Mechanisms Of Control – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964. I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame. This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first. That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”. Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened. But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race. And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution. And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die. Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter. The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure. And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated: black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better. Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical. Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights: It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race. Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs. Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in. And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy. That proxy? A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job. On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy. This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™. Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins. Here’s what Johnson said at the time: “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins. They even bought a special machine to do that. Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened: $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme. That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968. Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise. Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion. If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars. Or the income tax would be like $6 a year. And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times. It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on. Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots. Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment. As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.

Failing Justice: Vigilante In Indiana . . .

“Five hundred and twenty-seven counts of obstruction of justice.” – The Dark Knight

Behold, the American justice system! (All memes as-found today)

One of the most important requirements to have a functional society is the law. This is backed by historical evidence. One of the earliest known fragments of a legal system is the Code of Ur-Nammu. Ur-Nammu is the name of the king who wrote the laws, and the name of the country he ruled was Ur, which must have been quite a happy coincidence for King Ur-Nammu.

The kingdom of Ur was bordered on the north by Um, on the south by Uh, and on the west by Like. On the east was the kingdom of Carpetia, who, from their capital of Deepshag, specialized in creating high-quality fabric floor coverings. But that is another story.

This, though, was at least 4100 years ago. It illustrates a very simple truth: when people live together, they have to have laws and punishment or there will be chaos. Anyone who ever had a roommate or an ex-spouse can vouch for me on that one.

Thankfully, federal judges have jurisdiction in interstellar space.

The law is a very simple premise: in exchange for the promise of fairness, the individual gives up the natural rights of vengeance and retribution. This is crucial. Without law, if Britney Spears borrows $20 to buy a McChicken™ sandwich at 3am and then doesn’t pay me back, I could drive to her house and kidnap her pet ocelot until she repaid me. I know, I know, that sounds oddly specific, but there are some stories I just won’t get into.

Instead, I can sue Britney Spears in court, and if all of the facts are properly judged, that McChicken®-eating soulless tart will give me back that $20. Or, maybe, I lost that IOU she signed on the back of my travel copy of the Magna Carta and the judge says, “Insufficient evidence” and frog marches us both out of court.

As long as everyone feels the system is fair, life is good. But when people sense that fairness is gone, they’ll take matters into their own hands. This is scary, because it leads to a series of endless reciprocal atrocities. Another word for this is Chicago. Or Mogadishu. Or El Salvador.

Still waiting, Pam.

The people in those locations don’t believe in the law. Those wandering around killing don’t want cops, obviously. But most of the people that they kill don’t want cops, either, since they’re killing as well. The bystanders and clueless non-violent civilians who wander into the games would like law, but it often doesn’t matter.

The punishments are rare, and when they finally hit, aren’t a sufficient deterrent to others going out to break yet more crimes. Part of the reason is that most of these criminals are really stupid. I don’t mean that euphemistically – they’re stupid. Low IQ correlates with high crime. The stupider they are, the more likely they are to kill.

There are many reasons for that, from inability to plan, to the inability to understand a conditional hypothetical (“How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast, Jamal?” “But I did have breakfast.”), to the inability to think that their actions might have consequences.

Amazing how opposition to Trump will make the GloboLeft contort themselves.

No, for the law to work on stupid people, the punishment must be swift, severe, and certain. Our current justice system is none of these. Cases last for years, most crimes are dealt with by being dismissed or through a plea to a far lesser offences, and Soros D.A.s frequently drop the charges on rapists and murderers.

If that isn’t bad enough – juries are tribal. The first big case I saw that confirmed this was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

It’s pretty obvious that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife. This is a non-ideological question. But it is not a non-racial question. Why was he found not guilty? It was because he was black and killed a white woman. The black jurors certainly weren’t going to convict him.

Do we think a black juror will vote to convict Karmello Anthony? Or that a pliable D.A. won’t give him a sweetheart plea deal so he can do two years in the slam and then be out? That leads to a loss of faith in the system.

What happens when we lose faith in the justice system? Well, in Indiana, one great-grandfather lost faith in the system. 65-year-old Mark Vawter was waiting, likely, to shoot and kill one S’Doni Pettis.

