From Spears To A.I. To Spears In Two Easy Steps

“How do you hunt a bear in winter?  Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13th Warrior

I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points.  I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)

Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®:  “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”

In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point.  Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.

This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record.  Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.

I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.

I saw a mammoth singing Calypso.  His name was Hairy Elephante.

Other examples include:

  • writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
  • organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
  • agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.

Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier.  These changes fundamentally changed society.

The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing.  Oh, and taxes.  Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.

Ouch.

The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes.  So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.

The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment.  The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.

But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible.  Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap.  Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change.  Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution.  Oh, and child labor.

What’s short, tired, and very profitable?  Child labor.

Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:

In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts.  This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well.  It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.

The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that:  cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea.  This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”

It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market.  Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.

Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim.  Arm’s length, at most.

Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide.  This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price.  Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.

This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted.  This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks.  Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.

It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible.  Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.

I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.

Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts.  We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.

Now?  We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system.  Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:

Intelligence.

Okay, not exactly intelligence.  But in certain applications it can do wonders.  I had a phone call with my credit card company.  The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English.  Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy.  Peggy was able to answer my final question.

How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?  Don’t know, the jury is still out.

A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.

This is just the beginning.  I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.

Heart surgery soon?  No.  Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?

Yes.  And artists?  They’re now competing against free.

I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog.  Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)

And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos.  If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.

But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away?  The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.

This is a calculation, not a blind guess.  In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why.  Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

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

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire?  Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent.  Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade.  A free market?  Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep:  his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR.  That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark.  A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate.  It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years.  Some anon did an analysis.  On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis.  It’s below:

The new pickup line:  “Are you a house loan?  Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid.  And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest.  Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah.  Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug.  It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude.  And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family.  I myself have a mortgage.  I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote:  “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right.  I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again:  money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world.  To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now.  To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market.  It’s gambling.  And in the end, go back to the beginning:  the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start.  They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess.  Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt?  Import poor people!  They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks?  Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset.  I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments.  He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves.  They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers.  What about 2025 is something they don’t like?  Owning all the houses?  Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans.  Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration.  Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter.  They need to go home.  And, you can help.  At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them.  They have quotas, so help them.  Also, don’t be polite to them.  They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs.  This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family).  It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant.  Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state.  Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

Enserfification, It’s No Accident

“Oh my God!  Movable printed type!  We must keep this from the serfs lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!” – Family Guy

Bernie in a bar:  “Free drinks for everyone!  Now, who is buying?” (meme as-found)

“The moral and Constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy to our people.” – Ron Paul

Okay, maybe Ron was a bit of a downer, but if he could see the average millennial staring at blankly at their TikTok® feed while wondering if ramen counts as a vegetable, he’d probably nod and say:

“Told ya so.”

America isn’t only circling the drain, it’s installing a fancy gold-plated one, imported from China, because why not add insult to bankruptcy?

If Hunter Biden was a duck, what would he do?  Crack.

Let’s talk about “Enserfification.”  While I cannot find any reference to this word (I did find “enserfify”) on the Internet, A.I. claims that it’s okay, so that’s good enough for me even though Word™ draws an angry, squiggly line under it.

Enserfification is not quite feudalism, where the lord hands you a pitchfork and a plot of mud and some ugly facial moles in exchange for your firstborn.  Nope, it’s sneakier.  It’s the slow, corporate/bureaucratic boil where the middle class gets squeezed until the middle class plops, slowly mind you, into the ranks of a serf.

Let’s face it, the middle class is shrinking, and those that are in it are not building dreams anymore.  They’re just trying not to default on the electric bill for their bread and circuses Netflix™ indoctrination videos.

What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a seal?  A polar bear.  (meme as-found)

And the statistics?  They are brutal.

Those under 40 with a STEM degree and a car payment, life is hitting them like a tax audit from the IRS’s agent that they hired directly from the DMV because she regularly made Marine Drill Instructors cry.

Let’s start with jobs.

Remember when Mom and Dad said, “Get a degree in engineering or computers, kid, and you’ll be set for life”?  Yeah, that was before the H-1B visa tsunami turned Silicon Valley into a global import mall with accents thicker than a deaf Russian that learned English in South Carolina.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. approved a whopping 399,395 H-1B petitions—basically a free-for-all green light for companies to hire cheaper talent from abroad instead of the fresh-faced Americans they just saddled with $100k in student debt.  Oh, and did anyone mention that these invaders can bring their spouses, and that they can work, too?

That 400,000 number is up 3% from the year before, because nothing says “meritocracy” like importing coders who mainly lie about their degree and qualifications.

The other night The Mrs. asked, “Are you even listening to me?” which I thought was an odd way to start a conversation.

Recent American college grads with physics degrees are sitting at a 7.8% unemployment rate, second-worst among majors.

Computer engineering?  7.5%.

Computer science?  6.1%.

These aren’t lazy trust-funders: these are they (mainly) guys who aced calculus while discovering new an unique ways to self-administer caffeine, only to hit the job market and find a “park’s closed, moose out front should have told you” meme.  Why hire Johnny from Boston when you can snag Judgish from Bangalore for 30% less, besides, he’s the nephew of the HR lady?

I do know that the Canadian Army used to communicate via moose code.

Enserfification Step One:  Lock the gates on opportunity, import infinity Indians, then blame the peasants for not climbing the walls.

Let’s move to step two . . . .

Cars are the great American symbol of freedom in the postwar era:  cruising the open road with the wind in your hair and AC/DC® describing how to Shoot to Thrill.  Me?  Back then when I listened to AC/DC™, the neighbors did, too.

Except now, that freedom costs more than a down payment on a small ranch would have in the 1980s, and I’m not exaggerating:  the average new car price in 2025 is now solidly over $50,000.  I have no idea who is buying cars at these prices, outside of federal governments, state governments, local governments and corporations.

