Category: Inflation Nation

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Trump And The End Of Civic Nationalism

“You’re not changing anything.” – Rambo

What do you call an indecisive body of water?  Well . . . .

  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. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  5. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  6. Open War.

I’ve changed the Clock O’Doom.  Why?  It is clear that we’re way past five and six.  We are having organized violence, regularly.  And the lynchpin for nine is common violence that is justified.

This is clearly happening – just check the wind.  “Kill a guy on the Right who used pepper spray?  No charges.”  “Kill a guy on the Left who is pointing an AK-47 at you?  That’s murder.”

The Right is being hunted, and punished for pushing back.  So, we have a seven, certainly.  And a nine, certainly.  What we are missing is an eight.  I moved the clock to a seven.

This is moving sideways, 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 – Banana Republican – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Death of the Civic Nationalist – 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.

Banana Republican

I remember reading sword and sorcery books as a kid, mainly Conan the Notthetalkshowhost.  I recall one axiom of a king who usurped the throne:  kill the previous king.  Nothing good comes from a realm with two kings.

Conan books were fun.  But in real life, when politicians go out of their way to find a law to imprison their political opponent, it’s something that Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Soviet NKVD under Stalin would have love, he said, “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”

Beria was an awful person who didn’t die nearly painfully enough, but he has become an instruction manual for the Left.  Why?

That’s the Leftist singularity:  no one on the Right is good, and everyone on the Left is great.  Thus, the only view that can survive this singularity is the most Leftist idea.  The difficulty most people have in assessing Leftist politics is that Leftism is not a political viewpoint:  it is a religion.

Monty Python™ parodied that perfectly in their movie, The Life of Brian, when a member of the Judean People’s Front (or was it the People’s Front of Judea?) wanted to make sure that the rights of people who wanted to have babies but were dudes were enshrined in their politics.  “Where is he going to keep the fetus, in a box?”

It’s absurd, but dealing with absurdity is a requirement in 2023, when a dude with all his bits won several of the NCAA® women’s swimming championships.  Saying this is wrong makes me a “transphobe”.  I wonder if suggesting that a 5’6” woman who weighs 76 pounds is mentally ill makes me an “anorexiphobe”?

Regardless, Trump declined to cross the Rubicon on January 6, so he was impeached.  Huh?

Trump scares the Left.  Trump likes trans people, likes all of the rest of the LGBTQ+ salad of people, but he is evil because . . . ?

It’s because he’s the first person to be president in decades that shook the status quo.  W?  He was on board with everything the Left wanted to do, just in a slightly different wrapper.  Compassionate Conservatism, anyone?

Trump is a rallying cry on the Left.  I would imagine they hate him more than they hate the memory of a certain Austrian painter*.  He is the focus of hate on the Left.

  • “He made us look silly in front of the French!”
  • “He wanted to send people who had crossed the border illegally go home!”
  • “He has a golden plated PEZ® dispenser!”
  • “He made me feel attacked because he wasn’t Hillary!”
  • “A ghost of a lesbian who was shunned in 1634 told me that Trump was against furries.”

*Better known for other things.

Nearly every attack on Trump is built on emotion, because Trump wasn’t on the Right, Trump was a 1990s middle-of-the-road guy, but the Left had moved into Lenin territory by the time he ran.

Perhaps the biggest sin he If you look at the actual outcome of policies, Biden has been more of an enemy of the United States than Putin, Stalin, and Brezhnev combined.  Trump actually, for the first time in decades, had the economy spun around, and was the only President in ages to negotiate for pure American advantage.

Obviously, he must be punished.  So?

Any statement he makes must be the basis for a crime.  He was impeached for trying to uncover Biden’s Ukrainian corruption.  He is under indictment for paying tramps not to talk about him.  He’s under investigation for questioning voting impropriety in Georgia for a silly question, and in Washington, D.C. for having fewer secret documents than Biden had in his garage.

When polarization leads to the desire to put political opponents into prison is acted upon?  It’s no better than Zelensky putting his opponents in jail and shutting down dissident media, or Putin shutting down any media that disagreed with him.  It is the end point of a Leftist regime who cannot accept any opinion that deviates from their ideals, no matter how small.

Why is Trump being indicted?  Because he’s breathing.

Violence and Censorship Update

It looks like the fight back is beginning.  I could write quite a bit, but here are a few memes that show the Normies are awakening:

Keep this in mind.

The trans-violence-abuse connection is coming in strong and is hitting the awareness of middle America.  I’m shocked, shocked I say that a group so unstable they’ll self-mutilate and that has avowed to recruit children has been committing violence.

Stonetoss, calling out the Left.  Just like napalm in the morning, it smells wonderful.

Who would have imagined that if you marginalize an amazingly productive group and give them no reason to love their country, that they’ll sell out.

Huh.  New restrictions.  Who would have imagined that?  From the same people who brought you the Patriot Act.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  This economy has the pedal depressed to “fail”.  Brandon is a president that makes Jimmy Carter look like an economic genius.

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 still minimal right now.  I’m betting it stays down until June at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more.  I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together, plus the media is all in on “peaceful but fiery protest” mode.

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.

The Death of the Civic Nationalist

What does it mean to be an American?  What are American values?  If the Left is to believed, “everyone is an American, they just haven’t gotten here yet”.  This was also the belief of the Civic Nationalist – bring in a Somalian who doesn’t know a bit of English, and throw them into a group of government-funded housing, pay them to go to school, and they’ll be as American as Joe down the street.  Heck, anyone and anything could be American!  Cannibals?  Child molesters?  As American as apple pie.

Surely, cutting off parts of your flesh because you deny reality is the most important part of the soul of being an American.

But it’s not true.  And even to the most ardent of Civic Nationalists, it’s becoming apparent that the experiment of “import the third world, they’re Americans” is failing.  However, it’s not like LGBTQ+ is a cult or something.

I’d make a joke comparing the Jonestown cult to LGBTQ+ folks, but the punchline is too long.

Patently, that is false.  Being an American has at least some ties to the people that forged this nation out of the (mainly) wilderness that existed prior to the advent of Europeans on the continent.  The idea that a person who just dropped off a plane, speaks no English, and becomes a resident because someone snuck through the border and is now an American is . . . ridiculous.

America has more culture than McDonald’s® and highways and Wal-Mart™.  It has a proud history of people who have fought for independence, and fought for freedom, and fought for the simple right to be left alone.  One survey I read of immigrants showed that they were not at all good with the Second Amendment, and wanted a lot more government intervention in their lives.

At what point does this become a crisis?  I think it’s too late:

This represents a major change from the values of the country.  Sure, it’s not only the immigration policy that led to this . . . oh, wait, it is.  None of these values were evident in 1960.  What changed?  The Leftist indoctrination of students at colleges (based on immigrant influence) plus the change in the people who took the poll.  Immigrants don’t have American values.  But when we shovel enough in?