Why would a great-grandfather want to do that? Because Mr. Pettis had, while (allegedly) with drugs and while being chased by police, Mr. Pettis had driven a car at great speed into an innocent bystander’s car causing it to burst into flame. Inside? Mr. Vawter’s 3-year-old and 2-month-old great-grandchildren. Mr. Vawter probably had seen that Mr. Pettis was charged with 3 counts of a level 3 felony. In Indiana, that could put him out on the streets again in less than three years.

And Mr. Vawter had probably learned that Mr. Pettis had already been charged with an attempted murder, but the case was plea-bargained down to an aggravated battery. He went to jail, and . . .

Pettis was likely let out early.

Mr. Vawter calculated that the system would probably fail again, and decided to take matters into his own hands. Vawter waited with a pistol, and drew it when the prison van doors opened. What Vawter didn’t know was that Pettis wasn’t on the van – his hearing had been postponed.

Vawter was shot by the police.

Vigilantism is something that has been feared by governments for more than 4,000 years. When individuals feel that they have no choice but to enforce justice themselves, you have the chaos of gang warfare.

But thankfully in the UK, you know the justice system is working, and people will get longer sentences than Mr. Pettis for speaking their minds . . .

The justice system is important, and it’s failing. There will be consequences.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about. One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs. They never existed, and never will exist. This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that? Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
To fake that the company is growing,
Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged: often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”. It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place. My second job? Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school. When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role. I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size? The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much. The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible. Many corporations only take job applications online. And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow. When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty. These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications. In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit. So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.” (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys. In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote: freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job. Men need a purpose. They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen. Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable. They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable. Not the Elon Musks. Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966. Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy. Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth. (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful. There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple: never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal? No, that’s shut down. Maybe they should become journalists? Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced. The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough. But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.” – Fight Club

Did you hear about the emo cake? It cuts itself.

2025 is the 23^rd year of the smart phone, as the CrackBerry® was introduced way back in 2002. To put that into perspective, 23 years before 2002, Jimmy Carter was president and Hillary Clinton had only eaten six children.

But the BlackBerry© didn’t take over immediately – it was mainly a hit with the executive-set at first, since it allowed them to get emails while they were on the slopes at Gstaad or write ANGRY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS while munching on bigfoot filet roasted over Moonrocks at the beach down in Monaco.

The real killer smart phone, though, was the iPhone©. It was introduced just 18 years ago in 2007. The design standards for the iPhone™ quickly became the standard for cell phones, and it knocked BlackBerry® into oblivion within just a few short years because teenaged girls liked it much better because, selfies.

To be fair, it was a pretty big jump in functionality and aesthetics.

Why does Hillary have two “L”s in her first name? One for 2008, one for 2016.

The impact, though, of smart phones, however, is undeniable. They became the single most effective way to distract a person. Ever. You’ve seen the effect enough that it’s cliché – walk into a restaurant and it’s not a group of people talking to each other. Instead, it’s a group of people eating near each other while they take in content produced with the explicit objective of taking over their attention.

And, it has certainly worked if the goal was to distract. People now spend more time doomscrolling on their phones than they spend with their children, spouses, and friends. Combined, and Tinder™ has led to more one-night stands than wine coolers.

I love cooking with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food I’m making.

The reason smartphones grab our attention is somewhat seductive: every time a new notification hits, it sets off a small hit of dopamine in the brain. Just like lab rats, we love our dopamine. And the designers know it. On earlier versions of Twitter©, if I got multiple “likes” on a Tweet®, they would be delayed and doled out so that the action-anticipation-reward loop was optimized to keep me engaged.

And the format of Twitter© (that X™ retained) of scrolling through content, why, something super interesting might be at the bottom of the next swipe of my finger on the screen. So, I’d better just go two more minutes. And then an hour goes by . . .

X© is an attention harvester – they built the perfect trap to stick the rat to the app. And so is Facebook™. And Instagram©. And Snapchat®.

These are designed to meld into our nervous system, and keep our eyes focused on the screen, day after day.

I know this, because it works, and it worked on me.

And when it breaks down, you can have a Ford® Siesta™.

After I realized that, though, I decided on a strategy:

I would jealously guard my attention like CNN™ guarded information on Joe Biden’s ability to remember, you know, the thing. The reasons are many:

Information overload leads to depression and anxiety. I had to ask myself, “Can I do anything about this?” and “Is this something I really care about?”