Back in 2000, you could snag a reliable sedan for under $20,000.  Oh, and that number is adjusted for inflation.  But now, most people don’t buy cars with any view towards the price, they look at the monthly payment, so adding leather seats on a . . . pickup . . . becomes the norm.

My chickens really enjoyed the coupe, though.

Today?  Forget it.  Folks are hanging onto their rustbuckets like they’re family heirlooms, because the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads hit a record 12.8 years in 2025.  The newest Wilder family vehicle is nearly a decade old.

Why the delay?  First, value.  Most of the new cars are loaded with crap that I don’t value.  Heated seats?  A.I.-enabled cup holders?  Sound systems that have monthly fees.?

The idea is to turn a “here, you bought a car, it’s yours” to “here, you bought a limited-term license to have title to a car that will require $47.50 monthly so it will report your driving habits and destinations to your insurance company without your consent”.

Me?  I’d much rather own a 2012 Civic™ with rubber floormats and a passenger-side electric mirror that doesn’t work.

This is Enserfification Step Two: Make mobility a luxury, so you’re stuck in your 30-minute commute hell, pondering if that cheap Prius® with just one dead owner from Craigslist© is haunted. (Spoiler alert:  it is.)  Just like the meme says:  in 2030 you’ll own nothing, but you will represent a reliable monthly income stream because to the corporations and governmental entities, that’s what you are.  Which is?

A serf.

I could go on and on, but I’ve been wordy recently, and you get the picture.  I detail housing and our lack of choices there (killed by legal and illegal immigration), federal, state, and local laws that never seem to get rolled back but keep moving in the direction where everything that isn’t mandatory will be prohibited and the other aspects of the subscription economy where a million companies want.

The only two times you can have too much ammo is if you’re on fire or if you’re drowining.

The middle class isn’t shrinking naturally.  It is being pulverized into gig-economy paste on purpose on the twin altars of multiculturalism and corporate profits.  Their solution:  bread and circuses, updated for the smartphone age.

How do they make the middle class go quietly onto that good night?

  • Cell phones that ping into dopamine oblivion,
  • YouTube® rabbit holes that make three hours vanish like your savings, and
  • Netflix queues longer than the line at the DMV.

It’s genius, really.  Why allow the serfs to revolt when they can be made to doomscroll through cat videos and true crime docs that make their problems seem quaint?  Distract the serfs and they’ll never notice the chains.

Enserfification isn’t inevitable.

It’s engineered, and requires our consent to win.  Don’t patronize businesses that use H-1B employees.  Don’t patronize businesses that are owned by foreigners.

And, yes, ramen is a vegetable.

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag.  (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly.  I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK).  One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out.  It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources.  But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling.  Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one.  Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it.  In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul.  Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

 

Level 1:  Survival And Desire

Picture this:  a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce.  Life isn’t about stocks or status.  It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events.  Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut?  That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt.  Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex:  see food, eat. See threat, run or smash.  No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it.  Except in pathology:  think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside.  It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5.  These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

 

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely.  I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else.  Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone.  Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too.  And, when others are happy, I get what I want.  I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders.  Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

 

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person:  the realization that other people have connections to each other.  And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s.  Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought.  If India was a level, it would be Level 3.  It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

 

Level 4:  Conform

This is all about the rules.  Only 40% of humanity gets here every day.  That should scare you.

Yeouch!  That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on.  This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion.  It is here that ethics and the study of rules start.  This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on.  Chaos unchecked? No thanks.  Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent:  selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is.  It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them.  Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

 

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions.  About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes.  Freedom über alles.  Good and bad?  That’s subjective.  Life is about results.  Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties.  It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen.  I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

 

Level 6:  Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains.  Life celebrates diversity!  Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy.  Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love.  Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right?  Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot.  I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom:  moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies?  Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism.  It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

 

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5.  On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is.  The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies.  Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced.  Or crime rate increases.  Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists.  Those Level 4 rules aren’t random!  It is folly of the highest order to ignore them.  Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again:  the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance.  It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these?  Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now.  Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too.  Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3.  And the world already has way too much India.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Mass Deportation Is The Moderate Position

“There may be no criminal charges, but I’ll see these files reach Calcutta with the advice you be deported as political undesirables.” – The Man Who Would Be King

A Russian acrobat was deported, and now our human pyramid doesn’t have Oleg to stand on.

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

Volume VII, Issue 4

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have kept the Clock O’Doom to 8., given the open support of criminality in Blue cities becoming clearer by the day with their own words.  They feel the violence in Chicago and Baltimore and New York and Los Angeles is justified.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.  Right now (as of publishing) we are dropping below Level Rittenhouse and it looks like we avoided Level Rooftop Korean.  For now.

My 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 – Mass Deportation Is Now The Moderate Position – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Imperial Presidency – 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.

Mass Deportation Is Now The Moderate Position

Finally, and after years of absolutely no one voting for the mass immigration, legal and illegal, native peoples appear to have had enough:

  • enough of the violence and rape directed at them,
  • enough of the migrant murderers,
  • enough of having to work to pay taxes for freeloaders,
  • enough of the being told they are racist for complaining about having to conform to customs and behaviors that range from bizarre to barely civilized,
  • enough for having to support the children of other nations and being unable to afford their own,
  • enough propaganda about how they should seek to be childfree and kill themselves,
  • enough telling them that they should be happy to be replaced (even though that’s totally not happening and they should still be happy about if it was),
  • enough government censorship,
  • enough loss of free speech rights,
  • enough of being told that their flag is racist,
  • enough of being told that their economy can’t survive without cheap imported labor, and
  • enough of having to become strangers in a country they were born in.

If this weren’t Western Europe being invaded by endless hordes of third-worlders, I’d imagine the GloboLeft would scream for arming the invaded, look at Ukraine.  They’d be hounding Trump to air-drop in small arms and ammunition and declaring a no-fly zone, giving aid and intelligence to the partisan freedom fighters that were being displaced in their own country.