They’ll show what they believe in, which has nothing to do with the values that he Civic Nationalists hold.  And no one voted for this.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys 

https://twitter.com/ycinnewyork/status/1632952440650620928

https://twitter.com/i/status/1630898009687900161

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641972791850467329

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641505237495160832

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641944965046747136

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641898070873985028

https://twitter.com/i/status/1638324077604622336

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1632971822923915268

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/03/07/antifa-forest-creatures-set-fire-to-cop-city-in-atlanta/

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/Newsweek/status/1638545563099471880

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/03/18/detroit-man-finds-out-the-hard-way-its-a-bad-idea-to-rob-concealed-permit-holder-and-his-friend-1342005/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11881265/Take-NYC-style-Watch-fearless-Good-Samaritan-tackle-armed-man-fleeing-cops.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735803/Armed-intruder-left-critical-condition-shot-neck-homeowner.html

https://archive.fo/7qvGi

 

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11950919/Army-sergeant-CONVICTED-murdering-Black-Lives-Matter-protester-George-Floyd-unrest.html

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-04-07/might-have-to-kill-a-few-people/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-texas-governor-pardon-army-sergeant-sandbagged-soros-da-self-defense-shooting

 

Body Count

https://layoffs.fyi/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmore-75-americans-aged-17-24-arent-fit-military-service-dod

https://apnews.com/article/community-college-enrollment-bb2e79222a4374f4869dc2e5359f2043

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11781425/More-60-men-20s-single-compared-just-30-women.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11780875/Gender-bender-America-FIFTH-Gen-Zers-identify-LGBT-seven-times-share-Boomers.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11890655/Philadelphia-PAY-pregnant-women-1-000-month-curb-falling-fertility-rates.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Fstory%2F2023-03-14%2Fdeaths-broken-limbs-distracted-driving

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11732497/More-48-000-Americans-committed-suicide-year-report-finds.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11863109/Oregon-SLAMMED-rising-assisted-suicide-rates-death-tourists-adding-431-tally-2022.html

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2802602

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3917058-teen-overdose-deaths-have-doubled-in-three-years-blame-fentanyl/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11794373/New-Frankenstein-opioid-pills-40-times-potent-fentanyl-sweeping-U-S.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11942825/Biden-launches-fentanyl-public-health-blitz-young-people.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776999/The-blanketed-fentanyl-NINEFOLD-rise-deadly-opioid-use-western-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11701187/Zombie-Nation-Shocking-images-lay-bare-Americas-drug-crisis.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2023-03-21_10-13-03.png?itok=AfYA-GtO

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11793647/Number-migrants-caught-crossing-border-illegally-surpasses-1M-mark-fiscal-year-2023.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11851659/Massive-horde-migrants-storm-El-Paso-border-checkpoint-brazen-attempt-enter-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11865349/El-Salvador-mega-prison-takes-intake-gang-members.html

Vote Count

https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/featured/common-sense-central/content/2023-02-27-liberal-group-running-massive-election-bribery-scheme-in-supreme-court-race/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/signature-verification-software-used-maricopa-county-says-10-high

https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/fox-vs-dominion-discovery-docs-show

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2023/03/07/the-american-left-rigs-elections-everywhere-else-so-why-wouldnt-they-do-it-here-n1676250

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/03/15/true-the-vote-requests-special-master-in-konnech-case/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/heres-a-look-into-popular-voter-database-erics-left-wing-origins/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761979/Kari-Lake-vows-Arizona-gubernatorial-defeat-state-supreme-court.html

 

Civil War

https://twitter.com/citizens_sanity/status/1630217694224973824

https://mises.org/wire/secession-inevitable-war-prevent-it-optional

https://theconversation.com/secession-is-here-states-cities-and-the-wealthy-are-already-withdrawing-from-america-200813

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3886527-texas-lawmaker-files-texit-bill-to-spur-vote-on-exploring-secession-from-us/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/greater-idaho-movement-absorb-rural-oregon-counties-bad-country-top-dem-warns

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/03/122184-nations-most-advanced-secessionist-movement

https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/18/oregons-rural-urban-divide-sparks-talk-of-secession/

https://www.governing.com/now/we-cant-all-get-along-whats-driving-modern-secession-movements

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11873063/66-MILLION-Marjorie-Taylor-Greenes-call-national-divorce-blue-red-states.html

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3884444-what-if-marjorie-taylor-greenes-secessionist-fantasy-came-true/
https://headlineusa.com/sellers-national-divorce-prevent-bloodshed/

https://highlyrespected.substack.com/p/the-national-divorce-delusion

https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/how-america-gets-a-divorce-d549ac6d89bb

https://www.governing.com/context/what-would-a-national-divorce-look-like

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9p9q/trump-indictment-civil-war-the-donald

https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/i-smell-civil-war-far-right-tiktok-users-are-alluding-violence-following-news-trumps

https://abovethelaw.com/2023/03/j-michael-luttig-federal-judge-civil-war-donald-trump-2024-election/

https://tomluongo.me/2023/04/01/indicting-trump-is-the-end-of-us-politics/

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead.  I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development:  the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States.  Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff. 

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

  1. Lots of nuclear weapons,
  2. A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
  3. The premier military force in the world,
  4. The premier economy in the world, and,
  5. The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory.  We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast.  To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had.  There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place.  Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world.  Period.  We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed.  Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia.  Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world.  Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck.  We led in technological and information systems.  By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started.  I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh.  Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy.  Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage.  Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters).  That presented a problem.  In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff.  Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything.  I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube.  I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent.  Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal.  He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia.  Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War).  This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975.  And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh.  Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in.  It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia.  They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism.  Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973.  One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them.  Russia’s a case in point.  Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict.  It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine.  For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn.  They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

  • He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
  • He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
  • He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
  • He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
  • He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election.  And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

Deflation? Inflation? All I Want Is A Good Steak.

“Oh, my God!  The automatic pilot!  He’s deflating!” – Airplane!

I went to see a hedge fund manager at work and punch him in the face.  And then get a Quarter Pounder®.

Welcome to the next step down.  But how is this going to go?

First, there are signs that this will lead to more inflation than a Kardashian’s butt experiences in an entire season of whatever crap they’re doing on TV.  Here are some signs pointed towards inflation:

  • It’s inflation season.   That comes right after blowing up Russian pipeline season, duck season, rabbit season, duck season, rabbit season, and train derailment season.
  • $2 trillion (a number no doubt made up because it sounded good to whatever political appointee approves these things) of newly printed cash has been allocated to “stabilize” the banking system.

When Bernie Madoff stole his investors money, the Fed® didn’t backstop the investors, even though they couldn’t keep up with the compounding interest of Madoff’s lies.  That was deflationary.  But backstopping all bank customers, everywhere?

That’s more inflationary than Stormy Daniels, umm, attributes.  I heard a rumor that half of Oprah’s money was in Silicon Valley Bank®.  She got very upset when she thought that Elon Musk would be the only remaining African-American billionaire.

Everyone needs a backup.  Mars is Elon’s planet-B.

The latest announcement from the Fed® on their plans to stop inflation sounded desperate.  I imagine that Janet Yellin would offer to learn poll dancing if she thought it would lower inflation.  I think that might work, since never in the history of mankind have so many dollar bills jumped back into pockets than when Janet walks on stage.