Here’s where I draw the line:

Consciously, I decided I really don’t care about Ukraine and Russia. And you can’t make me care about them. I also decided the same thing with Israel and Gaza. They’re not here, and if I’m going to spend my attention and emotion, I’d rather do something to make the United States better, first – like doing everything I can to get as many illegals deported as possible and shutting down as many H-1B visas as possible so maybe someone at a call center could be intelligible.

Or I could spend my time spreading the word about the wonders of PEZ™.

Never trust a minotaur – half of everything they say is bull.

I also make a conscious decision (mostly) on what media I’m going to consume and when. I do personal emails three times a week because my inbox isn’t a slot machine for spam. I browse non-news websites three times a week (mostly – there are exceptions).

I have, at least at my age, also decided that multitasking isn’t something I’m going to count on unless the task is really mindless. I try to focus more on just one thing at a time – then I’m really there.

The problem in 2025 isn’t time management, it’s attention management. And I have to have time to:

Think deeply, so I’m not just reacting to stimulus and so I can better see propaganda. Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t trust any media unless I can verify the claim.
Relax, so I’m not so wound up about things. Life shouldn’t be so tense. That’s what caffeine is for.
Create, because I really enjoy it, and because that’s the way that maybe I can change the world. Without distractions, I can crush out a first draft of a post in about an hour. Pounding and sanding the result takes one or two more, and then I gotta add memes.

To do any of those things requires attention.

We are the sum of what we spend our attention and effort on. If I’m distracted, I know that I simply won’t have the focus I need in order to make the best decisions. Who, indeed, would like the American public distracted and not paying attention to what exactly is going on in the world?

Why does The Mrs. think I walked into a barn and ordered a bear?

Smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction.

Yet each time we’re distracted by one, it’s the result of a choice.

So, why let them win? I’ve got to look forward to 2048, 23 years into the future from now. I imagine Barron Trump will be in his third presidential term by then . . .

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight. I’m sure you’re shocked. I’m out travelling. Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing. When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income. The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it. Was it a nice house? Sure. But not that nice. Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad. The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place. Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit. The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff. The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment. What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California. Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego. Rent? $3000 to $4000. A month. But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation: my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™. Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave. Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes. A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™. Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal: to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan: You’ll own nothing, and like it™. Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check. Wait. It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem. Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying? “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand. There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything. In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations. The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly. I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record. “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas. My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month. That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect: lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men. Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it. Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?

It came from . . . 1993

“I’m your huckleberry.” – Tombstone

I have no idea who half the people in the picture are, but, hey, the logo rocks.

1993 continues the descent from the 1980s and Peak Movie, but as comedy fell, action movies continued to produce fun films. What did become more pronounced was the dismal “woke” viewpoint as shown in Falling Down.

As usual, there are no sequels on the list, though in 1993 there were 13 major releases that were sequels. In 2013, there were 33. In 1973, there were just five.

Let’s start with a movie that you can sink your teeth into:

I guess rugby players really will eat anything, but why didn’t they eat all those darn cats before carving up Carlo?

Alive – Not the best movie to take a date to if you’re planning on having dinner afterwards, this straight-forward tale of the rugby team stuck in the Andes when their plane crashes nevertheless nourish the soul with the feeling that people of taste will always be tender friends. When I left the theater, I felt so full . . . of life. In reality, most of the survivors were outrageously successful, since life had already thrown the biggest hurdle that it could at them and they came away satisfied. Note: although they were from pretty rich families, but, hey, they turned out to be salty guys in a savory story.

If this movie were about lawncare, that poster would be perfect.

Hexed – I first saw this on a video I rented from Blockbuster™. It didn’t have a big budget, and it lived up to it. In a sense, this is a throwback to an 80s comedy with a bit of Fatal Attraction thrown in for good measure. Is it a good movie that I would recommend? No. Is it a footnote of a fading genre? Yes. Bonus points: Claudia Christian’s body double is naked.

I told Grok® to have Tom Berenger eating crayons, but Grok™ told me he played a Marine, so that would be redundant.

Sniper – Sniper inspired 10, yes 10 sequels. It is an action film where Tom Berenger and Billy Zane play snipers wandering around South America shooting people. It’s decent action, and, obviously cheap enough to make that all of the sequels were profitable.

Now hear me out, every character except Murray is a groundhog.

Groundhog Day – This movie is about the invasion of giant, sentient, robotic groundhogs that just want to burrow and take over humanity, but are instead frightened when they see their shadow . . . from an atomic explosion. Just kidding. You know this one, the best romcom of all time (with the exception of Sniper Six, The Unsnipable). ‘nuff said.

