Mechanisms Of Control – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

End Times Review, Part 2 – Defining the Dragon

“Right. We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty? These things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.” – Fight Club

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior? They have such high double standards.

A general note: The Civil War 2.0 Weather Report would normally be on Monday. Due to getting this post finished, it will likely be next Wednesday before the CWWR comes out. It will still be wonderful and fresh as daises on a fresh daisy ranch. I will also (likely Tuesday?) post a combined version of this book review stitched together, so we’ll have a very rare Tuesday post. I’m doing that so that if someone wants to read it from start to finish, well, there it is. It will be slightly different for continuity and error correction.

When last we left the impending disaster of the 21^st Century, we were talking about Turchin’s theory that Elite overproduction was a primary driver in causing societies to disintegrate like records of voter irregularities in swing states in 2020.

The pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously. As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college. That’s probably the right number. Now? According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100. This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees. Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs. Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition. This would lower Google’s® profits. This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action. Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about stability a few posts back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society. Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States. People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies. Men want a mate. However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society. Out of wedlock babies? A scandal.
Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs. Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us! (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration. I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general. Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite. The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal. It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now? Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book: “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.” Whoa! That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud: something wicked this way comes. We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming. And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump. It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time. Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . . But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . . Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme, but this meme is as-found.

Again, wow. I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups. Who runs Bartertown? Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government? If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me? You’re soaking in it. A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes.. . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Proof in a graph that voters don’t matter, since Brexit was about immigration.

Yup. They’re not listening. They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport, and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country. That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra: “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™? It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business. Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who. (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists? They make teeth straight and white.

Part three of this review hits on Monday. And it’s a doozy – you won’t want to miss it.

The Funniest (And Most Enlightening Book Review You’ll Read This Year) End Times by Peter Turchin, Part 1

“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist

I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures. I mean, why knot?

I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin. I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.

Her book was bad. Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.

Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough. This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.” To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can. A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).

The XXX Files are a completely different subject.

His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse: Elite Overproduction. In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are. Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power. Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.

Turchin breaks down political power into four types:

Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this. Think AntiFa® or the “new” Army.
Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.

Where do psychics shop? The Seers® catalog.

In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power. The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else. In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast). In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race. Why? Bored, I guess. Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine. But I repeat myself.

The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs. That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin. Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.

Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.

I once saw a baguette in a cage. I guess it was bread in captivity.

Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.

There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.

So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown. What else leads to problems? Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person. Another term for this is Bidenomics. Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.

To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump. Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable. In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily. The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats. Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.

The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb! To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.

I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”

Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes. Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.

These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so. This is in line with Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb:

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023. American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion. It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce. We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world. Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia. While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.

Me? I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.

I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire. The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. No bucks? No Buck Rodgers.

Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today: America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people. As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.

Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes. What are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?

Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration? It’s perfect to keep wages down.
What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals? Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh. There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.

This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.

That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given. While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump. Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion. Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?

Thus ends the first part of this review. More to come. I’m not sure if it will be one or two more posts, but we’ll get through it.

I’m a trained professional. Unlike paint-chip-eating Barbara F. Walter.

(FYI, when I get this finished I’m posting a link to it at Turchin’s blog. He’s got a better book contract, but I’ve got more readers.)

Think Movies Suck Now? You’re Right.

“Freedom costs a buck-oh-five.” – Team America: World Police

I’ve lost to a computer at chess, but never at kickboxing.

I write about movies (and books) sometimes because they are important – very important. They are a part of the myths and backstory that defines a people and a country. Part of this entertainment is (often) a reflection of who we think we are, or who we aspire to be – those are the characters and stories that endure and grow over time.

Comedies certainly have their place, as well. Comedies can be rooted to universal truths that are (more or less) unchanging with time, think greed, yappy women, and farting. Yes. The oldest recorded joke in history that we have yet discovered is a (not very good) fart joke.

Why can’t you make fun of Steve Jobs dying? It’s not PC.

Part of comedy, especially movie comedy, is the unexpected. For that to happen, most of the time someone is the object of the joke – the person who is being made fun of. In comedy in the 1970s, that person was almost always a white male, and almost always was the father and was almost always on the Right.

Why?

Feminism. Comedy of the 1970s and onward was almost always written from the Leftist perspective. Think Archie Bunker, who ended up being popular in spite of them trying to make him a buffoon. Who had the first flush of the terlit on television? Archie. To make fun of white men who were on the Right.

Another tip: don’t use the toilet brush as a microphone when you sing in the shower.

Heck, when I was in junior high and wondering why the only funny things were Leftist (I was on the Right, even then). Then I read P.J. O’Rourke, and understood that it was more than possible, it was far, far funnier than Leftist humor ever imagined it could be.