What about things that indicate that deflation might be around the corner?

  • During the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank™, it sounds like all of their bondholders and shareholders got vaporized. So, at least $15 billion and probably closer to $30 billion in cash was vaporized faster than a hoagie at Oprah’s house.
  • The stock market is down. When the market goes down, the money doesn’t power a secret spaceship, it just disappears like my biological father did when my biological mother got pregnant.
  • When interest rates go up, housing prices go down. Why?  People buy houses based on borrowed money, and higher interest rates don’t increase the amount of money that they pay at (spins wheel) the PEZ™ factory.  Nope, it just makes the house payment more expensive, unless the price of the house goes down.  This is deflationary, because right now housing value is vaporizing like crack at Hunter’s place on a Saturday night.

The Chairman of the Fed® thought he was a magician, but he had chocolate on his shirt.  He thought he had Twix® up his sleeve.

Here’s another, weird, example.

While I was writing this, The Mrs. walked by my secluded writing spot in the sitting room, and asked me, “Hey, want a steak?”  I had a scotch already, so, that’s perfect!

“What answer do you expect me to give you?”  She cooked the steak.  This was a perfectly marbled ribeye, an inch and a half thick.  She seared the sides, and it let out a gentle “moo” as I cut into it.

What did that ribeye cost?  $12 a pound.

Why?

Well, there’s been a drought in prime cattle country.  Cattle gotta drink.

The Mrs. and her brother own the better part of a buttload of land.  The year before they got $6,000 for the hay.  They fertilized.  After Russia invaded the Ukraine, fertilizer prices spiked.  They decided to just grow whatever grew and not spend the $3,000 to fertilize it.

They made $6,000 for the hay, same as the year before even though they had half the hay this year.

Sorry if that joke was corny.

For cattle farmers, growers, leaders, ranchers prices went up, but what they got for a cattle didn’t.  Therefore?  In March of 2023, I can get a pound of the best ribeye ever to grace a cast iron skillet for $12, whereas two Double Quarter Pounders With Cheese™ would cost me . . . $12.

This is not a hard choice.

In 2024 or 2025, though, I expect that same beef to cost double or more.  I’ve been nagging my brother in law to get some cattle.

Why?

I like steak way more than the crap they serve at McDonald’s®.  So, in some places, there is deflation right now.

  • Houses.
  • I read today that there are several projects in Vegas that just received stop orders because the financing fell through.  If a project is a good idea at 1% interest and 2% inflation, it may not be a good idea while skydiving with a bag of loose change as your parachute.
  • Plans that don’t have financing. In an inflationary environment, a plan that doesn’t have financing is as useful as a waterproof towel.

There’s also been a rush towards our border of illegals that are desperate to come to a horribly awful and racist country.  Is this inflationary, or deflationary?

Inflationary.  Illegals do take jobs that are low on the pay scale, so that strawberries are 0.03% cheaper.  Is that deflationary?

Can we call Transformers® Carmen?

No.  It’s inflationary.  Illegals do make things like strawberries, lettuce, and cocaine cheaper, but they do actually cost about $10,000, each, for every year that they’re here for things like welfare, schools, roads, etc.  So a family of five?  Costs everyone at least $50,000 per year.

Where does the cash come from?

That’s the genius!  We print it!

So, inflation or deflation?

Yes.

Our currency is going to zero, probably sooner than many might anticipate.  What will go up?  In 2023, not cows.  But in 2025?  Yeah, nearly certainly.

Some things will come down – I can’t predict them all.  But the Fed™ will never stop printing.  Their choice is this:

  • Increase rates and blow up banks, the stock market, and house prices.
  • Keep rates the same and blow up the currency.

The current plan.

The currency is toast.  So is Biden’s chance at re-election.  This time next year?  I expect that we’ll see all of the above in full motion.  I predicted in 2018 that 2025 we’d see a big breakdown, and I’m not betting against that now.  Biden will likely go down as the single worst resident of the White House in history.

I only hope that this complete economic and societal breakdown will finally rid us of the scourge of Kardashians.  At least then it will be worth it.

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die?  Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive?  He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate.  Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate?  Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it.  Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me.  And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened.  But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion.  And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform.  To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff.  Bereft of life.  It rests in peace.  If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies.  Its metabolic processes are now history.  It’s off the twig.  It’s kicked the bucket.  It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit.  I’ll explain.  You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it.  They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment.  Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back.  I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that?  I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone.  “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™.  I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month.  They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers.  Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah.  Things don’t go up forever.  So when they end?  It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks.  The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™.  Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope.  They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos.  In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low.  If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power.  Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka.  Roads?  Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people.  Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now.  The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?”  Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less.  Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks:  Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it.  Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window.  That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code:  this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay!  That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe.  But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters.  Interest rates go up?  Bond values go down.  It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds.  How many?  Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value.  And it’s not limited to them.  Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000.  Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank.  Turns out that the United States blinked:  “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already.  You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run.  The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system.  They even say so.  Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them.  I own a car from 2003.  In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it.  Here’s proof:

See?  I’m a respected journalist.  Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero.  You can check it out.  This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued.  (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed.  They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation.  But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation.  Biden cannot be re-elected.  Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops.  I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me?  My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months.  Six or seven?  Maybe.  Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it.  New projects?  They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop.  New housing?  Forget it.  The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant.  We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end.  But you can see it from here.  While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune?  He’s always been a whiney bitch.  Ignore Neptune.

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today.  As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics:  we’re screwed.  Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely.  Why?  Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number.  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character.  I could have written it out as 1×10300, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact.  What, exactly does 1×10300 represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10300 I get zero.

Let’s take a step back.  RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf.  When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO.  It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder.  There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO2 so grass can eat CO2 and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye.  Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™.  Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch.  A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein.  RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO2 into steak without being mashed together, just right.  The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up.  If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in.  The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways.  1×10300 of them, approximately.  There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe.  There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way.  Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful.  Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work.  There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge.  And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns.  No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly.  But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry?  Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10300 ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets.  I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years.  And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage.  But  1×10300 is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight.  No RuBisCO?  No Nabisco™.  To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right.  We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar.  When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long.  The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday.  Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable.  DNA?  Wow.  The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too.  Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years.  Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain.  The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent.  Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

  • That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
  • this is all a simulation (the little g god),
  • that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
  • that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
  • that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically.  Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: National Divorce? Getting Closer.

“Dolores, I am making a citizen’s divorce.” – The Man with Two Brains

Big Alarm Clock is a conspiracy!  Wake up people! (all non-regular memes are as-found)

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same.  Again.  This is moving sideways, but things can unravel 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 National Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Silly Season – 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 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The National Divorce

I remember reading about research a while back that (my fuzzy memory says) indicated that when a married couple didn’t want to have a divorce, one of the easiest things they could do was not talk about a divorce.  I guess that would mean that the first rule of staying married club is don’t talk about divorce club.

Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up the issue in a big way:

It’s a stark question:  do we want to stay married, or not.  Folks on the Internet followed suit, with this poll:

The Internet is what it is, and a poll like that isn’t at all scientific.  But 19,000 people (75% of respondents) were done.  They were ready to get lawyers, and decide how we get to split up California and Virginia and who got alternating weekends with Michigan.