Okay, Antonio Banderas wasn’t in the movie, but Grok® made the poster like this, and I loved it.

El Mariachi – Shot on a $7,000 budget in 14 days (from money raised by being a lab rat for experimental drug testing) El Mariachi is pretty good, and I was really surprised by it when I saw it on VHS back in the day. A tale of violent Mexican crime, you can now save your theater dollars and just watch the news from Los Angeles.

This would probably have been a more positive movie.

Falling Down – Where to start on this one? First, it’s probably the most prophetic movie on the list. Micheal Douglas plays a disgruntled, unemployed engineer whose wife got bored and divorced him. In short, he’s a person that society has passed by and from his perspective, the world is dystopian, so why not blow it all up? The parallel character in the film is the cop chasing the engineer, played by Robert Duvall. In one scene we see that the cop is retiring, and that he is being (not so subtly) replaced by a Hispanic. And, I think that (less than secretly) the director, Joel Schumacher (a gay GloboLeftist) was enjoying the torture of the Douglas character as he watched the world he grew up in implode. I wrote the preceding before I found this quote from the author: “The main character represents the old power structure of the of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost.” So, yeah, nailed it.

Turns out the Roadrunner™ was trying to knock over the Fed®.

Cliffhanger – Whew, that last one was dark. This one, not so much. While the 1990s may have killed the comedy, the action film was still going strong. The move stars Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, some other people, and a mountain. Guns? Yes. Climbing? Yes. Tension? Well, we know the good guy is going to win, so, not so much. A fun ride.

Is Jurassic Pork the bacon I’ve left in the fridge that scientists brought back to life because they could, but never asked if they should?

Jurassic Park – This was Spielberg at, perhaps, his best. It was the number one hit of the year, and ended up on every lunchbox, video game, comic book, t-shirt, and tattoo in 1993. It was also the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic ruined James Cameron for us. Everything came together in this one – the music, the cast, the story, the special effects, all perfect for the time and place. Sadly, they never made a sequel.

Back, and to the left. And then the PEZ™ comes out!

In the Line of Fire – Again, action movies were pretty strong in 1993, and Clint Eastwood taking on an evil genius assassin played John Malkovich is a pretty good story. Dylan McDermott Mulrooney is also in it. Okay, I know that Dylan McDermott and McDermott Mulrooney are supposed to be two different people, but, really, have you ever seen them together?

I was wondering how to get this joke into the post, and Grok™ did it for me.

So I Married an Axe Murderer – Before Michael Myers was shagging spies, there was this lighthearted movie about a woman whose romantic interests keep being murdered. Hint to everyone: this does not indicate the basis for a stable relationship, since that’s a 10 on the hot/crazy matrix, she’d have to be a 10.

So, it looks like the acid made them all Salvador Dali.

Dazed and Confused – Nostalgia for the relatively free-range days of the 1970s had already hit the people having kids in 1993, or so the producers hoped. This movie was made for late-stage Boomer/early-stage Gen X kids who didn’t go to see it, since it was a box office bomb that has sent become a cult favorite after the careers of so many actors that were in it took off. Watch this right after Falling Down as a palate cleanser. Or, that might make it worse, seeing what we’ve lost.

I tried to make Grok® do Sandra Bullock in a swimsuit, but that was a massive failure.

Demolition Man – I love stupid action movies. This is set in the distant future of 2032 where woke culture has taken over and no one has sex anymore. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes were frozen during this time so that the plot can happen, as two barbarians from the 1990s make fun of woke culture.

No one is doubting that fire.

Mrs. Doubtfire – Is it predictive programming to try to shove strong, independent women plus crossdressing in the same movie? I did not like this movie even though I’ve found several of Robin Williams’ movies to be okay, but the divorce theme soured the whole plot for me. Apparently, I was alone, since this was the second-highest grossing movie of 1993.

Okay, at this point, Grok© would only draw Mrs. Doubtfire. So? I went with it.

Tombstone – Tombstone was on the list even before I had heard Val Kilmer had died, and he really had the best performance in this popular movie. I still rank this as my third-favorite Kilmer role, behind his roles in Top Secret! And Willow. Tombstone, though was a solid Hollywood western.

As we move along, comedy is obviously dying out though one of the greatest is on this list with Groundhog Day, but action movies are doing okay, even if they’re becoming a bit more comic book and less Dirty Harry each year.

