Inflation Nation – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Trump Trigger and Complexity

“Rita, you’re a convicted felon, and now you’re an escaped con.” – The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

They fired me from the clock factory because of all the extra hours that I’m putting in.

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

Volume VI, Issue 1

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

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

In this issue: Front Matter – The Trump Trigger– Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Stairway to Where? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

The Trump Trigger

Donald Trump scared the hell out of the GloboLeftElite when he was elected. I’m fairly certain that he makes many of GloboLeft rank and file lose sleep when they think about him being re-elected.

Rand Paul was quoted in Zero Hedge® (a reader sent this in):

“I worry about strife. I worry about war in the streets. I worry about 50 percent of the public believing that the court system will be used against them . . . I worry when half the country thinks they won’t be treated fairly, what happens and how people react.”

Huh, I thought he was dead.

Where we sit now, Trump may never spend a day in the pokey. And he may never even be convicted – yes, there’s a jury verdict, but until the judge finds him convicted, there’s just a vote by a jury of twelve GloboLeft peers, one of which may have violated the rules and talked about the proceedings.

Oops. There are other very, very valid reasons that Trump has for appeal – selective prosecution among them not identifying the charge against him – they never specified the other crime that Trump supposedly committed.

Rand Paul is right. The judicial system has been weaponized at every level against Trump. The fact that the Federalist Society has produced a slate of judges over the past several decades that aren’t woke Sotomayor-level GloboHomo soldiers will apply actual justice at the federal level.

But what if they don’t?

If Trump is convicted and sent to prison that will a very dark day in history – one that will show to millions of normies that the republic is irretrievably lost, a conclusion that many on the TradRight have come to years if not decades ago.

Does this lead to immediate chaos? This is a tough one – I tend to think not, but then again, the number of people that support Trump and MAGA are significant. It will be a sign that businesses need to create a quick exodus from New York, California, or any other location where the business has a political difference with the GloboLeftElite agenda. I mean, it’s not like elections matter.

But I’m told it was a FaiR ElEctIoN.

Perhaps Musk moving to Texas is beginning to make a lot more sense. On the bright side, it means that the Republic of Texas will be born with it’s own space force.

Violence and Censorship Update

The issues in Israel have done several things – they’ve increased the level of fighting in the GloboLeft as the Pro-Palestine wing and the Pro-Israel wings slug it out. As Bracken notes, it is a weird GloboLeft/Palestine alliance.

Of course, as soon as the GloboLeft makes one of their crappy villages, they . . . put up the borders that they claim to hate.

The other side of the coin is the reaction in Congress, which is entirely at odds with that pesky 1^st Amendment:

And, Massey has a very good question, especially since they committed $300,000 to ads attacking him:

Oh, and questioning the “Muh Immigration is Good” narrative is worth a banning:

They’re still trying to ban JK Rowling for telling the truth:

Propaganda, anyone?

Oh, it’s not like they’re trying to suppress anything . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

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

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

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is up, a little. I wonder if Chicago’s Democratic National Convention is going to spike temperatures?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down. I expect this fall to be a bit more crazy.

Economic:

Economic numbers are up a bit. But so are prices.

Illegal Aliens:

Second Highest May is actually down. But the normies are waking up.

Stairway to Where?

History never repeats exactly, but the same themes keep coming up again and again. While there is no guarantee, there are patterns.

The lead up to civil war is often the same: misery, rising tensions, and too many elites fighting each other for scraps of power. The wars are often drastically different, and depend on things like ideology, geography, technology, and telepathy. Okay, maybe not telepathy, but the other ones all count.

But, just like Led Zepplin©, there are two paths you can go by . . . and two outcomes.

Broadly, when civil wars occur there two things that can happen as a result. The first one is what happened after the Russian Revolution or the American Civil War 1.0 – that is, a drastic reduction in freedom for citizens.

But I’ve been assured that everything is fine.

The American Civil war did increase the freedom of slaves, and granted them full citizenship, to be sure. But for the common man who hadn’t been a slave? Freedom declined. There had been a balancing act between the Several States and Fed.Gov, but after the Civil War was done, the States were no longer sovereign, and, in fact were nothing more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This was drastically different than what existed before. The Several States were recognized as just that, complete governments. They only banded together, reluctantly, to create an organism strong enough, just barely, to resist being beaten up and conquered by the various European powers.

After the American Civil War? The process of eliminating the rights of the Several States has been an ongoing battle every year since 1865, and, with a few exceptions, has been largely won by the United States.

If increased central control and tyranny are one outcome from a civil war, what’s the other?

Increased complexity. Think back to the fall of the Soviet Union. A huge, monolithic, multicultural tyranny if ever there was one. It looked to the world as if it would never be defeated – heck, the view of the Russians in the 1980s (I know, I was there) was that, while they didn’t have lots of different consumer products, they did have a huge technological edge over the West.

But when the end came, the fighting that did happen was minimal – the Soviet Union (like the multicultural British and Roman empires that came before) didn’t end so much with a red tide of blood, but rather a gradual realization that no one wanted to play anymore. The sad, shattered core of empire let all the parts fly to the wind.

I met the guy who puts the symbols on maps that say what things are. What a legend!

It seems that one key is the “multi-cultural” part. Whereas you could make the case that the United States had Irishmen and Scots and Norwegians bopping around back in 1860, the vast majority of Americans were just that, Americans descended from (by and large) stock from the United Kingdom with a common language and common religious and cultural heritage.

That led to Tyranny.

The seat of power of Imperial Russian was mainly . . . Russian. The Russian Revolution led to? Tyranny.

It seems that there is some tipping point where a Civil War results not in tyranny, but in Balkanization, heck, the name “Balkanization” is literally exactly what we’re talking about.

The more I think about it, unless there is a Caesar sitting in the wings (and I don’t see him) then we will end up Balkanizing after a Civil War.