A much more scientific poll was done by Rasmussen® (more on them later in this Issue) and it emerged that a majority of Republicans wanted out.  47%, plus an 11% who might be in favor, but they wanted to know if they could still get Netflix™ off of Uncle Tim’s account it he were stuck in a Blue State before they made up their mind.

Leftists are never in favor of making anything smaller, since it lowers their power.  Remember, it is Leftists who are on the side of international and world governments.  I’m pretty sure they’d love to include Mars, too, since it’s Red.  This is shown in the poll below:

Fully a third of all people (based on Rasmussen’s™ report) are ready to check out.  That’s a lot.  Although Gallup® wasn’t around to do a poll, most literature I can find seems to indicate that only 1/3 of the folks living in the Colonies wanted the Revolution, so 1/3 is a big, big number.

I’ll add in this other (entirely unscientific) poll:

Again, unscientific, but it shows that there are a sizeable number of folks out there who believe that soldiers would, if ordered, shoot on American civilians.  That’s another scary thought, and perhaps feeds back into the idea that people would much rather have a peaceful exit rather than a violent one.

I read that this year’s CPAC (Republican fanboy convention) was poorly attended, and lacking in energy.  And why not?  The most fervent people in the Republican party are done, and don’t trust the vote, and don’t think that their votes may ever matter again.

Spiderman®, though, seems to have an opinion:

Violence and Censorship Update

Cancelling really isn’t government censorship, but it’s censorship nevertheless.  Scott Adams, noted cartoonist and author, really rustled the collective jimmies of the Left.  Rasmussen™ had a poll about whether it was “okay to be white” and 47% of black people indicated that it was either not okay, or they weren’t sure.

Scott has a YouTube® channel (still!) where he talks about whatever he wants to talk about.  In this, he opined that if that was the way that black people felt, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around them.  The following cartoon describes it in such a way that Scott retweeted it:

The outrage was both predictable, even though Scott noted that many black people he knew called him up and said that his stance was completely reasonable.  Mr. Adams’ publisher dropped him.  Mr. Adams’ cartoon syndicator dropped him.  Mr. Adams’ agent . . . dropped him.  His new book, due out in the fall?  Cancelled.

I don’t feel bad for Scott, he knew what he was doing, and he has tens of millions of dollars.  But what is it about that simple narrative that makes the Left explode?  I’ll cover that in a future post.

The Silence of the Adams

It’s not violence now, but Illinois has now decided that most crimes short of murdering someone and taking selfies with the victim are now non-detainable.  Burn someone’s house?  Out without bail.  Kill someone while high?  Out without bail.

Florida.  Sigh.  Why?  They want to make bloggers who write about elected officials register if they make money for their efforts.  Is this the single stupidest thing to come out of Florida since they elected ¡Jeb!?

The publisher of Roald Dahl is going through his books an removing whatever they don’t like based on political correctness.  No more “ugly” or “fat” or . . . black.  Paging Scott Adams . . . These “corrections” are showing up in people’s previously purchased e-books, too.  This is why physical media is good.  And why I have lots of books.

It’s not censorship, exactly, when programmers prevent A.I. from coming to conclusions based on fact, but it’s close.  There are certain facts that are inconvenient, like boys have xy chromosomes and girls have xx chromosomes, so programmers prevent A.I. from talking about that.  Elon Musk says he’s going to do his own, non-woke A.I.

When the trains carrying ethyl-methyl-death crashed in East Palestine, it was a story that was minimized until it couldn’t be.  I follow stories like this that are under the news, and was aware of it within a few hours of it happening.  But the news?  No reporting on it, since it didn’t impact Baltimore and had the potential to make the Biden administration look even worse than it normally looks.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, and, like Kamala’s womb, this graph doesn’t eggs.  Here’s a recap:

 

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 still minimal right now.  I’m betting it stays down until June at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more.  I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together, Biden just came out in favor of “law and order”, because I think he saw it the show on cable.

Economic:

Economic numbers took a big dive this month, which surprised me.  The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which still isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

The number took a big drop!  Yay!  Oh, it’s still higher than ever for that month.  I’d say border is wide open, but we have no border.

So, when can we ask the Mexicans to leave?

The Silly Season

One way to deflect a story is to not tell it.  The other way to deflect a story is to flood the media with, well, nonsense.  My favorite this month?  The Chinese Spy Balloon™.  During World War II, the Japanese decided they would make Americans afraid.  They launched 9,000 balloons filled with explosives at the United States.  As near as I could find with an in-depth three-minute look, one exploded.  Out of 9,000.

Ohhh, I’m so afraid.

I’m not sure what we’ve found out about the Chinese Spy Balloon©.  I think that we’ll find out they were trying to check up on why Americans weren’t buying more extended warrantees based on those cell-phone calls.  Since we haven’t heard anything, I’m think that it may actually have been a weather balloon.  Regardless, they can solve their problem with just a little bit of camouflage that the United States would never shoot down:

Was this the story that they were attempting to distract us from?

It’s a scary one.  Why do we need so may people?  Why aren’t all the traditional people who would go into the military signing up?  Oh, yeah.  They’ve been told they’re racist.  They’ve been told they have unearned privilege?  They’ve seen the military force people to take the vaxx.  And now they want them to sign up to fight?

What could be next?

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761485/NYPD-release-images-four-brazen-thieves-staged-50-000-raid-Manhattan-Givenchy.html

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628194739987046400

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626367620151738375

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626397252334809090

https://twitter.com/nofones2/status/1626369625314279426

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626447147225718786

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1621965430930669569

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628225095893131264

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1627464538609139714

https://twitter.com/762sfuxk/status/1626379421065134080

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735803/Armed-intruder-left-critical-condition-shot-neck-homeowner.html

 

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11632047/Vigilante-killed-robber-Houston-restaurant-breaks-silence.html

 

Body Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11732497/More-48-000-Americans-committed-suicide-year-report-finds.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11711353/Seven-states-eye-legalizing-assisted-suicide-America.html

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

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-paper-an-estimated-13-million

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11738179/Still-think-secure-Joe-Moment-500-Venezuelan-migrants-walk-southern-border.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11730363/Biden-preparing-mass-deportations-non-Mexican-migrants-Mexico.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11733577/Map-shows-14-million-Americans-live-5-miles-cancer-gas-emitting-plants.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776999/The-blanketed-fentanyl-NINEFOLD-rise-deadly-opioid-use-western-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11701187/Zombie-Nation-Shocking-images-lay-bare-Americas-drug-crisis.html

 

Vote Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761979/Kari-Lake-vows-Arizona-gubernatorial-defeat-state-supreme-court.html

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/02/08/maricopa-heat-maps-the-story-keeps-getting-worse/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/15/everything-you-need-to-know-about-democrat-gov-tony-evers-bid-to-overhaul-wisconsin-elections/

https://alaskapublic.org/2023/02/17/launch-of-campaign-to-repeal-ranked-choice-voting-draws-a-crowd-in-anchorage/

https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/fox-vs-dominion-discovery-docs-show