But I’ll always remember the wisdom I learned from Alive: the more you eat, the lonelier you get.

What did I miss?

Debt Slavery’s Long Game: From Sumer to Goomer With A Detour to Ginger And Mary Ann

“If you erase the debt record, then we go back to zero.” – Fight Club

If Electric Avenue is closed, where are on Earth are we going to rock down to?

I can’t remember the first time Pa Wilder said “There’s nothing sure but death and taxes” but I couldn’t have been any taller than former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who I believe is about three feet tall. But I’m sure that while Pa was quoting Benjamin Franklin accurately, he did miss one big point: although death was really old, for most people in the history of the planet, there was also debt.

Some of the earliest records we have are records of debt, baked into Sumerian clay indicating that Goomer owed Abadabaduu 12 sheep because he borrowed 10 sheep. And debt was a pretty serious thing back then. If Goomer couldn’t pay, he might even be sentenced to become Abadabaduu’s slave. If Goomer’s kid, Jenzie, had the misfortune of Goomer getting a bad sunburn and dying, well, Jenzie now a lifetime of debt slavery himself to look forward to as he pays off Goomer’s debts.

This stuck in my mind when I was listening to a conversation between a guy who owned a *lot* of apartments and some kids. The kids were in the middle school age bracket and the landlord was trying to teach them about finance. The landlord said, “You know, having apartments is a lot like having a slave. They go out and work for me, and give me money every month.”

Keep in mind that this guy wasn’t what I would normally call shady, but that’s the sort of nightmare fodder that GloboLeftists use as propaganda when they want to burn down capitalism. A much better way to describe the situation is that the apartment owner does such a good job at building and maintaining his properties that people want to engage in a voluntary transaction with him to live there.

Describing them as slaves? Eeek.

What did Yoda™ say when he saw himself in 4k? “HDMI”

And, I generally wouldn’t describe the situation where a willing lender and a willing borrower make a loan. I’ve taken out several loans, and have (so far) paid them all back, as far as I can recall. Now, people who have borrowed from me?

Not so much. I suppose Shakespeare had it right when he said,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
“for loan oft loses both itself and a friend,
“and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry [thrift – JW]”

Though, in truth I remember this best when the Skipper was singing it in the musical version of Hamlet that the castaways put on in Gilligan’s Island.

To be clear, I’ve made the argument as recently as Monday that we shouldn’t goof around with systems that work, and compound interest has been with us longer than bourbon and syphilis, so I give up. Just like herpes, we’re stuck with it. But that also means that we’re stuck with the problems that debt causes.

If debt were just limited to cocoanuts on an island where adolescent me was stuck with Ginger and Mary Ann, well, life would be swell. Really swell, as in now I understand why they never made it off the island: Gilligan was sabotaging any real chance of escape on purpose.

But it isn’t Gilligan’s Island, and debt it has longer term impacts than that glue the professor made out of that pancake syrup.

Why not both?

Let’s talk about Rome.

Debt played a significant part of the Roman Social Wars, a period of ten years where essentially everyone in the Roman sphere was fighting everyone else. This led to Rome taking the unprecedented step of cancelling 75% of all debts. Those that remained were restructured. This was brought about because debt-based economies become unstable.

It happened in mediaeval Europe, when III defaulted on his debt and forgave noble debts so the nobles didn’t slit his favorite throat. Oh, yeah, the peasants still owed.

It happened after the industrial revolution, when the Napoleonic Wars jacked the British government det to 50% of the budget by 1820. That was okay, because the British were in peak expansion mode, conquering the roughly 7,522 “nations” that made up India so that they could set up call centers. Then the British were forced to fight when they found that the Boer were sitting on all that British gold underneath the country the Boers had founded.

Indians in call centers make teams to see who can scam more Americans. I don’t like them or their call leagues.

And when the Imperial expansion stopped? The British Empire crumbled because it could no longer sustain itself and had to change its name to the United Kingdom. And the UK was stuck with a capital city (Londonistan) sized for a world-spanning empire, not for a country that would have to have US help to take back the Falklands and now has a navy that contains more admirals than ships.

Briefly, Great Britain saw prosperity beyond their debt burden when the North Sea oil began flowing, but as it has ebbed, Great Britain has started to ebb as well. The UK has an external debt of 66% of its total wealth.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring? Smallpox.

