status/1646885430766313474

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12017939/Record-one-FOUR-high-school-students-gay-bisexual.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2023-05-03_07-27-43.png?itok=je3spElX

https://nypost.com/2023/04/16/how-new-yorks-legal-weed-is-turning-workers-into-stoned-zombies/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11595829/One-EIGHT-people-ADHD-drug-adderall-prescription-rules-relaxed.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen%2Farticle%2Fz3mv99%2Fwhy-is-there-an-adderall-shortage

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/a-vasectomy-revolution-threatens-to-plunge-america-into-a-population-crisis/ar-AA19Tiye

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnypost.com%2F2023%2F04%2F20%2Fporn-ruined-lives-of-young-men-facing-erectile-dysfunction%2F

https://www.phinancetechnologies.com/HumanityProjects/Projects.htm#Nav_VDamage

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F04%2F11%2Fanalysis-big-tech-conducts-mass-layoffs-while-importing-34000-foreign-h-1b-workers-to-take-american-jobs%2F

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/biden-orders-1-500-more-troops-to-mexico-border-amid-migration-surge/ar-AA1aDFjq

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-bought-almost-60-million-100000845.html

Vote Count

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/09/bidens-digital-strategy-an-army-of-influencers

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/breaking-exclusive-corrupt-and-criminal-democrat-party-receives-half-its-donations-from-unemployed-who-are-likely-elderly-voters-whose-identities-are-stolen-wheres-the-money-really-coming-from/

https://www.revolver.news/2023/04/actblue-project-veritas-dems-suing-old-people-foreigners-launder-tons-of-money-through-shadowy-groups/

https://www.silive.com/politics/2023/04/someone-cheated-in-a-staten-island-election-now-lanza-will-propose-a-new-law-to-help-prevent-voter-fraud.html

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/04/10/kari-lake-asks-court-to-reconsider-maricopa-countys-chain-of-custody-issue/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1648462770936115202.html

Civil War

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/04/10/justice_perverted_we_need_a_new_magna_carta_149082.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/21/political-violence-2024-magazine-00093028

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/28/the-great-american-opt-out-a-matter-of-willingness-willfulness-and-will/

https://www.wpr.org/reporting-front-lines-slow-civil-war

https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/04/20/civil-war-reenactor-goes-off-script-admits-plan-to-bomb-battlefield/

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/barbara-walter-civil-war-democracy-ted-2023

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-john-roberts-saved-the-gop-and-sparked-its-civil-war

https://whitmanwire.com/opinion/2023/04/13/is-a-civil-war-likely-its-already-started/

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/social-media-free-speech-jeff-leach-lawsuit/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tucker-carlson-jason-whitlock-secession-trans-people-1234710421/

https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/is-secession-the-best-way-forward

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3949011-sometimes-secession-works-why-it-wont-work-for-the-us/

https://www.thebatt.com/news/republicans-push-for-texit-texas-secession-referendum/article_b9ce3730-da55-11ed-9073-035441f0ed13.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/04/25/fact-check-civil-war-supreme-court-ruling-block-states-seceding-texas-civil-war/11472885002/

Beyond Civil War

http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/4-ways-that-joe-biden-could-get-america-into-a-nuclear-war

https://mythpilot.substack.com/p/total-nuclear-death

Your Job

https://twitter.com/i/status/1645967641297690627

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl.  It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar.  Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency.  The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent.  The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious.  It was the strongest economy in the world.  It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons.  I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music.  That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler.  I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency.  First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff.  If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit.  It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper.  I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end.   Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework.  Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos.  Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money.  How much?  $1 trillion.  That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust.  In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.”  Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year.  The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me.  I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars?  I’m not sure.  Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here.  Why are they headed back?  Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates?  Inflation kicks higher.  If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less.  If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t.  And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society.  Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government.  Then everything will change.  Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

Some Signposts On The Way To Collapse

“It’s a growth economy, Gus. We’ve already made like, 500 rupee.” – Psych

What’s worse than rushing to the liquor store five minutes before it closes?  Getting there thirty minutes before it opens.

For the most part, I like to have my posts be about a bigger, underlying principle.  In my life, I have found the first thing I enjoy is making people think about life in a different way and examine new possibilities.  The second thing is a never-ending stream of jokes.  To be clear, I never tell jokes to amuse others; I tell jokes because they amuse me.  They maybe Dad jokes, that’s why I save them in a Dadabase.

Tonight, however, I’m going to just enjoy our current economy, and just give some milestones on the current descent into whatever economic future that we’re creating in a relatively short post.

First up, is the idea that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore:

How many Zoomers does it take to change a lightbulb?  100,000.  One to change it, and 99,999 to throw the parade.