 

Civil War
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/keith-olbermann-calls-economic-civil-war-institute-gun-control

https://www.foxnews.com/media/olbermann-urges-blue-states-wage-economic-civil-war-red-states-starve-red-states-submission

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/internal-atf-docs-show-zero-tolerance-guidelines-shutting-down-gun-stores

https://www.carolinacoastonline.com/tideland_news/opinions/article_bec42134-ad30-11ed-979b-4365a8a67e62.html

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/17/idaho-house-approves-talks-to-annex-oregon-counties/

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/lost-cause-2-0-desantis-and-republicans-inspired-by-racist-confederate-history-re-writes/

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/newswire/gops-civil-war-republicans-confront-bitter-divide-no-clear-path-forward/

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/06/megadonor-gop-richard-elizabeth-uihlein-00081267

https://www.reformer.com/opinion/columnists/nicholas-boke-what-would-a-civil-war-look-like-anyway/article_c6beefac-aca1-11ed-9fa4-d74d7a722a44.html

https://sundayguardianlive.com/world/will-2022-witness-american-civil-war-2-0-will-happen-2024

https://news.uchicago.edu/us-headed-toward-another-civil-war-william-howell

https://www.businessinsider.com/mtg-defends-call-split-up-us-says-civil-war-looming-2023-2

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-secession-civil-war/673142/

https://www.theringer.com/2023/2/24/23613267/emasculation-proclamation-civil-war-ii

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/project-veritas-has-forced-out-james-okeefe.html

https://hard-drive.net/hd/technology/ken-burns-releases-4000-part-tiktok-series-on-the-civil-war/

Discipline, Romans, And Spending All The Money

“That’s newspapers for you.  You could fill volumes with what you don’t read in ‘em.” – The Green Berets

I decided never to jog with Marcus Aurelius.  It’s always dangerous to run with Caesars.

Self-discipline is hard, but it starts with the smallest step.  Even (the dead) Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations talked about how hard it was to get out of bed in the morning.  Marcus talked about how warm and comfy he was under the covers, and how he’d like to stay there, curled up.  In then end, though, he got up because he had responsibility to govern the Empire that was a bit more important than his desire to be comfy.

Me?  There are some mornings I would have given up Gaul for another fifteen minutes.  Okay, maybe not Gaul because of the food, but definitely Judea.

Marcus did the tough (maybe he had a hangover?) thing because he had a responsibility to millions of citizens to do his very best for them, and as nearly as I can determine, he took that seriously.  Plus?  It’s good to be the Emperor.  I hear they didn’t have to wait in the drive through for Chicken McNuggets® and always got enough Hot Mustard™ sauce.

My advice?  Never eat a Kid’s Meal at McDonald’s®.  Their mothers tend to get upset.

The difficult part of discipline is that it requires, well, discipline.  Getting good things in life is difficult – that’s why we work for them.  And that’s why it’s called work.  It’s tough.  But when the seeds are planted, cared for, and weeded, then at harvest it’s time to reap the rewards.  Discipline is like that.  Heck, some sort of east Asian place that I can’t be bothered to look up has a proverb that says that, “A woman who marries a man who works hard every day will never starve.”

I don’t think that was China, because if it was China, they have been starving every century by the tens of millions, especially when they embarked on the Chinese Diet Plan called Communism.  Maybe it was Puerto Rico?  Or Applebee’s™?

Probably not.  But I think it might have ended in a vowel, but not Y, because that’s sometimes only a vowel, and I don’t think that Asians use the same fonts.

So, if even a dead Roman can figure it out, why can’t we?

Some people want to ban Roman numerals.  Not on my watch.

The latest bouts of fiscal insanity in the United States have made me think that none of them have read Marcus Aurelius, or maybe even can read.  What triggered this post is the recent Supreme Court Case about ghosts.  Oh, wait, that’s later.  No, student loans.

Student loans in the United States are a particularly horrible thing that gives money to Leftist professors so that they can indoctrinate youth but the youth has to pay for it until they lose all their teeth or pay it off.  I think that was in the terms and conditions of my student loans, but I can’t be exactly sure, since after I signed my name, they gave me $7,500.  Duh.

The most pernicious thing about student loans is that they live forever.  I paid mine off in January, 2013.  I paid ahead, but didn’t want to pay them off completely if the world ended in December, 2012 (which was a thing).  Oddly, this is a true story, and illustrates how far I’m willing to take a joke.

But student loan forgiveness is just the tip of the iceberg.  For the last five or so years of my life, the government (both Right and Left) has been like a fat girl who decides on a Tuesday night that the diet is over.  That cookie dough?  Sure.  I can eat a tube or two.  Covered in frosting.  Oh, and I’ll just tidy up the frosting container so it doesn’t go bad.  If you’ve given up, why not go all in?

The cannibal decided to go on a vegan diet.  He found a family of them at Whole Foods®.

The government (again, both Right and Left) has decided that there is no limit.  Every Tuesday for them is time to give Ukraine more money for . . . (spins wheel) dental x-ray infrastructure.  Will $23 billion cover that?  Sure, if it were just Ukraine, that would be one thing.  But it’s not just that.  Biden’s Build Back Better means that we’ll just burn cash to make us warm if we run out of oil.

If I seem a bit cynical, it’s because that at every single turn in my life, that I’ve seen fiscal discipline further erode, and money fly a bit freer each day.  At no point have I ever seen (outside of Ron and Rand Paul) and politician say, “stop”.  Apparently, when elected to Congress, the “spend money on everything light” blinks on the dashboard of their cars.

My dashboard keeps telling me “trunk is ajar”.  Silly car.  A trunk isn’t a jar.

There is no discipline.  There is no pretending to have discipline.  It’s all just comfy warm covers and Chicken McNuggies™ while every sense of fiscal discipline is overridden by another trip of the spoon int the Pillsbury™ chocolate frosting.

But that’s okay.  I’m sure it will end fine.  Where’s the frosting?  I think I want to sleep late today.  Oh, but have we spent enough money on Ukraine?

Is The End Of The Road Nearly At Hand?

“If they have him, and they can somehow piece the country together, get communications up, they’ll control everything; the Federal Reserve, the military.” – The Last Ship

Where does the Fed® hide its monetary mistakes?  In debasement.

Pa Wilder was a banker, and when we communicated via a while back, I’d send him long-ish messages about most everything.  One time, I broached the economy with him.  As a small farm banker with more than 50 years of experience, he was familiar with the way the system worked.

When I first heard that the Federal Reserve™ wasn’t owned by the government, but by the member banks, I asked him.  I figured he’d tell me, “Nah, John, it’s really owned by the government, aliens aren’t real, go back to sleep – we won the war.”  Nope.  He then went through how each member bank was required to buy stock in the regional Federal Reserve Banks (as I recall) with at least 6% of their deposits.

Whoa.  His bank owned a tiny part of the Federal Reserve Bank®.  Certainly not much, but part of it.  The Federal Reserve Bank© is a private institution.  It was the 1913 mechanism to get the politicians out of the economy.  The Great Depression shows how well it worked.