China, no friend to the West, is amused.  Their projections are that the West will cease to exist in any shape of consequence by the year 2050 due to multiculturalism.  And, they’re right.  Balkanization will lead to a squabbling group of states and atrocities that make the current state of Gaza seem tame by comparison, but no one will be photographing it, because no one will care.

The imported cultures coming into the West are fundamentally incompatible with the West.  A group of 320 Africans killed 70 people on their boated headed towards Spain last month.  Why?  Witchcraft.  Sure, I’m all for burning witches, but what chance is there that these sub-Saharan Africans or their descendants will ever enhance Spain?  How long will the Spanish take this?  The English?  The Scots?  The Irish?  The Danes?  Right now, the Poles are having none of it, and are outperforming the rest of the West.  The GloboLeft Germans are frightened – having killed 6 or 7 candidates for AfD in the last two weeks, right before their election.

Based on what is obviously coming, the obvious conclusion is this:

Mass deportation is now the moderate position.

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence takes the center stage this month, as Germans on the “right” (they’d be center-left in the US) have been dying – specifically seven candidates right before the election.

Staying in Europe – a young Scottish girl defended herself against some (now arrested) alien invaders.  Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story?

In the States, it appears that if you’re beaten up badly, the local politicians will say you had it coming.

And in other cities, the law is only a suggestion.

And, lawmakers themselves are avoiding their elected responsibilities:

Moving to censorship, Great Britain is trying to fight 4Chan.

A 4Chan anon notes that this is all part of the plan:

And games sellers are folding to financial blackmail to censor games from banks threatening to cut them off from banking:

Wikipedia® is a biased source, but some want it to be a controlled source:

Regardless:

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers as Trump’s policies apparently have been stunning at reversing the tide.  We’ll see, as the long term trend is not good.

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 indicators are down slightly this month, again.  Has Trump broken them?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went slightly up this month even though Democrats have never been more unhappy.

Economic:

The economy is up a bit this month, again.  But the H-1B program still exists.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.  Remember, they care nothing for our country, nothing for our history, and only want money and political power.

The Imperial Presidency

I wonder how chapped Obama’s butt is every morning when he gets up and looks to see what Trump has done.  Really, Obama started it, with his, “I don’t have the Constitutional authority to do it, but I’m doing it anyway” “stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda cool” executive orders.

Those were bad.  I’ve never liked executive orders, since they seem to take the Legislative work and turn it over to the Executive.  But the Executive writes all the regulations and Congress never reads them, because, I think, they don’t have enough time because they need to spend the evening eating bacon-wrapped shrimp at the lobbyist parties.  So, the Executive has become more and more powerful.

Trump has decided, I think, that “I’m nearly 80, I’m not going to live all that long, I’m not going to be re-elected, they’re going to hate me anyway, so let’s put the pedal to the metal and see how fast this baby will go.”  It’s probably never a great idea to put someone who is deep into IDGAF territory and who also has a really short time horizon in charge, but here we are.

It’s amusing, at least for now.  Trump has greatly expanded the powers of the Executive, and no one outside of some foreign judges (who claim to be American) has tried to stop him, including the Supreme Court.  I could go back in time and blame everyone from Teddy R. to Wilson on up, but, whatever.

It is what it is – the federal government has grown to massive proportions, and Donald Trump has become the Imperial President.  It won’t be him, mind you, but the next guy, or the guy after that that will cross the Rubicon and become the “president” for a lot longer.  The sort of power that is being unleashed is just the same as before Augustus seized final power in Rome, after Caesar (Trump) set the stage.

Buckle up, because it will be messy getting there.

LINKS

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/i/status/1952491475666878745
https://x.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1954189984594092107
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1956137380995588439
https://x.com/i/status/1951772080359473416

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/TheImmortal007/status/1955711189293654316
https://x.com/i/status/1955639211685765450
https://x.com/billysandytodd/status/1957566944753701169

ONE GUY

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/08/01/another_armed_civilian_saves_the_day_153123.html

BODY COUNT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/trans-people-us-data
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-reached-a-record-14-million-in-2023/
https://cis.org/Report/Overall-ForeignBorn-Population-Down-22-Million-January-July
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/12/ice-receives-100000-applications-patriotic-americans-who-want-help-remove-murderers
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Trumps-Federal-Layoffs_03-web.jpg?itok=r8mse-D1
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/The-American-Workforce-in-2002-v.jpg?itok=HdYKJcPT
https://classsolidarity.org/billionaires/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fewer-young-adults-reaching-adulthood-milestones-census-report/
https://www.newsweek.com/less-religion-less-babies-declining-birth-rate-2110254

VOTE COUNT

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1960686967273738382
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1956450577593848041
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/democratic-party-voter-registration-crisis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.fk8.l6c4.j2Uq_wX_yelU&smid=url-share
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/08/22/mail-in_ballots_need_to_go_153204.html

CIVIL WAR

https://modernity.news/2025/08/16/british-army-colonel-civil-war-is-coming/
https://off-guardian.org/2025/08/10/stirrings-of-rebellion-in-unhappy-britain/
https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/14/who-has-been-busy-destroying-democracy/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-device-data-reveals-exactly-who-showed-white-house-protests
https://forwardobserver.com/color-revolution-a-strategic-assessment-2025-2028/
https://archive.is/VYDs2
https://archive.is/MKs8n
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-essay-hoping-military-would-stand-up-trump-draws-fire-social-media
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/08/18/what-is-the-democrats-endgame-n2661929#google_vignette
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pentagon-plan-would-create-military-reaction-force-for-civil-unrest/ar-AA1KmDsZ
https://www.newsweek.com/campus-guardian-angel-school-shooting-drone-2106792

The Birds, The Bees, The Money, The Movies

“That’s good, because she’s a predator posing as a house pet. Stay away from that one.” – Fight Club

While the other Roombas™ cleaned, my Roomba™ studied the blade.