I kid, a bit.  Zoomers certainly are the most fragile generation that we’ve ever produced, since when I was growing up trigger warnings was what Pa Wilder gave me if he saw my finger head towards one when I wasn’t planning on shooting.  A safe space?  That was the place that Pa had a safe.

As much as I’d like to bag on the Zoomers, it really is a rough world that they’re coming into, economically and otherwise.  Most of the jobs are in the cities, and the housing costs there are ludicrous.  I’d rent in the cities for longer than two months, but I only can afford to give up one kidney.

A policy of unpoliced and encouraged illegal immigration for decades has consequences?  Perish the thought!

It’s not just housing which has become more unaffordable than at any time in history (at least in the cities).  Cars have recently gone to silly levels – the latest average monthly payment for a new car is $716 for an average of 69 (hehe) months.  The average loan amount is $41,445.  The last three cars I bought (all used) totaled $45,000 or so.

To be clear, people don’t have to buy a new car.  I haven’t bought a new car since 1997, all of mine have been used.  The average used car goes for nearly $28,000, with a monthly payment of $526 at an interest rate of over 10%.  Ouch!

I wonder if this app is the biggest cause of suicide for Tesla® owners?

While the next two items are from Canada, I wonder how far behind the United States is.

For those who aren’t used to metric, a kilogram is roughly two pounds, and a Canadian dollar is roughly a handful of rounded pebbles that you might collect at the bottom of a stream – I think it’s called a metric dollar.

It’s pretty bad in Canada.  They could have had it all:  America’s sense of freedom, British literature, and French cuisine.  Instead?  They got French immigration policy, Britain’s love of pointless bureaucracy, and American economic policy.  And they’re paying for it, literally.

Thankfully, some folks are doing well in the economy.  I heard a rumor that one person was taking dollars to buy diesel fuel from a European source, but instead bought it from a Russian source.  Amazingly, when you make smart decisions like that, you can save a lot of money.

Me?  I’ve seen corruption, bribery, blackmail, jealousy, theft, fraud, and deception firsthand.  I’m never playing Monopoly with The Mrs. again.

To be fair, I will share that Russia has a new technological innovation that I can share, to at least partially offset all those leaked documents.  The Russians have apparently developed a new technology that allows them to see with the vision of one of the most ruthless killers on Earth:

Remember when Putin said he didn’t have any plans to invade the Ukraine?  I think he was telling the truth.

Again, this post is just is a different one, just a signpost on road that we’re on.  I’d offer $100,000 for your thoughts, but it would be that Canadian metric money.  What’s it called?  A rupee?

Decline or Collapse? Collapse.

“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows

How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch?  Tip him for the pizza.

Finished my taxes.  All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back.  In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes.  This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board.  So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.

I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use.  But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.

How does civilization end?

Lots of people talk about an eternal decline.  That’s a wishful thought, I guess.  It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human.  I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.

Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.

To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.

  • Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
  • Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
  • A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age.  And the Zoomers and Millennials?
  • Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
  • Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.

There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine.  The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier.  The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.

I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once.  “Nice going!”

Again, that’s an optimistic case.  It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly.  That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.

But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems.  The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals.  I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy.  Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone.  And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).

I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.

We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire.  In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.

There are other materials that this applies to, as well.  The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back.  Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do.  But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required.  And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon.  Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.

The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes.  The civilization of the world today is just that.  Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization.  It’s all interconnected.  Russia declares war on the Ukraine?  Wheat prices go up.  If there’s an attack on Taiwan?  Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.

I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.

When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue.  If any part of the world collapses today?  The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.

The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody.  This is not a new development.  But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine.  The world is at war?  No one cares.

Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter.  Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered.  But if China takes Taiwan?  A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture.  And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.

A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once.  The cop got away with a warning.

One break?  Poof.

I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone.  COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed.  Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.

Oops!

The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse?  No more taxes!  Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.

Dependence: The Worst Drug Of All?

“I hate being dependable, man.” – Black Hawk Down

If I had a dream about a nocturnal horse, would that be a night mare?

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.”  This is from Thomas Jefferson’s book, Notes on Virginia, which I assume referred to some girl Jefferson was dating.  Maybe it was Virginia Madsen, I mean, she was kinda hot in the 1984 version of Dune, so maybe that’s when they met?

One of the ideas that has been carefully cultivated here by the Left in late-stage Weimerica is the idea that individuals are weak.  It has long been my observation that people who live in large cities are more dependent due to the facts of living in a large city, and this is reflected in the vote totals.  This is part of the reason that Leftists love big cities, that and owning a penthouse on the Upper West Side.

In a big apartment, residents are slaves to elevators, sidewalks, and trash removal services whereas in Modern Mayberry I haven’t used an elevator in months, sidewalks are okay but not required, and if the trash truck doesn’t show up because the raccoons sabotaged it, I can burn mine (legally!) in the backyard.