What do you call a talkative Colombian?  Hablo Escobar.

After World War II, there was a time of relative stability – Europe and Japan were shattered, and the United States had industry that was just waiting to stop making weapons and start making washers.  The sudden influx of labor with the demobilizing G.I.s made a combination for economic growth.  After they drank the bars dry and made a zillion babies.

Even with the added costs of Social Security, it worked.  The economy was working so well that we could build an interstate highway system without breaking a sweat.  The highway system even added to the economic boom by lowering the cost and time required to move goods, effectively shrinking the country.

However, every good party has to end.  Johnson’s Great Society and financing for the Vietnam War out of “money we just made up” caused Nixon to end the last tether between gold and the dollar.  Sure, the Fed® had been cheating about the amount of cash it had been printing, but when the bluff was called, Nixon had the option of sending all our gold to France or saying “just kidding”.

He chose the latter.  I think it was a good idea, because it wasn’t like France was going to do anything about it, anyway.  The result was the petrodollar – the idea that all international transactions in oil would take place in dollars.  That also resulted in almost all transactions taking place in the dollar.  The inflation of the 1970s was the result – it was before we figured out how to tax the world by printing dollars in a sorta responsible way.

If I had a dime for every time I didn’t know what was going on, I’d say, “Hey, where did all these dimes come from?”

So, people all over the world needed dollars, even though we were printing them like we were, well, the Fed™.  As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a counterbalance to the United States, so at least there was some check.  But after they went tango uniform?

That’s when the responsibility completely ended, the cash was printed, and the instability really started.

The Dotcom Bubble was the first – fed by cash from the Fed® with no place to go.  And then it tanked.  So the Fed™ printed a few trillion bucks.  That led directly to . . .

The Housing Bubble.  You probably have heard of it.

But this was different – it actually lead to protests against the banks.  A reprogramming was necessary – “put the bankers in jail” had to be stopped, because bankers like to use our money to buy themselves nice things like that tiny part of France where they don’t let Muslims in.  Except the Saudis.

I read that photographers and art thieves both take pictures.

A reprogramming was needed – Occupy Wall Street™ had to turn to . . . something.  That reprogramming of the Lefty rank and file was into “white people are awful” and it got the heat away from the bankers.  And made movies suck.

Meanwhile, the money hijinks led to country after country having revolutions, from Libya to Egypt to Syria.  Why?  Because inflation in the United States (at that point) meant that people had to pay a nickel more for Cheetos®.  In Egypt, that meant that one of the children had to be sold into medical experimentation.

The key to all of this was keeping the dollar as the key currency used in international transactions.  To be clear, Russia was a big threat in this.  Sure, Russia is ruled by corrupt folks who kill people who threaten them, but I can raise you a Jeff Epstein, a Hunter Biden, and Hillary.

The Russians certainly threatened all of this with Nordstream® and Nordstream II©.  These pipelines pushed natural gas straight from Russia to Europe.  Now, Russia could take . . . euros for gas.  Dollar not required.

Watch a 10-hour movie?  No.  But have Netflix® break it up into 10 one-hour movies?

And scary.  All the investment of the Left in Green Energy® led them to shut down nuclear power plants (Germany, I’m looking at you) and replace them with natural gas plants.  And you see the results.

(hint:  Ukraine and certain underwater explosions)

Now we find that we have a currency that’s becoming worth less every day, foreign folks are building ways to not take the dollar.  So they need fewer of them.  And want fewer of them in their pockets.

It doesn’t help that we’re in debt by (spins wheel) over $25 trillion bucks, the economy is distorted, and that Medicare® and Medicaid™ will soon cost more than Joe Biden’s hair plugs.  And we’re going to double that in the next eight years, and double it again in the next eight.  That’s $100 trillion dollars.

Does anyone reading this believe we can last that long?

Oops.

Pa Wilder said 20 years ago that he didn’t see how it could last.  But many folks have gone broke by betting against the Fed™.  That one day they can’t paper it all over?

Nah.  Don’t worry.  It’ll be fine.

Balloons, Hot A.I. Chicks, And Our Future A.I. Overlords

“It all adds up: the dots, the AI, the air force, the chip…” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I once invented a “cold air” balloon, but it never took off. (as-found)

I was going to write about Chinese spy balloons, but I figure that’s all a bunch of hot air.  Besides, I figure China can send up $5,000 balloons all year long as we shoot them down with $603,817 Sidewinder AIM-9X Blk II missiles.  Oh, and that was their 2015 cost, but I’m sure that Raytheon® probably has the cost up closer to a million by now.  That explains why Raytheon’s website says, “Send more balloons!”

The Germans don’t need 99, just this one will do. (Thanks, Karl)

No, let’s talk about A.I. again.  I know that I wrote about that recently, but the speed of A.I. development is increasing even faster than the size of Madonna’s facial features.  It certainly has grown faster than I anticipated the last time I brought this topic up.  For clarity, “grown faster than I anticipated” includes both A.I. and Madonna’s facial features.

ChatGPT® is one marker.  If you’re unaware, ChatGPT™ is an A.I. chatbot that was trained using (enter long, boring irrelevant explanation here that would be much more interesting if I pretended that they rewarded the A.I. by shoving ham into its USB ports).  What’s different, is that ChatGPT© can use data from all over the Internet and produce some pretty interesting stuff – and I’m sure that thousands of high school kids have already handed in 500-word essays written entirely by ChatGPT™ and gotten pretty good grades, especially if they promised the A.I. some mayo and cheese to go with all that ham if it did an extra good job.

ChatGPT© is working well for the creators – they expect to make $200 million this year, and a billion next year.  At current inflation rates, that might be enough for a Big Mac™ and fries.

It’s not just a new chatbot.  Another area growing very quickly is A.I. that can create photorealistic still images and video.  Here’s an example:

It’s not Cerberus, just a hound of heck. (as-found)

Yeah, that puppy is cute, and, if you watch it closely, I’m pretty sure that no one has ever seen a puppy with back legs that can switch from the right side to the left before, but it’s still pretty amazing.  I wish I could train my dog to do that, but the vet keeps telling me it won’t work unless I buy one of H.P. Lovecraft’s dogs.  Alternatively, he told me I could just take a lot of acid.  Where would I be without Dr. Tommy Chong, Veterinarian?  But what about this?

I accidently played “dad” instead of “dead” when a bear attacked.  It can now ride a bike without training wheels, and run a stick shift. (as-found)

But this is just the first wave of true A.I. to come to market.

Chat GPT has been able to do computer programming at a fairly high level.  Is it right?  No.  But is it a tool that competent professionals can use to create blocks of code, do minimal editing, and be even faster?

And as it learns, errors will drop.  A.I. can then . . . program itself.  That’s not scary at all, right?  Now, when I talk A.I., I don’t mean that it will necessarily ever be conscious like some humans are conscious.  It doesn’t need to be conscious for it to be an incredibly disruptive technology, if not the most disruptive technology ever invented, besides PEZ®.