Disagree? This is a newer thought, so, love to hear comments.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1788630900781047856

https://x.com/i/status/1797153228032815184

https://twitter.com/i/status/1787518756756901901

https://x.com/i/status/1795801690014429550

https://x.com/i/status/1790510753952194692

https://x.com/i/status/1796322999056163026

https://x.com/i/status/1797272685791117522

Good Guy

https://x.com/i/status/1797274250438476199

One Guy

https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/05/29/scjc-alleged-teen-triggerman-deadly-community-center-shooting-fired-self-defense-wont-be-prosecuted/

https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2024/SCO/0307/221482.asp

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/man-shot-killed-overnight-in-a-carmichael-apartment-deputies-say/

https://apnews.com/article/roger-fortson-stand-your-ground-race-florida-2c6a585f3fa5b2bd21179b84ff258b1d#

Body Count

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F04d489f3-35f1-4579-80f6-dc5babc003cf_936x528_png_92.jpg?itok=sQRpJ67q

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F13892e0d-32cb-47c1-8cef-b2e1554b9e62_1456x972.jpeg_92.jpg?itok=HMg63_9I

https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Population-Grew-51-Million-Last-Two-Years

https://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.240510.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/30142.jpeg?itok=jcgiDaxv

Vote Count

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/31/dinesh-dsouza-election-film-2000-mules-pulled.html

https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/13/heres-fresh-evidence-bidens-using-your-tax-dollars-to-turn-out-democrat-votes-in-2024/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/05/13/the-georgia-state-election-board-ensures-2024-will-be-a-2020-repeat

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/officials-overseeing-elections-swing-states-doubt-2020-results/

Civil War

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/biden-uncivil-war-rages-rcna150666

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13447357/THIRTEEN-conservative-counties-Oregon-approve-ballot-measures-SECESSION-vote-join-non-woke-Idaho-issue-list-demands.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13452561/Divided-states-America-Oregon-Louisiana-campaigns-secession-taking-place-local-state-levels-succeeding.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinion-we-are-starting-to-enjoy-hatred/ar-BB1nm54r

https://x.com/seanmdav/status/1796301843338789070

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-investor-ray-dalio-warns-115219371.html

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/18/unpacking-ray-dalios-alarmist-prediction-of-civil-war/

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-hush-money-verdict-maga-civil-war-1906671

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/trump-trial-maga-internet-violence/678571/

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-guilty-verdict-online-maga-fanbase-war/

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/28/terrible-place-bill-maher-warns-a-civil-could-happen-here–some-already-pining-for-it/

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” – Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie. Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog). In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them. His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time. I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years. That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me. From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl. I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it. Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years. This caused several related things to happen:

The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class. Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination. In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world. I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too. McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them. I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish. Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration. Which one? Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many. Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do. Keep this in mind: McDonald’s is now a luxury food. Are McDonald’s™ sales number up? Sure! Prices have doubled. But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters: P and A.

What’s the outcome? Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail. Examples abound:

Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains. Period. Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile? He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West. The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier. Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.

Revenge of the NEET

“I wanted to send my kids to college. It’s, like, $200 a year!” – Unfrosted

But I do have degrees in Mike Rowe Economics and Mike Rowe Biology.

NEET is Internet slang for “Not in Employment, Education, or Training” – in other words, “stays a home and smokes weed and plays video games”.

Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, spent time noting last year that even with unemployment below 4%, 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t in the work force at all.

Now, I would hate to bring up the points that if our nation:

sends all the factory jobs overseas,
imports millions of foreigners with H1B visas (95,000 a year, minimum, since 2006, and more going back before that), or
just like Google®, cut hundreds of highly-skilled technical jobs in the United States and offshore them to Mexico and India,

then maybe, just maybe, the job market actually sucks because the wages are depressed to the point where living conditions at those wage levels are literally third world.

They’re not send us their best, or their best navigators, but I wonder if the repairs will be riveting. (meme used with permission)

Why would people put up with that? The market.

An example I read recently was of a person from India claiming that the only way they could find a place to live (this was in Canada) was in a bed in a kitchen in a two-bedroom apartment where six other Indian families were living. Admittedly, this is probably an upgrade from living in a slum in Mumbai, but these six families each pay a sixth of the rent. If a typical Canadian family wanted to rent that apartment and each Indian family was making $300 payments, the Canadians would have to cough up $1800.

That’s why people are tenting it – tents are better (marginally) to the American psyche than living with six other families in a condition where “squalor” would be an upgrade.

Another example?

When I was a kid, delivery work was for kids. Sixteen-year-olds were the ones frying Big Macs® and driving pizza from the Pizza Den to people’s houses.

Now?

Doordash® is now an adult job and everyone I see running the windows of the fast-food places has been voting for a big chunk of this century.

The United States is slipping quickly (and then, I fear, all at once) into a third world economy. To be clear, I’m not blaming those attempting to get to a better place, but it would be magical thinking to believe that once they got here and were a majority that they’d not immediately turn the United States into just another version of their homeland. You know, the one they fled.

Biden can’t stop doing connect-the-dot puzzles even though he can’t finish one. I guess Biden just doesn’t know where to draw the line. (meme as found)

But some of them aren’t working at all. And of those men that aren’t working, a huge number of them are white guys. It turns out that all, and I mean all, of the job growth since Corona™ became something other than a beer, went to dudes that weren’t white. In fact, the number of white people in the workforce dropped while Joe Biden “created” all of these jobs.

They were replaced. On any job where there is a remotely credible alternative with some sort of “diversity” score based on: a sexual fetish, being “female”, missing one of their six spleens, race, ethnicity, or religion. Of course, white, Christian and male is the opposite of diverse even though that category is only 6% or less of all of the humans we know of in the Solar System, excluding Phobos.

With things like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) actively putting up barriers to hiring (or keeping) white guys, I’m not surprised that many have just given up. They are pretending right now that that DEI is going away, but in reality, they’re keeping it but just naming it other things. “People and the Planet,” anyone? (Yes, it’s real.) Their goals really haven’t changed.

A lot of companies have women as DEI executives. I guess because it’s cheaper. (meme as found)

The big problem is that Identity is now more important than Competency. Think: Chernobyl 2.0, brought to you by DEI. Why no DEI in the NFL®? People actually care about meritocracy in football players, I guess.

Also, Automation is real. Factories of almost any type, when compared by their counterparts of 1960, are much more highly automated. A guy named Fred walking around to check temperatures on thermometers to make sure the boiler doesn’t suddenly wipe Peoria off the map has been replaced with sensors that feed pressure, temperature, and flowrates back to computers that automate the process. Fred’s out of a job, and, if those boiler automation systems weren’t programmed in India (looking at you, Boeing®) then Peoria is still safe.

Except for Fred, who doesn’t have that job anymore. A.I. is coming for lots and lots of other jobs. Starting now. According to Indeed®:

Software development jobs are down 51.3%,
Information Design down 44.3%
IT Operations and Helpdesk down 33.5%
Industrial Engineering down 30.3%

Are all of these jobs replaceable by A.I.? Of course not. But 35.3% of HR jobs (same study) apparently are.

I’m not a NEET, but I’m sure it’s easier being a NEET without a family. No particular requirement to have shelter other than couch surfing, and some NEETs work for a couple of months during the year and then goof off, smoke weed, and play video games during the rest of the time.