Often, larger cities have restrictive laws that restrict the ability of individual citizens to protect themselves, leading to a complete dependence on the state for the most basic of human rights – the right to protect their own life.  Powerful Leftists, of course, are surrounded by people that they hired that have guns, even when the normal folks can’t have them.  This is what they call “equity”.

Surely, those two things above aren’t related.

Cities are thus an actual breeding ground for dependence, and here are just a few examples, since this isn’t the whole point of the post:

  • Control – This is always and forever the goal of the Left. In large cities, it’s often impossible to contact actual decision makers, since it’s actually George Soros, and he doesn’t take visitors.
  • Concentrates Economic Gains – When control is granted, the winners often cease to be those that produce, and then gravitate to those that run the systems, since it’s actually George Soros, and he gets all the cash.
  • Sole-Source Education – I’ve seen some parents just leave education and discussion on important topics entirely to the schools, and be utterly ignorant about the discussions on values that take place there, which is what George Soros likes. (Education problems aren’t limited to big cities.)
  • Splits Social Cohesion – Individuals become atomized, and the chance of seeing a random person on the street even more than once is minimal. There are millions of people, always in motion, so no one has the opportunity to think much about George Soros.

Obviously, this isn’t all places, everywhere, and some cities (those with 100% less Soros) are better than others, and the ‘burbs are almost always less dehumanizing than the ultra-dense cities that the modern world seems to favor.

Why did Elon move to the suburbs?  He wanted more space.

This is not how people were made to live.  We’ve spent the vast majority of our existence as a species living in smallish groups, and being responsible for each other and our own actions.  Even as far back as 1500 Anno Domini (3405 metric years) the largest city in Europe was Paris.  The population?  A staggering 200,000 to 250,000 people.

Yeah, that’s bigger than Modern Mayberry, but the population density was only about 2000 to 2500 people per square mile, which I assumed still left them room for their snail ranches, and if you walked for a couple of hours, you could be in the countryside.

Regardless of where it happens, though, dependence can have a horrible toll, especially in someone who is was born and raised to be independent:

  • Feelings of Helplessness and Hopelessness – I like to have as much control over my own destiny as possible. I realize that meteorites to strike, earthquakes happen, and PEZ® factories are bought out by Bulgarians.  Regardless, people who feel that they control their lives are happier, more confident, and have better body odor.
  • Anxiety and Fear – When there is a lack of control, people get afraid – I see that in people are dependent on others, I mean, you should have seen The Boy when he was a baby and I’d play “steal the bottle while he’s nursing”..
  • Shame, Loss of Feeling of Self-Worth – One of the compromises for society today is that most people aren’t in business, they have jobs, and many people feel in control at work, especially when they are contributing and working with a great team. However, lose the job?  The understanding of dependence hits in an avalanche.  Likewise, being dependent on the state for life just turns a person into a dehumanized cog who votes for the benefits.
  • Political Indoctrination – Upton Sinclair, a miserable Leftist himself, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” He sniffed around the problem, but didn’t realize that the same problem existed with his beloved Leftism, but his book sales depended on him not understanding that.
  • Self-Censorship – When social or economic standing is based on not having the wrong opinion, people are afraid to stand up for what’s right.

I pretended to gag at dinner one night, but the family knew it was just another another dad choke.

This, in many more words, is what Jefferson was talking about.  And this is what we have seen repeatedly in countries where tyranny takes hold.

Dependence is also a drug.  When a person falls in love with their dependence, it becomes the easy way to explain giving up.  I’ve met people who love their dependence, who list their medications and conditions with a pride like they’d been given a medal from the disability fairy.  It’s a free pass to explain how they’re not responsible for their life.

Thus?  Jefferson was right:

  • Subservience comes from owing everything to the master,
  • Venality, (roughly, being corrupt) is part and parcel of dependence, since the life of a dependent person is built around personal gain,
  • Suffocates the germ of virtue, since life becomes about the material, and
  • and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition. This is the lynchpin.  This is the desired end state.

Thomas Jefferson bought a 2006 Ford® Taurus™.  He called it his Jefferson Carship.

Dependence is everything that the Left wants, because is serves their purpose.  To be clear, demagogues on the Right can use this, too, but most people on the Right are actually into individual freedom, and won’t follow a leader that pulls them away from that.  Remember when Trump got booed at one of his own rallies when he brought up the Vaxx?

I remember.

But this isn’t about them.  This is about us.  My suggestion to every person is to look at areas in their lives where their dependence is unhealthy, and be aware of them.  That’s the first step.

Then?  Eliminate every one of them that you can, and rather than being ruled by fear, be ruled by your own choices.

That’s the opposite of dependence, and is better for you in every way.

How Occupy Wall Street Led To The Current Woke Crisis

“Being a villain is such a waste of time!” – The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The way she set up the pieces, I think she might be planning on eating them, rather than playing a game.