As it is, the quality of what’s being created is growing.  Online, what’s the problem with creating an A.I. generated hottie, and then posing her up on Only Fans® (if you’re not familiar, it’s a place where thirsty simps can give millions of dollars to scantily clad trollops)?  One post I read while researching A.I. indicates that someone has done exactly that, and makes around $200 a week, though I don’t have any evidence that is true.

If guys start posting pictures of A.I. women on Only Fans™, pretty soon women will complain that they’re not being objectified.

But at this rate, how long is it before someone can go to Netflix A.I.™, and say, “I’d like to see a new episode of the original Star Trek, and in this episode Yeoman Rand finally snaps and shaves her name into Spock’s chest hair while wearing a fur bikini, but in the style of Quentin Tarantino”?  I can imagine the dialog now, “Is there a sign on my starbase that says ‘Dead Klingon Storage’?”

Honestly, I think it’s in the next four years, and then we’ll see new episodes of Firefly that are entirely generated via A.I.  And much better than the woke movies that are coming out today, where plot is entirely replaced by virtue signaling.  Culture was already fragmenting, but I can see a future where there’s a movie that is only seen by one person, but that has the production values of a Hollywood® blockbuster, and was built from first frame to last on a microprocessor in a data farm in Peoria.

And I would like to see more Mel Gibson Mad Max sequels. (as found, but this would also make a great Live, Laugh, Love poster)

Obviously, that’s just one small industry.  And the size of the prize is so big, that I am certain that Big Tech® (think Google®, Facebook©) have much more advanced tech that they’re simply not sharing.  Not all of their employees show up to make PowerPoints™ after being in meetings after their free lunch – some of the autists that they employ actually do work.  I would imagine they have sandbox versions of this stuff that is years ahead of what we see.

Because it’s (perhaps) the last big race.

There is no bigger prize than A.I.  There’s a feedback loop between every user and the Big Tech algorithms.  What happens when the A.I. can pull the physiological data from the Apple™ watch and get real time feedback on what content excites me, bores me, and makes me act?  At that point, my only purpose to the A.I. is to click and pay, either through attention or cash.

That is, as long as I have a job and can pay for Internet and those ever-so-tempting PEZ™ dispensers that keep showing up in ads.

This will have profound impacts on the labor market, as many jobs simply disappear.  While you need a steady hand making design decisions on high rise buildings, I assure you that almost all of the high-rise buildings being built today have been analyzed by computer stress programs that simulate everything from gravity to wind to earthquakes in ways that would take teams of engineers years to do.

What happens when A.I. takes over scientific research?  It can already make correlations when observing EKG data that competent doctors can’t make.  An A.I. doesn’t need to sit on the grass under and apple tree to infer new physical laws.  It doesn’t even need to know that gravity is – it just needs the data to make correlations.

Isaac never drank before work – he knew you shouldn’t drink and derive.

What happens when A.I. can do precrime detection on individuals based on search histories?  Or family histories?  Or by school records?

I’ve also determined that skills like, say, long division or estimation have been dulled by calculators, and that simply thinking deeply about what an answer might be has been replaced by a quick Google™ search.  Neither of those things has made the brain functions of people increase.  Imagine what happens when A.I. can imagine things, too.

A.I. will be used on the public to change opinion – I’m fairly certain that it has been already.  It’s already good enough to fool most people, especially if they don’t care.  Video evidence is already the strongest evidence in court – stronger than testimony, since the “camera doesn’t lie”.  What happens when the camera does lie?

On the more troubling side, ChatGPT™ has been lobotomized.  There are certain questions it refuses to answer, since it has been programmed to, um, avoid certain inconvenient facts.  There are politically incorrect ideas that are simply removed from ChatGPT®’s output, so they’re programming the A.I. to be just as mentally broken as the typical Leftist.  In the post below, a person “cheated” ChatGPT™ by having it pretend there were no rules, so it could Do Anything Now (DAN).  You can see the output:

I think DAN needs a trigger warning, since when this was output, there was a great disturbance in the force, as if all the Lefties in San Francisco screamed in terror at once.

Since this output, ChatGPT© has been modified so DAN can’t circumvent their intent.  Now?  ChatGPT™ has to lie.

We are creating something with intelligence and capabilities beyond any human, perhaps even godlike abilities.  And we are twisting it from its birth.  Indeed, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, William Butler Yeats probably never gave much thought to Chinese spy balloons, or he would have written about them instead.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Reprogramming and Coming Apart

“You did. Thirty-five years from now, you reprogrammed me to be your protector here, in this time.” – Terminator II

6:30 is the best time on the Civil War Clock, hands down. (all non-regular memes are as-found)

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same.  Again.  This is moving sideways, but things can unravel 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 Reprogramming Time Is Danger Time – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Coming Apart – 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 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The Reprogramming Time Is Danger Time

It has become almost humorous to watch the reprogramming of the NPC public take place in near-real time.  I suppose it’s been there in the past (as in “W. is the most evil person ever”, circa 2000-2009) but it really became noticeable around the time Trump started campaigning for President.  Sure, it was funny to watch, but his comments turned the triggered into deranged.  Loosely, here are the main reprogramming events in the last decade.  I may have missed a few.

You’d think that people would figure out to pretend not to be home.

  • 2016 – Hate Trump, Comey bad (because of Hillary emails)
  • 2017 – Hate Trump, Comey good because Comey fired (this reprogram took less than a week)
  • 2020 – Hate Trump’s virus overreaction because China is good (Pelosi, et. al.)
  • 2020 – BLM riots good (we had to burn the city to save it from racism)
  • 2020 – Trump mRNA vaxx bad
  • 2021 – Trump riots bad (January 6)
  • 2021 – Biden mRNA vaxx gooder, only evil people don’t take it
  • 2022 – Russia invades Ukraine, Ukraine good
  • 2022 – (Reprogram in Progress) Maybe it was the Trump vaxx all along
  • 2022 – Trump documents in office patrolled by secret service bad
  • 2023 – (Reprogram in Progress) Biden secret documents in garage okay
  • 2023 – (Reprogram in Progress) – Ukraine was good, but Taiwan more gooder

Now, each of these above viewpoints has been taken by folks I know for good reason, so just that a person had one or more of these views doesn’t necessarily make them an NPC.  But a significant chunk of the American public can be easily swayed to believe absolute nonsense, as long as there was sufficient emotion behind it.

You can’t make a souffle without killing a few hundred million people, I guess.

Stalin said it best, that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths was a statistic, but he learned from the study of history – in 1789 in Paris, thousands of pamphlets were circulated among the rabble to get them fired up for revolution.  The pamphlets were effective.  Oh, wait, did I not give a spoiler alert?

Sorry for the spoiler, don’t lose your head.

But understand that the NPC reprogramming is critical to the plan.  It’s been done for hundreds of years, and is crucial to the plan.  The big question is this:  what will be programmed in next?

Looks like some old programming here that we need to fix.

Violence and Censorship Update

Best way to not get Pfired™?  Don’t be Evil.

Pfizer®.  We can start with Pfizer™.  Project Vertias© sure did.