It’s Friday night, 1985.

Me, back before the hair migrated from scalp to back, picked up my date. She’s spent two hours teasing her hair to defy gravity using enough hairspray to singlehandedly destroy the ozone layer over Peru.

It was before streaming, so we headed to the movie theater because that’s what you did. I chose the movie. I always chose the movie. I actually never asked my date what she would like to see, because I was paying for it. Choices? Well, Back to the Future or, hey, Predator!

Yeah. Predator. Hell yeah.

She’s along for the ride, giggling.

When IKEA® furniture is stolen, it activates a shelf-destruct sequence.

As we’ve already discussed, this was the golden age of cinema, when movies were made for the people who actually showed up: young guys trying to score, uh, points. Yeah, score points with their dates.

Now it’s 2025, and Hollywood is finally remembering who buttered its popcorn.

Feminism, in its quest to “fix” everything (men, the patriarchy, colonialism, pumpkin spice) has turned every movie into a lecture hall. The box office results show that the audience has been sneaking out the back. Why?

Movies over the last decade bore men, annoy women, and leave studio execs wondering why their company returns are flatter than Harvey Weinstein’s prison mattress. I’m sure Harv has the lower bunk, right?

Historically, movie decisions were simple. Young men, wallets stuffed with ambition and minimum-wage cash, picked the films to woo their dates.

Sure, exceptions existed. I once got dragged to Dangerous Liaisons, surrounded by women swooning over 18th century French literature. I guess the consolation prize for me was prime Uma Thurman, but she was stuck in a plot denser than a dutchman’s fruitcake. (I have no idea if the Dutch eat or make fruitcake, but the phrase “dutchman’s fruitcake” should exist. You’re welcome.)

I hear the Dutch are tall because all the short ones died in floods.

My point is, men drove the box office because they were the ones buying the tickets. And what do men want?

Let’s not kid ourselves: great quests, attractive women, preferably ones who don’t lecture them on how to be better feminists, and explosions.

What do men want out of their women?

Men want an attractive woman. They also want loyalty, and a woman who’s, well, womanly nurturing, supportive, maybe even a future mom who doesn’t bench press more than they do as I was taught was the norm in Eastern Europe.

In Soviet Russia, you not wait for tooth fairy, tooth fairy wait for you.

But Hollywood’s 2015 memo?

Men’s preferences are problematic. Instead, they gave us girlbosses who could arm-wrestle Thor and win, despite never having arm-wrestled. These characters aren’t meant to only break the glass ceiling; they shatter the laws of storytelling itself.

Women, on the other hand, have their own cinematic cravings, and they’re not what the feminist scriptwriters think. Women don’t want to see perfect, flawless heroines who never break a nail. They want the fantasy of a powerful, ruthless man, think Ted Bundy with cash, who could crush them but don’t, and who’s inexplicably obsessed with them despite their quirks or, let’s be honest, their past.

It’s why Pretty Woman still gets women, um, misty. We’ll go with misty. A billionaire Richard Gere, falling for a hooker, is peak fairy tale. It’s why The Handmaid’s Tale keeps spawning sequels despite all the women claiming it’s a dystopia. Women say they don’t want to be handmaids, but they keep coming back for more, uh, stimulation.

And do they imagine being held down?

Hollywood’s current slate of heroines are not women: they’re poorly written men with better haircuts played by actresses who average a 6 out of 10. They’re written as invincible, quip-dropping machines who never fail, never learn, and never need no man—unless he’s there to clap like a trained seal.

This isn’t the Hero’s Journey; it’s the Hero’s Freeway, a straight shot to victory with no pitstops for growth. The Hero’s Journey, for those who skipped English class, is the classic epic story arc: a flawed character faces trials, fails, learns, changes, and triumphs. Think The Odessey. Think Beowulf. Yes. It’s that old. Luke Skywalker®, and Rocky Balboa™ are cut from the same cloth, because that story is the story of humanity.

Failure is the crucible that forges heroes.

But Hollywood’s girlbosses? They start perfect, stay perfect, and win without breaking a sweat. It’s like playing a video game on invincible mode—boring as hell.

Men aren’t signing up for lectures disguised as blockbusters. They want women who are worth rooting for—gorgeous, loyal, maybe even a little vulnerable, not someone who can out-punch them, out-smart them, and out-sarcasm them while looking like they just rolled out of a CrossFit® gym.

She solidly would have fit better in episode 3 out of 10.

Hollywood’s response? Write male characters, slap on some lipstick, hire mid-looking women to play them, and call it empowerment. No wonder they’re all-in on the trans movement, it’s just their casting philosophy taken to its logical extreme.

Women aren’t really thrilled either. Women want strong, dangerous men who choose not to break them, men who are powerful but prioritize them (while not too much, because that’s clingy). It’s why war brides lined up with open arms and open legs for conquerors from Genghis Khan to G.I.s in post-WWII Europe.

It’s why women, despite demanding equal pay, still want a man who earns more than they do. Equal pay? Sure. But he better out-earn her. But she also wants equal pay. But also he better out earn her . . . you get it. It’s a merry-go-round of contradictions that only stops when the popcorn runs out.

So why are movies so bad? Because ideology hijacked the projector. Somewhere along the line, a cabal of GloboLeftists, yes, studio execs and “scientists” and journalists and professors, all with pronouns in their bios, decided men and women are exactly the same. This is the root of the trans nonsense, the girlboss epidemic, all of it. They pushed a narrative that ignores biology, psychology, and basic human nature.

Men and women aren’t interchangeable cogs; they’re different, and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And it’s not just in the crotch. But Hollywood, drunk on GloboLeftist dogma, decided to churn out films that lecture instead of entertain because that was the narrative.