And you can do both of these things in a video game, while stoned. (meme as found)

Families have always been the nucleus that keeps men showered and shaved, but without them, men give up. It’s not like they can afford a family, either. Housing prices and interest rates are now high enough in most metro locations that most young families are effectively locked out of homeownership. The price to income ratio has doubled since 1985 nationally – homes are now twice as expensive as 1985 compared to median family incomes. Add in 7%+ interest rates, and you’ll see why the middle class has caused Red Lobster to go bankrupt.

Who knew we’d live to see so many movies come true? (meme as found)

In reality, there’s not a labor shortage – there’s only a labor shortage at the wages companies are willing to pay, and a ludicrous inflation of the value of women so that what they bring to the table (for kids) doesn’t equal what they have to put. NEETs don’t really care about either. They’ve got their weed, couches, and video games.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Time And Temperature

“Hey, come on. You divorced? You Separated? She beat you up?” – Die Hard

My book on clocks finally arrived. It’s about time.

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

Volume V, Issue 12

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

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

In this issue: Front Matter – Clock of Doom Setting– Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Talking About The Inevitable – Links

Front Matter

Clock of Doom Setting

Klaus really rocks that Klingon cosplay?

I’m keeping the clock at stage 8 this month. But last month there was the comment from Aesop (LINK) that I promised to address this month, so here we are. The critical comments are in italics.

You’re still vastly over-selling the case. We’re at a 5 to a 6, at worst.

Things are neither wider nor deeper, just more widely and repetitively reported.

That’s a sign of desperation by the minions of Evil, not dominance.

Things are ugly. (Really ugly, if you want to use 1982, or 1962 as benchmarks. Which is why you shouldn’t.) But they’re not out of control, by any stretch. They haven’t turned up the burner, and the water isn’t anywhere near getting to frog-boiling range. Yet. That may (probably will) change. Perhaps quite rapidly (but that’s been true for ages). But until it does change, you really should throttle this back some.

Calling things an 8, at the current time, is gross overstatement.

This is a 100% fair criticism. I am certain we are, at minimum, at a 6 (People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology).

Why?

I know multiple people who have fled states merely for ideological reasons – the Red folks are leaving the Blue states, the GloboLeftists are leaving the Red states and taking their guns with them, to go and live in states that actually value the Second Amendment.

I just flew into Australia, and boy are my arms confiscated.

The GloboLeftists leaving Red states isn’t as big, because (at least now) the GloboLeftists are tolerated in Red states. You can have a “Biden” sign in your front yard and no one will vandalize the place. This is mostly true.

There is a paradox of these places: If you live in the parts of America where it’s likely that you’ll need to use force for self-defense, you also live in a part of America where the District Attorney will charge you, and the jury will convict you for using self-defense. If you live in the parts of America where it’s unlikely you’ll need to use force for self-defense, you also live in the parts of America where the odds are they’ll give you a medal instead of indicting you. If indicted, the odds are nearly zero that any jury would convict you,

People on the TradRight see that, and they’re moving.

So, 6 is the floor. Is it also the ceiling? My logic says no, and here’s why:

Most Civil War violence is homicide.

A large portion is because the state allows or encourages it to happen. It’s not tanks, it’s not fighter jets, it’s people killing people – US Civil War 1.0 was an anomaly, mostly. Out in Missouri, though, there were many blood feuds that only glancingly involved politics. Ditto the Balkans, where neighbors just started killing neighbors due to ethnicity or due to them being middle class. Ditto the Indonesian civil war, where it was mainly just homicides based on opportunity, not based on political reasons.

Dali’s brother was a really good boxer. His name was Muhamma.

Regardless, there is currently an increasing amount of violence that is well tolerated, as long as it is perpetrated on people who probably vote on the Right. The January 6 protesters were charged in ways that strain any sort of claim of fair justice. The actually violent and felonious Black Lives Matter™ protests and Antifa® protests had nary an arrest, and of those arrested, the punishments for things like assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and actual murder were not handed down. Most protesters (of the GloboLeft variety) were just ignored.

They got the message. Even now, violence is 100% tolerated by the GloboLeftElite Soros District Attorneys and their “catch and release” program for violent felons. In 2011, Syria released all of the violent prisoners to act as a counterbalance to peaceful protestors. This is a known strategy. Civil War 2.0 won’t look like Civil War 1.0, and it will be a far, far dirtier thing, and we may never see a single uniformed conflict.

Where do football players get fresh uniforms from? New Jersey.

In my mind, that brings us to an 8. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

I see Aesop’s point, and, though we may differ, I’ve got to make my call, and I’m sticking with an 8. If we see any meaningful attempt to back down the violence in GloboLeftist areas, I’ll rachet it down accordingly.

Violence and Censorship Update

Let’s start with Elon Musk. A judge in some place called Australia seemed to think that Australia controls the media in the United States, and, heck, maybe interstellar space for all I know. She ordered Elon Musk’s company, X™ to stop showing a video of an adherent of the Religion of Peace stabbing a Christian priest during a sermon. Elon (predictably) told her to shove it.

Microsoft® has likewise decided that games should only have women in them that look like sacks of potatoes. The good news is that Amy Schumer isn’t doing much, so she should be okay to step in as a model.

And, if you thought that you could own and operate a business and not hire criminals? I guess you didn’t figure on 2024. A convenience store is being sued by the Justice Department for not hiring criminals. I didn’t know Hunter needed a job that badly.

And, if you thought that having a bridge named after the guy who wrote the National Anthem was not unreasonable, well, they’re trying to disappear him from history.

Finally, the FISA program was not only extended, but expanded. Now the NSA has the power to look into, essentially, the whole Internet. Go figure.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. And it’s gonna get worse.

Updated Civil War II Index

Violence:

Violence is down, expected with cooler weather. Probably quiet until June or July.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly up. I expect this fall to be a bit more crazy.

Economic:

Economic numbers are down a bit. But prices are up.

Illegal Aliens:

Second Highest April. Ever. But the normies are waking up.

Talking About The Inevitable

One of the clues that people are going to have a divorce is that they start talking about it. A recent Rasmussen Reports® poll shows that:

41 percent of voters are thinking that there is a new civil war due sometime in the future,
16 percent felt it would occur in the next five years,
37 percent of voters felt civil war is more likely if Biden remains in the White House after the election,
36 percent of Alaskans want to leave the Union,
31 percent of Texans want to leave the Union,
29 percent of Californians want to leave the Union, and
28 percent of New Yorkers want out.