Sure, that sounds bad, but let’s look at the United States:

In 1980, the United States was the largest net-creditor in the world. Take what we own and subtract what we owe, and we were, by far, in the best position on the planet. Only six years later, the US was a net-debtor. How bad is it in 2024? The United States has more net-debt than . . . every other country that is a net-debtor.

Combined.

How long does that last? I’ll ask Grok® and he’ll opine here:

My Opine: How Long Does U.S. Net-Debt Dominance Last?

The Take

Short Term (5-10 Years): The U.S. can sustain this—barely. Web data (Visual Capitalist, 2024) shows U.S. debt at $36.1T (Dec 2024), 124% of GDP (CEIC, Dec 2024), projected to hit 166% by 2054 (PGPF, 2024). Japan’s at 254.6% (Visual Capitalist, 2024)—they’re fine, because they hold their own debt (90% domestic). U.S. has a buffer as the world’s reserve currency (Visual Capitalist, 2024), but foreign holders (22.9%, $7.9T, USAFacts, 2024) like Japan ($1.09T) and China ($768.6B, Investopedia, 2025) could pull back—X’s “China dump” fears hum. Interest costs are the killer—$1.126T in FY 2024 (GAO, 2024), 14% of federal spending (Wikipedia, 2025). If rates rise (CBO projects 3.1% average, PGPF, 2024), or if China tariffs spike (Visual Capitalist, 2024), the U.S. could face a reckoning by 2035—debt-to-GDP at 118% (PGPF, 2024).
Long Term (20+ Years): Cracks show. Web data (PGPF, 2024) warns of 172% debt-to-GDP by 2054—unsustainable. X’s “dollar crash” doomers aren’t wrong—foreign selloffs (USAFacts, 2024) could spike rates, tank the dollar. If the U.S. loses reserve status (China’s yuan push, X’s “dedollarization” buzz), it’s game over—think Britain post-empire, your “Londonistan” vibe. I’d say 2040-2050—25 years max—unless spending cuts and growth (not GloboLeft “stimulus”) kick in. Carl’s X: “Debt’s a PEZ® trap—U.S. chokes in 25.”

Why It’s Shaky

Interest Costs: $1.126T (FY 2024, GAO)—set to hit $1.7T by 2034 (Visual Capitalist, 2024). That’s 3% of GDP (Wikipedia, 2025), highest since 1996. X’s “interest bomb” memes nail it—unsustainable.
Foreign Pullback: China’s down to 5% of U.S. debt (2018, Wikipedia)—sanctions, tariffs (Visual Capitalist, 2024). If Japan follows (X’s “yen rise” buzz), U.S. rates spike—GloboLeft’s “forgive it” won’t save.
Structural Mess: Spending outpaces revenue (PGPF, 2024)—23.1% GDP outlays vs. 17.5% revenue (2024). X’s “cut the fat” roars—GloboLeft’s “spend more” is Rome’s 86 BC rerun.

See? Grok® likes PEZ™, too.

One thing you can credit him for, he stepped down as CEO when he was in his Prime®.

Unless that debt gets written off, it certainly won’t be paid off, and Jenzie will be turned into a wage slave because who is left saying:

“Okay, Goomer.”

Movies, Foreigners, Blazing Saddles, And The Fight For Your Mind

“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man

Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.

Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm. Gradually sequels became popular. A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original. But they would make money, even if they were crappy.

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed. How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws? None. Zero. I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars. Revenues from China in the 1970s. From what mud hut theater? Paid in what? Chickens?

Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage. and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs. But the audience was different. Avengers: Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51^st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas. Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included. The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.

Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences. Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again. So, movies have changed because the audience has changed. And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.

Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.

The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks. Trial mix.

But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever. One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing. By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry. 12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest. Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists. The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.

This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts. How bad is this movie? During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room. This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors. Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.

When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction. Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:

To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in. But after years of having woke slammed into my face? My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.

The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.

Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise. One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”

My response was rather pointed, “Why not? Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love? Is it the normalization of gays? Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff? Is it the interracial romance? Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”? Was it shooting a hole in a Bible? ”

No. It’s racial slurs. But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes. But I recognize it. Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black. Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?

Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.

What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone? Sans Sheriff.

The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville. This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.

I really hate this movie. It is the worst sort of subversion. The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s. Their lives are in black and white. Literally. That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color. When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color. A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.