The result? Box office receipts that now look like a clearance sale on Betamax™ tapes at Blockbuster Video®. Audiences aren’t stupid: they know when they’re being preached to.

I’m so old I rewind Netflix™ movies before logging out.

Men don’t want to watch a Captain Marvel™ who is flawless in every way, punch harder than any other character because she’s 100% girlboss. Women don’t want to see another flawless heroine who makes them feel inadequate and don’t care about those movies anyway. And studios? They’re bleeding cash faster than Taylor Swift crying over her impending divorce after her impending marriage. But, hey, think of the album sales!

If Hollywood wants to save itself, it’s simple: make movies for humans, not manifestos. Give men the eye candy and heroism and explosions they crave along with a boy who fails, and in that failure, becomes a man. Give women the powerful, complex men they dream of, not cardboard cutouts spouting feminist taglines that result in, um, uncomfortable dryness.

Let characters fail, grow, and earn their wins. Stop pretending men and women are the same, because the only thing that’s equal is how much everyone hates these preachy flops.

Until then, I’ll be at home, rewatching Predator. Because nothing says “date night” like Dutch bleeding, swearing, and chomping a cigar while saving the day and the dame.

Now that?

That’s a movie.

A Serious Post: Courage And Inspiration Against Invaders In Scotland, or, BFYTW

“Freedom!” – Braveheart

Beware – this post will be grim reading.

Sometimes there is a moment so poignant that it creates history.

My candidate for August of 2025 is a young girl from Dundee, Scotland.  The story is simple:  she is 14 and she has had enough and had nothing to lose.  As much of the alleged story as I can patch together follows the video immediately below:

An adult invader from a foreign country started following the girl and her little sister.  An adult male invader.

Yelling started.  The man kept following the girls, despite their repeated warnings to leave them alone.  Finally, the invader pulls out his camera after being warned by the 14-year-old girl that the invader needs to “leave my sister alone, she’s only twelve!”

With a heaping dose of “I don’t give a fuck anymore” she pulled out a knife and a hatchet, ready to defend herself and her sister, all while giving ground, all while trying to avoid the invader’s pursuit.

What does it take to have decided, at 14, that you have to arm yourself merely to walk around the city that your mother and grandmother, back hundreds, if not thousands of years, had walked without fear?

Dundee, without fear.

What caused this?

Simple:  the girl lives in a collapsed country and knows that no one will do anything to help her.

According to @RadioEuropes on X®, in the year 2000 there were a total of 8,593 rape crime reports in England and Wales.  Not good, but when you compare it to the total in 2023 of 68,109, it seems positively charming.

Rape is nearly up 10 times, and that is of the reports of rape that the police will take.

In Rotherham, for example, thousands of young (some as young as 11) English girls were raped.  In some cases, these girls were murdered and in at least one case the girl was alleged to have been cooked and sold to tourists as kebabs.

I’m not making any of that up.

The police?  The police were informed of it, but would take no action to help the girls.  Were they afraid of being called racists?  Yes, certainly.  How afraid were they?  They intimidated some girls into withdrawing charges and arrested others to shut them up.  Oh, and the police raped some of the girls, too.

The media is now filled with horror stories of what is happening in 2025 that would reinforce the Scottish girl’s realization that the only one who will help her, is her.  An example that just happened:

In Holland, a 17 year old girl was stabbed to death by an illegal alien who had raped a woman days earlier and assaulted another five days before that.  But he was released.  The young girl in Holland called the police as she was being chased by this vibrant diversity who was just seeking asylum.

The police showed up after 45 minutes and found that young girl from Holland dead in a ditch.

Why wouldn’t the young Scottish girl arm herself?  Police are, at best, second responders when they finally get around to responding.

Who is coming to save the Scottish girl?

The police?  Why should she trust them after Rotherham?  Why should she think that they’d do anything for her after Holland?  And why would she think that they’d do anything for her because, after protecting herself and protecting her little 12-year-old sister, she was charged with a crime.

She faces two choices:

  • When girls are unarmed, they’re killed or raped or both and the attacker gets a light sentence and gets to have his brothers chain migrate.
  • When girls are armed, they’re charged with a crime.

I guess she chose the second option.

I’d imagine that in Scotland the penalty for carrying weapons like she did is almost as bad as if she’d removed the creepy foreigner from the blotter of life – the one thing the people of Great Britain are afraid of is the remnants of the founding stock.  The invaders?  They’re there to replace the English and the Scots and the Welsh.

Scotland and Holland are learning that if you import the very worst people from the very worst parts of the world, you become the very worst part of the world.  In Sweden, for instance, the police stopped taking down the race of rapists for over a decade because they didn’t want people to become racists.  Because the rapists aren’t Swedes.  And because the rapists aren’t white.

Invaders are in the United States, as well.

Look at the recent Sikh driver who ended the life of a family.  Over three million Indians have signed the petition.  They don’t particularly care that he killed people by breaking the law no less than three times.  They have no interest, really, in assimilating or becoming Americans, living in their segregated cloisters, many, like the driver, making no effort to learn English or engage with actual Americans.

They don’t care about you or I, and want us to die so we can leave our country to them.

But even worse?  Those citizens that encourage this because that don’t think the mass rape of little white girls or the deaths of a family or of the heritage stock of Americans is a bad thing as long as no one calls them racist.

Freedom is just another way of saying “nothing left to lose.”

Good thing that courage is contagious.