When I started writing the Weather Report in 2019 (this is the 60^th monthly issue!) I stated that I felt that the very first possible time that a civil war would occur would be 2025. I felt the halfway point and most likely time would be 2032, and the latest date would be (I think this is right) 2037. There are reasons for those years, tying to several large trends in economics, world power dynamics, hordes of illegal aliens, and other demographics.

Back in 2020, Scott Adams predicted we wouldn’t have a civil war in the near term. His reason? “We don’t want one.” I think, four years later, we’re getting closer to wanting one. Remember: it doesn’t require everyone to agree to a civil war, what it requires is a committed minority. John Adams, who knows more about this than I do, noted that he thought about a third of Americans were in favor of the Revolution, which was just a civil war that we happened to win. Adams felt another third didn’t want war, and another third were loyal to the king.

The numbers above are showing that we’re at danger levels of support for a major change, and I think next year takes us into the period where civil war becomes possible – with the peak probability still sitting at 2032. Here in 2024, though, it’s a nice, cool night and tomorrow’s weather will be perfect. A storm may be coming, but tonight I’ll prepare. And enjoy.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/TTEcclesBrown/status/1779532832056180756

https://twitter.com/TTEcclesBrown/status/1776630901277126892

https://twitter.com/i/status/1779690452398330155

https://twitter.com/i/status/1782456547525685499

https://twitter.com/GangHits/status/1784616636735004918

https://twitter.com/i/status/1783536135085388174

Good Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13371699/UNC-protest-Israel-frat-American-flag-protected.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0gKDgYHvRA

https://nypost.com/2024/05/02/us-news/bill-ackman-donates-10k-to-unc-frat-bros-who-shielded-us-flag-from-anti-israel-mob/

https://www.newsweek.com/unc-frat-brothers-flag-donations-update-1897055

One Gal

https://twitter.com/Red_Pill_US/status/1779348493490131392

Body Count

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLGuBnfbMAA2xEN?format=jpg&name=large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLGFWhwXsAAinOO?format=jpg&name=900×900

https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-21st-century-red-state-murder-crisis

https://www.shewon.org/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/04/09/transgender-surgery-in-military-paid-by-taxpayers

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-births-alarmingly-slide-lowest-level-1979-failing-exceed-replacement-rate-gfc

https://www.lifenews.com/2024/04/25/americas-fertility-rate-hits-record-low-as-planned-parenthood-abortions-hit-record-high/

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1775928212805103945

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ar-BB1llO5L

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/Rogue_Outlaw17/status/1775851708436078957

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/04/24/poorly-managed-toddlers-are-running-elections

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1778840719387488583

https://twitter.com/amrenewcitizen/status/1774806979367641474

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-dealt-blow-new-testimony-1886322

https://twitter.com/CannConActual/status/1773089354635698446

https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1774799076707422307

https://twitter.com/TrueTheVote/status/1775625397431877718

Civil War

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/alex-garland-civil-war-explosive-083228878.html

https://americanmind.org/salvo/extremism-on-the-ballot/

https://alt-market.us/the-political-left-has-proven-beyond-a-doubt-that-they-are-authoritarians/

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/09/america-politics-divided-polarization-data

https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-democracy-rights-freedoms-election-b1047da72551e13554a3959487e5181

https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/18/second-civil-war-becoming-increasingly-plausible-insurrections-likely-20671654/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/1-in-5-americans-think-violence-may-solve-u-s-divisions-poll-finds

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/41–of-americans-say-second-civil-war-likely-in-next-5-years

https://www.nysun.com/article/100-million-americans-say-civil-war-could-rip-country-apart-within-5-years-survey-suggests

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/04/06/america-is-hurling-toward-a-full-blown-hot-civil-war/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/26/what-a-real-civil-war-would-do-to-the-us-economy/

Forbidden Economics: The GloboLeft Versus The Good

“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

My neighbor has had a bad financial crisis. He has to drive a car without a top and his car doesn’t have a roof.

Monday’s post was about Forbidden Science. These are inconvenient truths that simply don’t fit into the ideology of a GloboLeftist. In the tradition of the very best GloboLeftists, whenever this inconvenient set of facts conflicts with their ideology, they do what rational people have always done – they consult how the facts disagree with their ideology and change their positions. Nah, just kidding. Instead GloboLeftists ignore them and stick their fingers in their ears and yell loudly “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”

Wednesday is the day I typically post about economics and related issues, so what better topic than Forbidden Economics? Just like on Monday, I’ll start with things that the GloboLeft actually believes and then make fun of them, primarily because they deserve it.

Me? I say bring back the positive power of bullying.

I was a bully to this orphan kid in school. I mean, it wasn’t like he was going to tell his parents.

GloboLeftists believe that Modern Monetary Theory isn’t just made-up justification for “I spend what I want”.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has quietly taken the place of any sort of rational thinking. When I first wrote about it, it seemed so fringe and tongue in cheek that I was shocked anyone smarter than AOC would fall for it. I know, I know, that leaves about 85% of the country, but the GloboLeft has willingly and enthusiastically embraced MMT.

What is MMT? It’s the theory that, since money is entirely made up in the first place, that it doesn’t matter how much you print. Yes, you read that correctly. The idea is that money is like points in a football game. When a team scores a touchdown, there aren’t some vat of points that are decreased to add points to that team’s score. Instead, they’re made up. The limit to the number of points that can be scored in a game is based entirely on the productivity of the teams.

If we reset to zero every day and all played NFL® football, well, that might make sense. In MMT, the idea is that extra cash is just soaked up via taxation rather than the game ending.

What happens when the score keeps going up from game to game.

But the GloboLeftElite really, really don’t like to be taxed. As much as Warren Buffett complains that he’s not taxed enough, the one thing Warren never, ever does is send more than he owes in taxes in voluntarily. In fact, he has fleets of lawyers working every angle possible so that he pays the least amount in taxes possible. (Note: If Donald Trump were to try this he would be tried for felony tax evasion.)

There are two types of people in this world: Those who can find an answer through simple deduction.

This is not a new thing. It really started under W., and has continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden.

But what could go wrong?

GloboLeftists believe that women are cheated in the workplace, earning less than men.

I’ll start by reminding everyone that GloboLeftists don’t even know what a woman is, to the point that a sitting Supreme Court Justice was unable to define what a woman was during her Senate confirmation hearings, and sits on the Supreme Court.

However . . .

The reality is that women actually make more than men when their wages are controlled for things like, oh, career choice, amount of overtime put in, time taken off to have children, et cetera. The idea is so simplistic in that it takes everyone, puts them in a bag, and says that the average man makes X, and the average woman makes 0.8X.