Once in a while, it’s good to take a step back.  Where are we?

First, it’s important to review that the economy is not the financial system.  The economy consists of the stuff we make, and the people who make it, and their productivity.  It’s matched with people who want that stuff.

Stuff can be anything people want to pay money for:  PEZ®.  Cars.  Machetes.  Beer.  Zirconium nose hair trimmers.  Video game software.  Pictures of PEZ©.  Gasoline.  Streaming movies about PEZ™.  Velvet Elvis™ paintings (I still need one, I prefer the “mid-carbohydrate, wearing sunglasses and a sequined jumpsuit” King).  Houses.  People to polish the PEZ® statues I keep in my yard.  Did I mention beer?

Notice that the stuff is physical stuff as well as information and services.

What’s not required?

I have the heart of a lion!  I have the eye of an eagle!  I have the legs of a gazelle!  I also have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Money.  Debt.  Interest rates.  These are fundamentally constructions of humanity, and are meant only to make transactions easier.  They are not required.  When Pepsi® wanted to do trades with the Russians, they traded cases of Pepsi™ concentrate for seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer.  Think about how cool that was:  for a time, Pepsi© had a navy that could have probably made France surrender in a fury of carbonated corn syrup.  Again.

And how cool would it be for a soft drink company to stage a march down the Champs-Élysées while Parisians cried?  Honestly, it probably would have led to a better outcome than they currently have.

But what happens when the tail (finance) wags the dog (the economy)?

I guess the best answer goes right back to France, but this time not to around 1990, but to around 1790.  What did the masses see?  They saw the upper class scamming and cratering the economy while eating piles of bacon-wrapped shrimp, or whatever passed for a delicacy in 1790s France.  The system really was rigged, but it was so rigged that poor Marie Antoinette couldn’t imagine actual hunger.

I will admit, they had cutting edge technology.

Here, though, I think that the Powers That Be see the end coming.  Remember Occupy Wall Street?

Yeah, it was a bunch of smelly hippies that mainly spent time arguing about who was in control of the collective, and it featured all of the woke crap that is currently being paraded, but back in 2011 only the smelly hippies took it seriously.  Oh, my, to be back in 2011.

Anyway, what happened after 2011?

The media and the Powers That Be were scared.  How scared?

A neutron walks into a bar.  The bartender says, “For you, no charge.”  The electron next to him yells “That’s discrimination!”

They upped the ante.  If people were unhappy about the manipulation of the banks and the mortgage-led meltdown of the Great Recession, the answer was simple from the Powers That Be:  “Look, a squirrel!”

They doubled down on every single thing that is Woke.  And, why not?  The seeds were simmering as the Leftists took control of the education system and threw children into sex education that was really indoctrination, often without the knowledge of the parents or their consent, was yet another thing that finance could get behind.

And when finance gets behind it?  All the companies that require finance get behind it, too.  The attempt is gone a bit farther – an attempt to regame the system so that the financial imbalances built on decades of mismanagement could be controlled.  Every aspect of finance and money, if it were only in the control of the Powers That Be, well, then the tail (finance) could really control the dog (the economy).

Looks like the Woke want to refund the police?

But here is the salvation.  The Powers That Be only understand the financial side of what’s going on – the shadows on the wall.  They do not understand the systems that they need to survive.  Remember Mike Bloomberg in 2016 saying, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer.  It’s a process.  You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”  This is the shallow understanding of a person whose feet have never left asphalt and concrete, and learned all he needed to know about farming by watching Green Acres.

Mike Bloomberg doesn’t understand where the food he eats comes from.  He does not understand it, and cannot recreate it.  No matter what Mike Bloomberg does, he cannot use his financial magic to create one kernel of corn, not one molecule of water.  Financial magic encourages production of corn, but cannot make it.

  • Woke culture cannot produce prosperity, or a single PEZ®.
  • Printing money cannot produce a single steak.
  • Financial manipulation cannot produce a single velvet Elvis©.
  • The tyranny of the Left cannot produce a human civilization.

The regular person has spoken this week – Bud Light® is now off the menu for millions and I’ve heard that it lost up to 70% or 80% sales last week.  Will it kill Bud Light™?  I doubt it.  Drunk people often don’t make the best decisions, but, then again, I’m here.

How to remove 80% of beer drinkers with this one simple trick.

I think bud light will manage to survive, but we are seeing the cracks in the woke agenda that showed up after Occupy Wall Street – at some point, regardless of all of the financial shenanigans, at some point someone has to want the crap that’s being produced.

To those that look at the mess that we’re in, I can assure you of this – it’s all going away. It’s merely a matter of time.  The economy is not the financial system, and a bank cratering doesn’t destroy all the corn that Mike Bloomberg has no idea how to grow.

Or maybe he could teach me otherwise?