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device.  (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

  • a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
  • kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
  • most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
  • adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
  • the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
  • the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah.  South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it.  I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI.  These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols.  Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®:  they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope.  In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it.  And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars.  Nope.  Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal?  Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords.  They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet:  disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps.  Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me.  Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society.  I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better.  But South Korea?  The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse.  What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids.  The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young.  Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles.  Monotonous?  Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex.  Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent.  And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring.  Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®.  It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death.  South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable.  In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman.  In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t?  Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust.  Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

  • Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin.  Voting?  You don’t vote on a living god.  The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech.  So, tie.
  • Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts.  The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies.  Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™.  The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

  • Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises.  Monotonous work?  Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions.  It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food.  I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

  • Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets.  Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme?  This one goes solidly to North Korea.
  • K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader.  I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total?  To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well.  I’ve been trying to make this point again and again:  capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families.  When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists.  In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out.  In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

Making The Invisible Hand Visible: Psyops and the War for Our Minds

So, if you watch The Matrix backwards, it’s just the story of a guy who quits drugs and gets a job.  (most memes as-found today)

Back in 1995, I think, I saw an editorial cartoon.  One was a picture of an American G.I. holding a dead child in 1945.  Next to it was an American G.I. holding a dead child in 1995.  The message was simple:  Americans needed to go and fight in a place that Americans couldn’t find on a map.  Bosnia?  Why was this a picture in a newspaper, trying to get me, John Wilder, to be on board attacking Serbians?

Why Serbians?  I mean, it sounded like an alien race of creatures that spent their lives curb surfing.

Something felt off – I think the only thing of value in the whole country was the last thirty Yugo™ transmissions.

And, I wasn’t wrong.  This was propaganda.  I (and the rest of America) was caught in a psychological operation, or psyops, a calculated effort to hijack my thoughts and bend my will.  About . . . Serbia.

Did you hear about the group in the Balkans who think the world started 6,000 years ago?  Croatianists.

Psyops, per the Army’s FM 3-05.301 (LINK), are “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to . . . audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

What’s that in language that is less like The Terminator® is talking?  It is the art of making me think what someone else wants, without me ever spotting the strings of the puppetmaster.

The story doesn’t start with Edward Bernays, but he’s a pretty convenient on-ramp for discussion.  Bernays gets that distinction because he, more than anyone else, is why the world feels like a scripted reality show.

I guess the bridge had a Twitter account, but it’s now suspended.

Born in 1891, this nephew of Sigmund Freud took his uncle’s insights into the human psyche and turned them into a weapon. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays didn’t mince words: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Translation?

The GloboLeftElites think Americans are too dumb to think for ourselves, so they’ll do it for you. Bernays called this “the engineering of consent,” and he was as good at it as a tick is at finding blood or as Zuck is at mining your soul with InstaFace™.  Take his 1929 “Torches of Freedom” stunt. To sell more cigarettes, Bernays paid fashionable women to light up during New York’s Easter parade, framing smoking as a feminist rebellion against stuffy norms.  The result?

The media ate it up, women started puffing, and tobacco companies doubled their market.  Women?  They traded motherhood and bras for Camels™ and lung cancer.

Bernays didn’t stop at commerce.

I sometimes wear a tinfoil hat.  I’m not nuts, it just makes it more interesting when I stick my head in the microwave.

In the 1950s, he worked with the CIA to paint Guatemala’s elected government as a communist menace (true, they president was buds with Castro later), justifying putting pressure on the president to resign.  He did, and United Fruit Company (a story for another time) got Guatemala back into their orbit.  Bernays proved that by tapping into the primal emotions of fear, desire, and identity, anything could be sold, be it a product, a war, or a worldview.

Bernays’ playbook became the blueprint for government and corporate psyops and I could spend a book describing them, but ain’t nobody got that kind of time this morning.  But one thing is clear:  psyops are cheap and effective.  Thankfully, we abandoned the use of such technology.

Whoops.  Guess not.

Here 2025, and psyops have gone high-tech and are used more than ever.  The core, though, remains Bernays’ emotional manipulation.  Here’s how they work now:

  • Framing and Narrative Control:  Words shape reality.  Calling illegal aliens “undocumented workers” or “asylum seekers” turns lawbreakers into victims.  Meanwhile, people who just want to live in their own country without unending streams of infinity third-worlders are smeared as “racists.”  Whoops.  Guess that word doesn’t have the power it did even two years ago.  This is also why control of every platform is important to them.  Just one kid saying that the emperor is nekkid is enough to bring the whole charade down.

I sometimes can’t tell which psyop is more fun to watch.

  • Emotional Manipulation:  Fear and identity are big guns.  During COVID, “flatten the curve” and “trust the science” were hammered into us day after day, justifying lockdowns and mandates and a not-vaccine while dissenters were silenced and fired.  On race, media amplifies the “man bites dog” rarity of white-on-black violence to stoke division, ignoring the reality that the violence is almost all one-way.  Emotional manipulation was also that editorial making me feel sad for dead kids in a place I’ve never heard of.
  • Social Media Amplification:  Algorithms on all social media are designed to boost outrage because clicks mean cash for Zuck.  Bots and influencers push phrases like Black Lives Matter, making manufactured narratives feel organic.
  • Astroturfing: Fake grassroots movements, like funded protests or viral campaigns, create the illusion of public consensus.  Remember the 2020 “defund the police” push?  It looked spontaneous but was backed by big money, just like the “no kings” protest against Trump.  There really isn’t a group supporting it, it’s a cause in search of supporters.
  • Gaslighting: The ultimate mind-screw, telling us what we see isn’t real.  Worried about illegal immigration’s strain on schools or hospitals?  We’re “xenophobic.”  Notice crime spikes in certain areas or that moslems are pretty rape-y?  We’re “bigoted.”  The goal? Make us doubt our own eyes, believe that no one else thinks the same way that we do.

Psyops in Action:  Race and Immigration

The American public is a prime target, especially on race and illegal immigration, where psyops fuel division and push GloboLeftElite agendas.  After George Floyd’s overdose in 2020, the media ran a relentless campaign framing police as systematically racist.  Every white-cop-on-black-suspect incident became proof of a grand conspiracy, while DOJ reports (like the 2014 Ferguson findings clearing Officer Darren Wilson) were buried.

The result?