Yes. That’s true. But when I went to a college graduation several years ago and they called out the engineers, 90% plus were men in some fields, and in no engineering field were women even close to a majority.

And they both give sound advice.

I wonder if that could be partially a reason for a pay difference?

Nah. Sexism is easier, and if people will swallow MMT, they’ll swallow anything. I mean, we already knew that about Kamala.

GloboLeftists believe that increasing a labor supply won’t decrease wages.

Immigration is an amazing source of brain rot for GloboLeftists. They think that bringing in hordes of illegal aliens won’t drop the price of unskilled labor. Now, not for one minute do I believe that’s the case, and neither do the people (the GloboLeftElite) that are feeding those thoughts to the rank and file.

But lower labor costs mean higher profits, so why not bring in not only illegal aliens, but tons of people on H1-B visas to take the jobs that Americans had – the number of stories of people showing up to work only to be forced to train their replacements to “earn” their severance package is so common as to be boring. It doesn’t even make the news anymore.

Yet the flip side is that they also don’t think that raising the minimum wage will have any impact on prices?

As found.

The last belief that I’m going to touch on that the GloboLeft has is this: history has nothing to teach us about the danger of an irreligious society basted in feminism and socialism.

Hey, wait, do you hear someone yelling “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”?

I’m sure it’s not just me. You can hear that, right?

Oh, and as a follow up to Monday’s post, here is NASA’s Administrator. He believes the far side of the Moon is always dark. Really.

Zoomers And Pools Of Cash

“The pools of blood that have collected, you’ve got to soak that up. Now, Jimmie, we need to raid your linen closet.” – Pulp Fiction

How do you drown a programmer? Put up a sign that says, “no swimming”.

If I were to come up with a metaphor for today’s situation, well, it might be this . . .

While I was half asleep this morning I visualized in that gauzy dreamy sort of way, dark pools, sitting quietly behind a large earthen structure. At first, the surfaces of the pools were smooth and reflective like glass as they slowly filled.

It was calm, and serene. For now. But the level was coming up.

What was the defining moment of my generation in our youth? Probably the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still remember the news stories piling up day by day as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations slowly turned away from communism and then someone said the Berlin Wall didn’t match the Iron Curtains, so, it had to go. What a time to be alive! Heck, women were still winning women’s swim meets!

If I were born a bit earlier, it would probably would have been the Iranian Hostage Crisis, or Carter’s Stagflation, both of which led to Reagan’s election and eventual conversion to MechaReagan®, who fought Godzilla® and Mothra™. But that’s another story.

Anyway, think about those defining moments, the defining events of Gen Z are still out there, and I wonder what that would be. In the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a story that, at the time, was filled with hope. Here was the collapse of a political system bent on the forceful subjugation of humanity. What’s not to celebrate?

What was the favorite song of East Germans before the Berlin Wall came down? “Under Prussia”

In the end, though, what was lost in that moment was restraint. Just like Gingrich restrained the worst (political!) impulses of Bill Clinton (“What, I can’t spend what I want to spend because of the way the bond market might react?”), the Soviet Union constrained the worst impulses of the people in power in Washington. That restraint really ended with Clinton who had to fight to save his political career after lying under oath about dallying with the help.

But after Clinton, after 9-11?

Bill Clinton will be remembered for the economy. Oh, and that one other thing . . . .

All restraint fell. Oh, sure, we needed to go and find Osama Bin Laden, but did we need to invade Iraq? In hindsight, almost certainly not. Did we need to stay in Afghanistan for 20 years? Again, almost certainly not. And these adventures cost trillions of dollars, all of which we didn’t have. But that’s okay. Cash isn’t for earning. It’s for spending. Like AOC said when asked where the money would come from for one of her socialist programs: “You just pay for it!”

She was, and is, serious about this, since her understanding of cause and effect is limited to her goldfish-like memory.

But those dark pools of my dreams, they were filling. And while they filled, they began to destabilize everyone tied to the United States. In Egypt, for instance, I think they eat nothing but rice, sawdust, and the occasional house pet, which is fairly inexpensive. So, a small change in the price of rice or a decrease in the availability of sawdust causes people, real people, to go hungry.

Does Biden look like he needs more fiber in his diet to you?

As Snickers® told us, “You’re not you when you’re hungry” and hungry people are the ones that overthrow Middle Eastern despots. But that’s okay. You just pay for it.

What does the Left think about all the illegal aliens that are teeming over the border in relentless streams? You just pay for them. And you have to. Even when we’re not stacking them like cordwood in Chicago or displacing vets to house them in New York or trying to teach them to ski in Colorado, there is one horrible fact about illegal aliens:

They cost more than they create. We can’t get a volume discount if we import them by the millions. No, they just cost billions more. The net annual value of an illegal to the economy is, at minimum, -$10,000 per year. NEGATIVE $10,000, and that’s after the work they provide.

I used to worry about the collapse of the United States because of the destruction of our nation’s values and economy by illegals, but that was too scary. Now I just worry about celebrities. (meme as found)

Where does the cash come from? If you’re AOC, “You just pay for them.”

And all that “you just pay for it” is what’s filling those dark pools of my dreams.

If all that cash would just sit, quietly, in those dark pools, there really isn’t a problem. If we pay Raytheon™ for a $4 million dollar Patriot® missile to destroy $20,000 Iranian drones, as long as Raytheon© just leaves that money in their bank account, filling up the pool.

But, oops, you have to pay people to make the missile. If it’s only the Chinese who keep the money in a bank account somewhere and never use it, that’s fine, too, because that’s just another dark pool of money.

When the Fed™ started out bailing out every bank, that’s really what happened. The banks kept the cash in deposit, and salted it away in their dark pools.

I think it’s the dark pools of cash that will ultimately be the defining moment for Gen Z. Well, not the dark pools themselves, but, rather, the mess they make when the levee breaks. We’re seeing the problem starting now, and Gen Z is aware – many of them have lived their teen years seeing nothing but inflation as the pools break loose.

I’m getting tired of Gen Z, always walking around like they can afford to rent the place.

The pools are up high, and have a great deal of potential energy. The destruction the flow will create as the cash spreads down through the economy has been bad, but it will be legendary. When the American Continental was issued it was backed by the same thing the dollar is today: nothing. The phrase “not worth a Continental” was no doubt on the minds of the framers of the Constitution as they wrote that no State shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment in debts.”

But that’s quaint thought, right?