The result?

Color.

The message is clear. Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring. Live your life. Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.

Pleasantville is anything but. Obviously, critics loved it. Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.

Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998. It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance. Be proud of that deviance.

Hmm. Proud. Pride month. Got it.

In 2025? It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie. The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37^th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.

Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?

Bad Luck, Diversity, And Bank Robbers

“Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony?” – Kill Bill Volume 2

I got mugged by six dwarves. Not Happy.

There is such a thing as bad luck. A neighbor of mine told me a story of when he was a kid. He and his friends were throwing dirt clods at another group of kids. Now, I remember doing exactly that. Dirt clods were perfect for throwing because when they hit the ground, they exploded in a puff of dirt that I pretended was a grenade.

Pretending I was blowing up my friends. Huh, sounds like a Unabomber childhood when I put it that way, doesn’t it?

Regardless, my neighbor said that one of the other kids got a dirt clod in the eye. Why threw it? I don’t think they ever figured that out, but my friend was the only one sued. Why?

Every cloud has a silver lining. Except a mushroom cloud. That’s probably cobalt or strontium.

His dad owned a bank. As I recall from the story, his dad’s insurance company ended up settling the claim. No one said, “Oh, bad luck.” There certainly doesn’t seem to be a place for bad luck in our world, but sometimes bad luck really does happen. I mean, once upon a time a fortune teller that I would have to suffer with eight years of bad luck.

“And then things get better?”

“No, you stop suffering because you get used to it.”

To me, this seems unfair, but remember Law School Lesson 101: never sue poor people. It’s a variation of the Willie Sutton school of law, when he responded to the question of why he robbed banks with the answer of “Because that’s where the money is.”

I want to own a bakery just so when someone walks in and points at a cake and asks, “Is this gluten free?” I can respond, “No, that’s $16.50.”

That’s one part of the equation, but the second part makes it really rough: massive damage awards. Ask Alex Jones about the nonsensical $1 billion jury award against him. Why not a trillion? It’s not like Alex Jones has a billion dollars, and it’s not like they can strip being “Alex Jones” from Alex Jones, so if they take Infowars™, well, he’ll be in business the next day with a new company. And if they take that, yet a new company.

Poor people are lawsuit-proof because they don’t have money. Alex Jones is lawsuit-proof because (like James O’Keefe) his company is him.

Since most companies can’t hide behind the idea of being Alex Jones, they have to have a defense. The defense?

Standards.

David Hogg has personally sold more AR-15s than Palmetto State Armory®.

If a company does the same thing the same way all of the time, and if every other company does that exact same thing the same way every time, it’s now a Standard. While a company can certainly be sued if they screw up, it’s a pretty good defense to say what Ma Wilder described as a weak excuse, “Well, everybody else is doing it.”

So, if you ask Proctor and Gamble™ if they would jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it, the answer is probably something like: “If that would help us actualize projected profits in the near term and help build organic growth in the sector, that would be a strategy we would engage with.” Or, in human terms, yes, yes they would jump off a cliff if everyone does it. Sadly, this throttles innovative products.

This also leads to a herd mentality in large companies. “Does Disney™ have DEI? Well, looks like we need DEI, too.” These companies realize that there is safety in numbers. Sure, they want to be different, but they all want to be different in the exact same legally non-actionable way.

If being a diversity hire is a good thing, why don’t we publicly name them so they can celebrate it?

This (in part) has led to the extreme pliability of the companies to Woke propaganda, and their quick rebound once Trump was elected. Was Google© all in for Kamala? You bet. Has Google™ swapped their maps to “Gulf of America” at the same time removing Black History Month©, Pride Month™ and scrapped targets to not hire white guys?

Yes, yes they have.

This surprised me. I was expecting these companies to keep being part of the ResISTanCe since they actively opposed Trump during his first term. Either they were neutered during and by the pandemic, or they’re horribly afraid of Trump and Elon. Or they’re worried about the inevitable wrath of Barron when he reaches his full height of 65 feet (1 kiloliter).

In the end, there really is “bad luck”. Now, I don’t think that everything is bad luck, I mean, when that double amputee tried to rob a bank? That wasn’t bad luck.

After all, he wasn’t even armed.

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look! A baby wolf!” – 1941

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

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

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

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

What could the drones be?

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

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

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

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

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

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

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

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

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

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

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

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

So, to summarize:

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

Heck, it could be angels?