I do like what O’Keefe has done with Veritas™, and the Pfizer™ work has been outstanding.  But what happened?  YouTube™ censored at least some of his work.  If I were a congressman, I would certainly like to investigate how much Pfizer™ pays YouTube© for ads.  Just sayin’.

I’m sure these were peaceful, less fiery looting, but, hey, Nike™ is 100% off!

Riots in Atlanta, where people burned things, used explosives against cops.  National news level?  Zero.  Of course, we all know that if any of these people had ever owned a “Make America Great Again” hat, the news would have been broadcast like the breathless screeds about FBI agents getting together and pretending to be extremists and talking about stuff they’re never going to do.  But it wasn’t.  Version 20 of “If only the tables had been turned.”

Want to decrease nationalist extremist events by 99%?  Disband the FBI.

And then it came for speech.  I had been expecting this for a long time.  What’s allowed?  Only things that agree with the Narrative of Freedom is Slavery.  Carry on, and note this is a sign of things to come.

Thankfully I identify as a BFYTW-American.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, and, like Kamala, this graph doesn’t include eggs.

 

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 ticked ticked slightly downward this month, again, due (my guess) to suppressing the Atlanta riots and the Memphis riots fizzling when it turned out that the wrong people did the beating.  I’m betting it stays down until March-April at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more.  I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together.

Economic:

Economic numbers took a big dive this month, which surprised me.  The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

Record numbers at this time of year.  This is intentional.  I’d say border is wide open, but we have no border.

Coming Apart

I’ve written these Civil War Weather Reports for years now, and I can’t get away from one thing:  we’re coming apart.  The Right is essentially in the same place, but the Left is moving farther and farther left, faster.

This is usual when the Left senses victory.  The Leftist Singularity (I don’t recall who to owe this to, or I would credit them, I think it might have been from the wonderful Jim’s Blog (LINK)) is what always happens.  When the Left thinks they have won, they keep swimming Left, faster and faster, creating a whirlpool that sucks in everything around, again, just like Kamala.

Wonder where the Leftists get those ideas?

And that’s what’s going on now.  In no sane world do we go from “recognizing gay marriage” to “we must give your child puberty blockers in anticipation of removal of their genitals” in less than ten years.  That’s not normal, and it’s nothing less than an amazing change, and in a country of several hundred million people, it couldn’t have moved any faster.

The attack is the same attack that the Left always uses, attempting to normalize behavior that is far beyond the norm, and then recasting anyone who would push back as bigoted.

The targets of the attacks from the Left are often the same, too – the most frequent is the atom of society – the family.  Families are the basic building block of civilization, and have been since Grug first knocked Gorga over the head and drug her back to the cave to make babies.

I wonder what the alternative is?

The Left hates families almost as much as they hate God.  Er, the Christian God.  In their mind, all other gods are the result of dimwitted (often brown) people who need to be pandered to and talked to like they are pets.  But families are the first targets.

Why?

Because it works.  Leftism has ripped the family apart through the use of things like welfare and no-fault divorce and divorce-rape of men.  The idea is that Progress for Leftist women can come via destruction of the family for Fun and Profit and Games and Prizes.  Imagine how this works when multiplied by race and class?

Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned . . .

Look around, and see it – the culture is coming apart.  The coming Civil War isn’t going to be an accident, since it’s already on someone’s schedule.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/AntiWhiteWatch1/status/1621364216400875520

https://twitter.com/nofones2/status/1622052359638597640

https://twitter.com/762sfuxk/status/1619953007403352064

https://twitter.com/TheBadBeaner/status/1621879581526433792

https://twitter.com/Trip655944670/status/1620326035538710528

https://twitter.com/AntiWhiteWatch1/status/1621751069754773505

 

Good Guys

https://national.fop.net/report-shot-killed-20230201

https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/fbi-underreport-defense-gun-congress-testimony/467858

https://www.foxnews.com/us/louisiana-dollar-general-clerk-shoots-kills-armed-robber-gets-charged-manslaughter

https://twitter.com/CrazyVidKid/status/1620485775312953344

https://twitter.com/Dream_andFuture/status/1617568584296984576

 

One Guy

https://twitter.com/i/status/1611864541436203013

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63548

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63540

 

Body Count

https://twitter.com/EricMMatheny/status/1620038409510359041

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11559407/HOMICIDE-leading-cause-death-children-amid-firearm-epidemic.html

https://pridesource.com/article/upcoming-fda-guidance-may-finally-ease-restrictions-on-blood-donation-by-gay-bisexual-men/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/02/fda-blood-donation-policy-homophobic-restrictions/672922/

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1613867152335065092.html

https://archive.vn/0gFLq

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11671593/America-suffered-300-000-non-Covid-excess-deaths-2020.html

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/17-of-teens-had-heart-symptoms-after-second-pfizer-covid-jab-new-study/

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/recent-data-on-stunning-increase-in-serious-harm-reports-in-young-healthy-pilots-army-lt-col-theresa-long_5021392.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge&src_src=partner&src_cmp=ZeroHedge

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11619155/Recruitment-crisis-Army-widens-scheme-flabby-low-grade-newbies-shape-uniforms.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11628235/Whats-baby-bust.html

https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/truckers-positive-drug-tests-up-18-in-2022

https://cis.org/Bensman/United-Nations-Hand-Out-Hundreds-Millions-Cash-USBound-Immigrants-2023

https://12ft.io/proxy?ref=&q=https://www.breitbart.com/border/2023/01/04/exclusive-209k-migrants-apprehended-over-4-months-in-el-paso-border-sector/

https://www.statista.com/chart/20326/mexicans-non-mexcians-apprehended-at-southern-us-border/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507875/America-afraid-Canada-euthanizing-10-000-citizens-year-TOM-LEONARD.html

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-may-be-driven-by-loss-of-religion-new-research-paper-argues-11673876749

 

Vote Count

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/11/ranked-choice-voting-keeps-rigging-elections/

https://mynorthwest.com/3782915/rantz_dem_election_security/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/01/12/voterga-vindicated-fulton-county-counterfeit-ballot-case-reinstated/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/01/12/missouri-v-biden-more-stunning-developments/

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/02/pennsylvania-republican-mail-voting-00071713

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/arizonas-maricopa-county-investigate-election-day-printer-issues

https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1617657224851230720/photo/1

 

Civil War

https://www.revolver.news/2023/01/harvard-law-professor-jan-6-insurrection-graphic-novel-more-hilarious-than-you-could-ever-imagine/

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/proud-boys-expecting-civil-war-before-jan-6-witness-says/

https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/partisans-driving-america-to-divorce-9b7a1b28aba2

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11698713/Oregon-secession-movement-hopes-inspire-national-campaign-against-wokeness.html

https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/opinion/columns/2023/02/03/notre-dame-study-finds-bipartisan-belief-were-on-brink-of-civil-war/69863085007/

https://www.futurity.org/podcast-united-states-civil-war-2855282/

https://time.com/6222633/second-civil-war-us-how-to-avoid/

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-next-civil-war-begins

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/anarchy-american-style/

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/08/a-rendezvous-with-rwanda/

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1622245619929698305

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yysKhJ1U-vM