(meme as found)

Weimar Germany followed the AOC “just pay for it” formula, and German bankers eventually (after some, um, events) became the most cautious in Europe about inflation.

So, after my dream of last night, I think we have a big dam problem.

It worked so well last time, right?

Rebuilding America: First It Will Fail

Rebuilding America

“Blown up, sir!” – Stripes

Raw materials for steel have gone way up in price. Producers say it’s a horrible ore deal.

When I was in 6^th grade, I remember driving to Capital City with Pa Wilder while he had a business trip. As part of the trip, we went through Industrial Town. The major feature of Industrial Town was a miles-long hulking rusted out steel plant complete with huge towers, big enough to hold Oprah’s breakfast.

To me, they looked like the discarded remnants of an ancient technological innovation. In fact, when I was reading a novel about explorers that had gone to some far-off world that had been littered with the technology of an incomprehensible civilization, I visualized that old steel plant.

It was rare to have one-on-one time with just Pa and I. He often worked long hours, but on longer trips, sometimes we’d talk about, well, whatever. As I’ve mentioned before Pa was a banker, and I think he was more amused by my early fixation on science than anything. But when it came to the steel plant, Pa Wilder knew a lot, and that day was the first time I ever heard “Bessemer Process”, and we talked about steel and history during the drive. He said that once upon a time, you could bring your ore, make steel, and sell it for a fee. Apparently “He who smelt it, dealt it” didn’t catch on as a business model.

I hate recycling aluminum cans. It’s just soda pressing.

Bad dad jokes aside, when we drove by, that old steel mill wasn’t doing so well. The major reason, oddly, was World War II.

During World War II, the United States and Britain, mostly did everything they could to blow up anyth8ing in Germany that could make a ball bearing or paper clip. At the end of the war, the country was in ru8ins. The same thing happened in Japan – the country was wrecked, and, unlike Germany, the Japanese didn’t have many of resources needed for steel production, things like iron ore or coal.

In both cases, Germany and Japan didn’t build back with the Bessemer Process, they built back with the newest technology. Japan, especially, had to focus on being efficient since Japan has fewer natural resources to work with to make steel than Kamala Harris has for use in a battle of wits.

Once Kamala though she might be pregnant. She asked the doctor, “Is it mine?”

To be clear, it was very hard to rebuild nations shattered by the Last Modern War, but once those countries did finally rebuild, they were the most efficient and highest quality steelmakers in the world.

But this took decades.

The infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt. Then people had to learn how to make the new technology – basic oxygen steelmaking was pioneered by the Swiss and the Austrians. Oh, sure, the Austrians and Swiss are so autistic that asking a girl out is a seventeen-step process that has to be memorized prior to execution, but that’s exactly the autism level needed when you’re going to change an entire industry.

In a rare screwup, the Swiss dude who invented the process wasn’t legally able stop the Japanese from using his process for free, and the Japanese licked it up without having to pay royalties. The Swiss, experts at chocolate, hoarding gold, yodeling, and engineering. At being attorneys? Maybe not so much. 80% of Japanese steel was made using the basic oxygen process by 1970, because it was far cheaper.

Oops.

But Baltimore is gr . . . oh.

Since the United States didn’t bother to innovate, US Steel©, once the biggest steel manufacturer in the world, was sold to Nippon Steel™ for the equivalent of what Elon Musk keeps in his couch cushions back in December, 2023.

What’s the lesson here?

To be clear, in many cases our economy is where Japan’s was after World War II. There are two major differences:

It’s not as obvious because the nigh-infinite ability of the United States to print cash and trade it for things like steel is still in effect, and
We were complicit in the destruction of our own industry via free trade, regulations, and financialization, and didn’t even need to use any bombs.

To rebuild an industry requires time. It also requires a lot of investment of money, but it also requires the best talent in the country. Silicon Valley became the information systems capital of the world because it brought together capital and talent over the period of decades. Taiwan became the semiconductor capital of the world because of the capital and talent it consumed over the course of decades.

Hey, that’s what Xi said.

What did New York do? Soaked up capital to loan and soaked up talent to figure out how to magic more cash into existence – by and large a waste of decades of some of the best and brightest in the world.

This is the game that we should have been playing, but stopped when the United States was the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world. Now, the reason we were the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world was because everyone else was blown up. What did we do with that success?

Rested. Relaxed. And began to believe that the economic success was a right, not a consequence of hard work, talent, and investment.

We have to learn to build things, not financial products. But we also have things to unlearn. Our liability system is horrific, but that’s because liability lawyers fund the Democratic party, so, they buy more bacon-wrapped shrimp than others.

The other thing to unlearn is zero impact. As long as humans live on the planet, we’ll impact it – the idea is to conserve and make wise use of our resources. The GloboLeftElite have taken their mask off when climate ideologs go after the United States, with declining carbon emissions, and ignore China and India with massive and growing carbon emissions, with China producing nearly three times the CO2 of the United States.

How dare you!

But have the GloboLeftElite complain about China or India?

Nah. They wouldn’t listen anyway.

The path forward requires that we fail. Great news! We’ve failed! We’re in a worse place than the Japanese after World War II due to our cultural inertia and the newfangled “all the Zoomers have a mental disorder” society.

The second part of the path is letting go of the financialization and making PowerPoints® in New York as the goal of society. If we want to be serious, we have to make stuff, not accounting irregularities.

There’s a reason that China’s buying gold, and that reason is simple:

They’re making steel.

How Transfer Payments Might Doom Us All

“Okay. Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

The Andy Griffith show would have been a lot different if her name had been Aunt Tifa.

I like thinking about the economy and what we have in front of us, and I guess I’m not alone.

Recently I stumbled across a column in Zero Hedge® that originated from Mike Shedlock at his place (link below). Shedlock has been writing about economics for years, and was pretty far out in front of the Great Recession. When Shedlock starts to tease at the threads of the economy, he just might have something interesting to say.

How Much Do Food Stamps, Social Security, and Medicare Support the Economy?

Anyway, the column that caught my eye tied back inflation to the amount of money that the government spends that it doesn’t get anything for, or transfer payments – pulling from one source (taxes or printing) to give to another person or group. The examples of this are everywhere. Shedlock mentions:

food stamps,
Taylor Swift,
Social Security,
Late night television hosts,
Medicare,
PEZ® theft,
Medicaid,
Kamala’s vodka supply,
child tax credits, and
other “welfare” payments.

Okay, I’ll admit I might have added a few things to Mike’s list.

It’s been three months since I joined the gym and I’ve had zero progress. Tomorrow I’ll go in person to see what the problem is.