I get the creeps because it seems like Sting is still watching every breath I take. (my meme)

Riots, “defund the police” mania, and corporations tripping over themselves to push DEI policies that pit races against each other. It’s Bernays 101: amplify emotion, ignore facts, and, in this case, watch society fracture because it’s always easier to destroy than to build.

Illegal immigration is another psyops goldmine.

Since the 2021 border surge, outlets like CNN and MSNBC have framed illegal immigrants as “migrants” fleeing persecution, spotlighting tear-jerking stories of families while ignoring the stunningly high costs that these people bring to our country.

Crime stats, like DHS reports showing 66% of released detainees reoffend, are swept under the rug.  Ignore that diseases that were eradicated are again showing up in our country.

The narrative?  Open borders are humane, and anyone who disagrees hates brown people.  This isn’t an accident.  This is a deliberate push to erode national sovereignty, weaken cultural cohesion, and make Americans feel guilty for wanting secure borders.

COVID was a masterclass in psyops too, as was the January 6 “Insurrection” and a thousand other public lies meant to manipulate you.  But never forget those who are in full service of the Lie:  The Court Jesters of the GloboLeftElite.

The Capitol was in less danger on January 6 than it was during the revolution scenes from the D.C. production of Lés Misérables.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver, among many others, are the smirking faces of psyops disguised as comedy. Stewart, helming The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015, and Oliver, with Last Week Tonight since 2014, aren’t just entertainers (and it’s arguable that they’re even entertaining).  Nope.

They’re narrative enforcers peddling DEI with a laugh track.  Their weapon?  Humor that makes their audience feel smart and superior while feeding them a script of what the Narrative wants them to believe.

Their techniques are pure Bernays:

  • Selective Framing: Stewart’s 2010 Tea Party takedowns painted fiscal conservatives as racist rubes, ignoring their legitimate gripes about government bloat.  Oliver’s 2020 border segments framed ICE as heartless, glossing over data like the millions of illegals flooding over the border.
  • Ridicule as Persuasion:  Mockery is their hammer. Stewart’s smirks and Oliver’s exasperated sighs make conservative ideas:  border walls, voter ID, traditional values seem absurd to their hand-picked audiences. Laughter shuts down critical thinking:  nobody argues with a punchline.
  • Moral Superiority: Both position themselves as the voice of reason. Oliver’s 2021 “critical race theory” bit dismissed critics as clueless, never engaging their actual concerns about divisive curriculums.  Stewart’s post-Ferguson rants leaned on emotion over evidence, amplifying the “systemic racism” narrative while ignoring the exoneration of the cop that shot the “gentle giant” that had just roughed up a convenience store clerk.

Their impact is insidious.  By blending humor with half-truths, they make progressive dogma feel like common sense.  Their audiences are urban, educated, and often young, who walk away feeling informed, not manipulated.  But it’s psyops all the same:  control the frame, mock the dissenters, and let laughter do the rest.  The GloboLeft couldn’t ask for better foot soldiers.

Seeing this is half the battle.  The other half is reflection.  Psyops work best when they’re fast and jump out at you unexpectedly, like that editorial cartoon did decades ago.  I remember it because it was effective at emotional manipulation, but when I realized that I had no idea what a Serb ate for lunch or if Bosnians wore special hats while they ate PEZ® I came to the conclusion that my opinion on the subject was the product.  I was meant to be mad at one side or the other, but, thankfully, I had no idea which side I was supposed to be mad at.

Does throwing the discus make you want to hurl? (my meme)

What I try to do now is to ask myself:  what are they trying to make me feel?  Why?  Why should I care about Ukraine?  I thought about it and did some research, and, made the conscious decision that I don’t care about Ukraine unless someone is asking me to pay for it or unless it’s the source huge corruption.

It is?  Well let’s stop paying for it and let’s arrest and try those who were paid off.  Simple.

The GloboLeftElite’s goals are at least partially clear:  they want a borderless, divided America, where the people are too scared, guilty, or distracted to fight back.

We don’t have to play along.  Question everything.  Dig for primary sources.

Be careful what you feed your head.

And if something connects in a particularly emotional way, ask yourself:  why should I care?

Then make your own choice, and if you’re lucky, you might get your hands on some cherry Yugo® transmissions.  I mean, if you have goats to trade because I’m not sure they use money.

Wilder’s Fables: Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Oh, yeah, call the police.  Tell them about the Spear of Destiny, the golden goose, the lost Ark.  Enjoy your stay in the psych ward.  I understand Thorazine® comes in vanilla now.” – The Librarian:  Quest for the Spear

I bought one of my friend an elephant statue for his front room.  He said, “Thanks.”  I said, “Don’t mention it.”

In the OG version of The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, (the OG version of which is pushing 2600 years old) a greedy farmer finds a goose that pops out golden eggs, but instead of chilling with the steady bling, yo, he decides to open up the bird for a quick jackpot despite the goose giving him a new golden egg each day.  Shockingly, there is no gold mine inside.  Just goose guts.  And a lesson no one ever seems to pay attention to.

In 1945, the West stood astride the world like an economic Applebee’s® with endless appetizers, its factories humming and the treasury brimming with gold.  Literal gold, and some of it was even ours – I’ll skip my usual grumbling about FDR’s confiscation for another post.  Some of the gold wasn’t, it was gold from our allies that had been given to the United States for safekeeping.  Because, panzers.

But America was a far greater treasure than all the gold in the country.  America at that time was the goose of golden prosperity.  The United States was responsible for half of the world’s GDP, its assembly lines spitting out cars, steel, washers, sinks, and dreams of a better future.  Add in the allies?  It was a clear three-quarters of the world GDP, with only the Soviet Union, still bulging from the war steroids it took for a decade, being close.

And there’s not a big market for a used T-34/76.  “One owner, very nice.  Ignore red stains, please.  Last owner not so careful at Kursk.”