During the Great COVID Crisis, first Trump and then Biden threw money at the economy, and the amount of income that people got from the government in transfer payments DOUBLED as a percentage of income. That’s staggering. This isn’t an absolute number, but as a percentage, which actually makes it worse. Not to mention all the companies that got paid for not doing business, not selling beer, and not making good movies. Disney®, I’m looking at you.

Here’s an odd sentence: Missing Person Remains Found.

Part of the trouble with the economy has been masked, for years. That trouble is Social Security. In 2018, Social Security started paying out more in benefits than it received in taxes. This was supposed to be just fine because all of the payments from past years that were put into a “trust fund”.

Well, Congress didn’t just pile all of those tax dollars it was taking in under the mattress or in a Mason® jar buried back near the old outhouse behind the Fed®. Nope. Congress did what politicians always do with every available dollar: they spent it to buy nice things (things that lobbyists wanted) immediately when they got the cash in their appetizer-covered little fingers. Oh, and they borrowed more, too. The only thing the “trust fund” did was mask the true size of the deficit.

What if your trust fund has a negative balance?

It’s like that with most things the government does, but there is a limit to how much of the economy you can just make up before reality eventually catches up with you. Ask Enron™.

Regardless, things are going to get much, much worse. All of those illegals that are streaming across the border as fast as we can pay (yes, the United States is actually paying cash to them on the road) them to get here? Once they get here, they’re being paid thousands of dollars a year plus free chow and lodging and medical care. All of that cash is just printed at this point, and spent on something that adds no net productivity to the economy.

Well, he is called Bad Luck Brian for a reason. He also invested his life savings with Bernie Madoff.

And, where, exactly are these millions of people going to live? They’re staying 30 to a house, and buying up properties that used to go to Bobby and Becky when they got married, but now can’t afford them due to the massive competition and rising interest rates.

The Boomers? They’re retiring in droves right now, and Social Security and Medicare spending will only increase as they retire. This will, of course, come from spending rather than the non-existent trust fund.

None of the above counts how much more we’ll send to Ukraine or Taiwan or Israel or Haiti.

All of these transfer payments *plus* the increased interest on the debt that we took out to buy the things the lobbyists wanted in 1994 will result in stopping Congress from spending.

Ha! See! I made it through that with a straight face. Man, I should have used that line on April Fools’ Day. Of course Congress isn’t going to stop spending. They’re not even going to slow down. There are still appetizers to be eaten, and lobbyists to be massaged.

One lobbyist even lobbied to save the penny. He called himself a change agent.

And again, Congress got away with this quite well when the United States was the Sole Global Superpower™. Now? China is pushing us economically, and from a military standpoint, it’s looking pretty iffy: no one wants to sign up to fight Russia for Ukraine, or China for Taiwan. Additionally, unless the war(s) go nuclear, I question how prepared we are to fight a near-peer foe in 2024.

Like I said, I like thinking about the future of the economy. I always have enjoyed horror movies.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: It’s All Planned

“Did everything go as planned?” – Pulp Fiction

I had some chips at midnight on Saturday. It was a snackrifice.

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

Volume V, Issue 10

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

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

I’m keeping the clock at two minutes to midnight, probably will roll back next month.

In this issue: Front Matter – All Of This Is Planned – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Border In Five Memes – 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 810 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

All Of This Is Planned

When I look at the road we’re on to Civil War 2.0, it has not gone unnoticed that the enemy creating this isn’t outside the United States. As much as the GloboLeft likes to call out Russia, others see things perhaps a little more clearly.

Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador. What has he done for them? He’s broken the back of organized crime, by this one crazy tactic: arresting criminals and putting them in jail and getting gender ideology “contrary to nature, contrary to God” out of El Salvador’s schools. He has a 90% approval rating from El Salvadorans, so of course the GloboLeft hates him.

What is the response of the GloboLeft? Isn’t it obvious? First is the rotting the minds of youth. The map above should be clear enough – it’s a symptom of a plan coming together.

Although this is from Canada, it’s very, very clear that the agenda is simple: they want the kids. It has long been the GloboLeft’s desire to use propaganda to get children at their most vulnerable and split them from their parents.

Things like this idea are created to humiliate people. None of that can make a “more green” planet since the energy used in the process more than offsets any “benefits”. No, this is humiliation and dehumanization.

Canada, again, has show the goal. They want to stop making any new roads outside of cities. Live in a rural area? No roads for you. And, last I checked, Canada has a lot more rural availability than most nations outside of Russia.

Now they’re even giving TED® talks about how literally any sort of degeneracy is a sacrament.

And the lawfare is continual. The New York Soros GloboLeft Attorney General, Letitia James, is on a a tear. Donald Trump is just the most prominent of her use of the law to destroy people. Another target besides the new one listed above? VDARE. VDARE is a fairly prominent anti-immigration website that Ms. James has hit with amazingly broad subpoenas and is costing them tens of thousands of dollars – even though they aren’t in New York. You can read more about that here (LINK).

She’s also gone against the NRA, suing them. The important question: why would anyone want to do business in New York?

So, Nayib Bukele is right. It’s all being taken apart from the inside.

Violence and Censorship Update

Several readers have reported to me (via email) that they were unsubscribed or that their subscriptions are filtered out as spam. FYI. Might it be random? Sure. It might.

I’ll (mostly) let the memes speak for themselves. Foreign stories are included as they often foreshadow attempts in the United States.

I guess this one involves both censorship and violence?

This one is especially fun: Canada has a bill that punishes hate crimes, which can be reported anonymously, and that do not require evidence with huge fines and up to life imprisonment.

Crabs reading? Forbidden knowledge.

People reading? That’s racist!

Looks like the plan is working.

I thought they loved science?

If only they could be sent home to Make Eritrea Great Again.

Yeah, that’s the history of the top Google® executive in charge of A.I.

Looks like the New York Times censors . . . food.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Why? The GloboLeft are economic geniuses, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

Violence:

Violence is flat. Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down.

Economic:

Economic numbers did a slight dive. I wonder if this is the new American Dream?

Illegal Aliens:

Highest January. Ever.

Also, other people are noticing:

The Border, In Five Memes

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762833481682264080

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762297111381455043

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762568451581681721

https://twitter.com/i/status/1762225168645059071

https://twitter.com/i/status/1610431809334149120

https://twitter.com/i/status/1763481437372567971

https://twitter.com/i/status/1761129463218139238

https://twitter.com/i/status/17636130393229273

https://twitter.com/i/status/1760862306005590149

Good Guys

https://youtube.com/shorts/tQGuha2gpQw?si=kjoLNVF2y0qd7wdE

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1759109053630800211

https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-worker-fired-shoplifters-retail-theft-fight-problems-2024-2

https://www.wtoc.com/2023/07/24/woman-gets-job-back-lowes-after-being-attacked-while-trying-stop-shoplifting/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article285835356.html

One Guy

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2024/02/28/louisiana-expands-gun-rights-for-self-defense-against-criminals-with-concealed-carry-bill/72765215007/

https://www.wowt.com/2024/02/09/nebraska-legislators-consider-bill-alter-self-defense-laws/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2894180/arizonas-commonsense-self-defense-bill/

https://www.oxygen.com/kill-or-be-killed/crime-news/how-to-watch-kill-or-be-killed-an-oxygen-true-crime-series

Body Count

https://twitter.com/MakisMD/status/1754830517986566210

https://thehighwire.com/editorial/why-are-young-adults-having-more-heart-attacks-the-level-of-denial-is-stunning/

https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boys-who-were-killed-by-police/item/5

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2024-02-13_11-38-28.png

https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PRRI-Jan-2024-Gen-Z-Draft.pdf

https://twitter.com/noble_x_x_/status/1758149565251784710

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-81749d7c-d0a0-48d0-bb11-eaab6f1e6556

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1757461240421449806

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759305508584882680

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/nevada-identifies-voter-history-errors-on-website-fixes-underway-3003358/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/11/data-specialist-presses-georgia-look-voters-cast-ballots-wrong-jurisdictions/

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/exclusive-see-the-grave-markers-of-long-dead-residents-listed-on-michigans-voter-rolls/

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/elon-musk-is-right-and-the-ny-times-is-wrong-about-illegal-voting-by-non-citizens

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2023-review

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-24-2020-Election-Analysis-vWeb_Final.pdf

Civil War

https://uproxx.com/movies/civil-war-alex-garland-details-february-2024-update/

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/cpac-donald-trump-voters-warn-355149

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-is-spoiling-for-a-civil-war/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kristi-noem-war-texas-border-standoff-1234960568/

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-disinformation-campaign-civil-war-texas-border/

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/comes-thermidor/

Kardashians And The Cult Of Growth

“A future of economic growth, freedom, and happiness.” – Robocop

I had a hen who wanted to study economics. She was something of a mathemachicken.

“The economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023.”

And my response: so what?

There is a Cult of Growth in the world. In the United States, at least, that growth was literally in the DNA of the young country – there was lots of space and it was only filled with some pesky Indians who didn’t have a lot of resistance to smallpox or lead, some buffalo, no zoning, and lots of empty land to build Blockbuster Video® stores.

So, off my ancestors went. The idea was simple – fill the country from sea to sea with farms and businesses, eventually mines and mills and railroads and factories and highways. No one really planned it, and there weren’t economists reporting on unemployment figures to Rutherford B. Hayes.

What does the “B” stand for? Babebandit.

The growth that the United States experienced was amazing, and it was real. People built those farms and businesses and mines and railroads and factories and highways. That sort of growth allowed the creation of amazing wealth and prosperity because it was enduring and built upon itself. In those decades of growth, the United States experienced not diminishing returns but increasing returns as the steel mills fed the oil boom which fed the creation of the automotive industry and interstates.

Add in a few thousand nuclear weapons, and this growth of actual productivity and wealth production allowed the country to achieve tremendous national prosperity during a time of relative safety. Some would maintain that this prosperity peaked in 1973, but when you look at the relative availability of exceedingly cheap “stuff” – it was probably later than that. Perhaps a good case could be made for the 1980s when Blockbuster Videos™ roamed the land like a great majestic beast, spewing properly rewound videotapes and Raisinets® to all.

Regardless of when that exact date is, it is likely past.

Your momma is so old she rewinds Netflix® videos before logging off.

What was once achievable on a single income now requires (in many cases) two incomes. People of the past always thought that new labor-saving devices would accrue benefits to the worker, and we’d see a two- or three-day work week. Instead, we see people working more hours for less (relative) pay.

Why is that? I mean, the economy grew, right?

Yes, it did. But the way the economy grew, fueled by illegal aliens contributed to lower wages. The argument could be made that that the economic activity, the growth from these added workers helped everyone. Well, no. Illegals are certainly a net negative when everything is accounted for – welfare, roads, schools, medical care, voting GloboLeft, and Kardashian body hair.

I think she’s got so much plastic in her that if she swims it’s technically littering.

And the “growth” that we saw in many cases was the productive bit of the economy being hollowed out and shipped off overseas. Why? Because regulation increased in the United States (it never goes down) and it was easier to start and run a factory in Malasia than it is in Maine. And if iMegaCorp® can ship the factory over and increase corporate profits by 2%, they’ll do it.

Why? They’re owned by the people who make bad growth.

What’s bad growth? Well, the financial sector. It should be set up not as a casino or a place where the businesses make money selling money.

Growth is not always good. And it’s not always desirable. Let’s take an example: if I decided I wanted to gain a pound of weight next week, the healthy way to do it would be to put on a pound of muscle through exercise. But the easy way to put on a pound would be to pound some beers and milk shakes.

I believe her pronouns are HerShey.

The United States could do the same – we could increase the size of the economy by producing more and better cars or computers or flat panel displays, or bulldozers. Or, we could increase the size of the economy by ChaseCitiFargo™ charging extra fees on overdrafts and GoldmanBlackRock© buying a company, loading it up with debt that it can’t pay, and then selling it piecemeal for a 15% profit.

One of these makes a more productive society. The other is the equivalent of two people selling a house back and forth for 10% more each time and talking about all the wealth that they created.

So, not all growth is good, and not all increased profit is increased wealth. One economy can make stuff, the other just makes magical made-up profits. I’ve made the argument for some time that China’s economy is fine. It is. They know how to make stuff, so they are fundamentally more stable than the United States because the growth in China wasn’t in financial shenanigans, it was in productive stuff.

Did you know it’s illegal to water your plants in China? It causes the microphones to rust.

Does China have all sorts of debt? Yes, yes they do. Have they produced a lot of suspect crap in the past, especially for internal consumption? Yes, yes they have, and probably still do. Doesn’t matter.

Their economy isn’t based on “growth” that occurs only on paper, and only due to paper even though people smoke in China to get fresh air.

They don’t worship the Cult of Growth.

Do I want to live there? Nope.

Again, there’s good news – this system can’t last, so it won’t.

The ride, however may be bumpy . . . as we get to rebuild it – on healthy growth this time.