Capitalists have it easy.  They never have to spell bourgeoisie.  (meme as found)

Allies flocked to the Western orbit.  Some were spooked by the hordes of Soviet tanks, others were nudged by CIA coups, and then nudged again until they got it right.  Most, however, was because Uncle Sam’s deal of bikinis and bourbon was sweeter than a Moscow winter and a Siberian GULAG.  It was an empire, but it was an empire of alliance.

Fast forward to today.

The Soviets are long gone, and the goose isn’t dead, but it’s close.

The economy has been slowly strangled by a combination of bad policies and worse ideas, and none are deadlier than mass immigration.

To be clear:  the wealth of the West wealth was no accident – things that produce wealth aren’t illiterate laborers, pools of oil, or uncut trees.  Nope.  The wealth producer, the golden goose was culture, not what Vox Day so eloquently described as “magic dirt.”  By killing the goose, our future is becoming bleaker, and the GloboLeft is cheering the downfall.

Bruce Lee was fast, but his older brother Su-den was even faster.

The golden age peaked post-World War II, and the United States had a 20-year head start on the rest of the world while Europe and Asia rebuilt from rubble.

By 1973, though, the United States began to falter economically.

This wasn’t entirely from external foes, but at least partially from our own hands.

Four factors gutted the goose:

  • dumping the gold standard,
  • feminizing the workforce,
  • enforcing affirmative action, and
  • opening borders to unrelenting immigration.

The first three wounded us; the last is the mortal blow, changing our people, our culture, and our wealth.  Let’s discuss the carnage.

  • Dumping the Gold Standard (1971):  Nixon’s pen stroke cut the dollar loose from gold, turning money into Monopoly® paper.  Oh, wait, there’s a limit to how much Monopoly© cash they can print.  The median home price in 1973 was $32,500.  Today, it’s $412,300.  Without gold’s anchor, our wealth’s a mirage, and the goose’s eggs are plastic.
  • Feminization of the Workforce:  The 1970s pushed women into offices, doubling labor supply but halving family focus.  Birth rates tanked—2.1 kids per woman in 1973, 1.6 in 2023.  Empty cradles mean fewer Actual American workers, and less innovation from the best workforce on Earth.  The GloboLeft calls it “empowerment” when a woman has to leave the home for fifty hours a week in order to afford to pay for another woman to ignore her child by becoming a cubical Karen.  Go figure.

I have a new personal record in the 100-yard dash.  I’m up to 47 yards.  (meme as found)

  • Affirmative Action (Duke Power, 1971, for example):  Forcing quotas over competence, the Supreme Court’s decision diluted merit.  Companies hired to check boxes, not build bridges.  A 2022 study found 30% of firms reported lower productivity post-DEI mandates.  30%.  If diversity is our strength, I’m not sure who “our” refers to when we’re forced to play diversity bingo.
  • Mass Immigration: Here’s the killing blow. Since 1973, legal and illegal immigration flooded the West.  There were 2.5 million border crossings in 2024 alone and those are the numbers that they’ll admit to, which we know are low.  Now add in the Islamification of Europe, where France is nearly a Caliphate and the Germans keep going to work in order to pay for the illegals that flocked to them.  Most don’t integrate.  Imagine the farce:   Mexican banners at California ICE protests where they tried to stop ICE from arresting underage illegals busy in the process of harvesting illegal (federally) marijuana.  Can we be honest and just admit that immigration is not at all about joining the West, it’s about exploiting it.

Imagine, it only took 44 hours for the police to completely clear Martha’s Vineyard of illegals. (meme as found)

Immigration, though, is the dealbreaker because it changes the people.  And everything is downstream of who the people are:  culture, politics, and even PEZ®.

In 1973, a near-minimum-wage earner could buy a median home for $32,500, which was about five times the average annual wage.   Today, that median home costs a stunning $412,300, ten times the average wage.

Why? Illegals depress wages.  Back in 1973, a high school grad could pull a great job in construction.  But even since 1990, construction wages have dropped 15% in real terms.

Illegals also drain services: illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150 billion annually (FAIR 2024), siphoning wealth like a cuckoo bird stealing the nest for its own young rather than for those that built it in the first place.

If it takes a village to raise a child, I guess it takes a vineyard to raise a cat? (meme as found)

The GloboLeft insists “diversity is our strength,” but Pew’s 2019 study shows diverse communities have less trust.  Many immigrants—legal or not—don’t assimilate and have no desire to assimilate.  Ever.  Many (not all!) second and third-generation Mexicans in California wave foreign flags because they’re only here for the gold, not the goose and, in fact, despise the goose.

Meanwhile, families, the nucleus of Western civilization, struggle.  Low wages and high costs mean fewer kids—Europe’s at 1.5 fertility, which means that, pretty soon, the Swedish Bikini Team™ will have mustaches and be wearing burkas.  As we often repeat, the future is there for those who show up.

The West’s prosperity had nothing to do with luck.  It was culture.

Discipline, merit, family, forged in Athens, Rome, and 1930s Detroit. The GloboLeft’s dogma remains one based in hate for the West:  open borders, DEI, and reviling of every bit of the culture that creates wealth.

They’d rather pluck the goose than protect it, and be happy with the result.

But the goose isn’t dead yet.

Bleeding?  Yes.

In a state that’s getting worse every day?  Also yes.

Is it worse than most people think?  Absolutely.  It is a dire point we find ourselves at.

But one thing I’ve seen when I read about Western Civilization is this:  every time it looks bleak, and it looks like the flame of what we stand for is in danger of getting extinguished, people become firm and take that stand.  And we win because we’re fighting, at the core, not for an economic idea but for the Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good.

I think, in part, it’s because it’s not magic dirt.  It’s in us, and this rallying from near defeat is what makes us who we are, what drives us to make civilizations, to make the golden goose, again and again.

You know, that even inspires me.  Almost gives me goose bumps.