The Right is funnier because the Right has Truth on its side.

For a long time, movies have been propaganda of one type or another. Top Gun? There’s a reason that the Navy spent millions to help make the movie – they approved the script.

There have been wild cards – people who make fun of everyone and everything – think Airplane. One that really pushed the boundaries was Team America: World Police. South Park used to be funny, back when the stories were about the kids. When the stories started to be about the adults? Less funny.

But Team America: World Police was something else. It made fun of jingoistic movies while at the same time gutting hard-Left, virtue signaling idiot actors like Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Tim Robbins. They were all part of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G.

Yes. They went there. They also made fun of AIDS and homosexuals. And Moslems. And movies like Top Gun. The rumors are that the studio approved it because it was so politically incorrect, and might be cheap because it was made with puppets instead of actors.

I’m glad COVID didn’t come from a Chinese bear. Then we’d have had a pandademic.

Needless to say, making a movie that makes fun of any protected group is no longer allowed. Why are comedies dead? Because it gets really old, really fast, when the only person you can make fun of is the same person who buys all the movie tickets: heterosexual white Christian men who have XY chromosomes. You know, “literally Hitler”.

Comedy is now unfunny, mostly. Please feel free to leave exceptions in the comments. And movies as a whole are borderline unwatchable. Part of the collapse of the box office (and small theaters) was COVID. The other part is that movies suck.

The reason that movies suck is that they’re now just blatant propaganda, start to finish. The latest Marvel® movie, The Marvels™ is a commercial failure, and a box office flop. The studio is blaming the usual suspects: the actor’s strike, superhero fatigue, white supremacy, anti-feminism.

That’s easy.

Harder to face is that their stupid movie sucks.

This was even in his speeches . . . remember him saying, “Let me be clear”?

Why does it suck? It’s about women that don’t need no man. Oh, and couples who have kids don’t want to spend money to have their kids watch Gay Buzz Lightyear™ and ask questions about why Buzz© has two mommies. That’s it.

Who is the primary consumer of superhero movies? White men. Who is the primary consumer of movies for children? People capable of making children, which, for every year in the history of mankind before 2020, were known as “men” and “women”.

Yes, white men like to look at attractive women in skintight costumes, but only the most Leftist is willing to sit and watch a movie that makes fun of them and marginalizes them.

Why does Marvel© (and Disney™) lose money? Because they forgot who buys the tickets.

Men.

I’ve gotten to the point that, unless I’ve heard about a movie, if it was made in the last four years, it’s a hard pass, even if it looks interesting. The movies started going south in, say, 2018. My take is that was a reaction to Trump. It so triggered nearly everyone who writes or acts in a movie that all they wanted to do was attack a relatively Centrist guy who just happened to be President.

What do your get if you take an entire human digestive tract and lay it out on a football field? Arrested.

The reaction led to . . . crap. Every Leftist simply had to get their message out that trans was the new normal and white men were awful and stupid and that NASA stuff on the Moon was a fluke. Oh, they tried to take credit for that, too. Because white guys, you know, can’t do math.

I also noticed it with books. I was a lifelong reader of science fiction – I loved the ideas. Then, around 2010, I started to notice that the books in Barnes and Noble® mainly . . . sucked. I thought it was me. I thought I was old and jaded. But, nope, I read some of the old stuff and it was still great.

Science fiction was destroyed by The Narrative, too. The people who picked the books that made it to the shelves only picked Leftist crap filled with weak people who hated themselves and hated everything True, Beautiful, and Good. In this breakup, it wasn’t me, it was them.

They came for comics and killed them. They came for books and killed them. Lastly, they came for movies, and killed them. Every book and every movie has a message, and most are propaganda of some sort or another, for good or bad. Propaganda to get kids to brush their teeth? That’s good.

But propaganda to turn them into self-loathing transexuals? That’s 100% against the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

This was the 2022 “woman” of the year. Guess guys do everything better.

Watch what goes into your mind. Watch what goes into the minds of your children. Help them to aspire to be noble and virtuous and strong. Help them to understand that jokes about yappy, farting women have been funny for 4,000 years, and will be funny for as long as women fart.

There are still good books out there. There are still good movies, though they are uncommon, since the rot is very, very deep. But freedom?

It still costs a buck-o-five.

Two Types Of Society. There Is Proof We Have A Choice.

“There are two types of people in this world: people who like Neil Diamond, and people who don’t.” – What About Bob

A man threatened me with a coffee cup and stole my wallet. I guess I got mugged.

There are two types of cultures. One of them looks a bit like this:

I was walking in Silver Dollar City® more than a decade ago. It was spring, and Silver Dollar City™ was an amusement park where we could take the kids and visit attractions, and even though they weren’t even teenagers, there were plenty of rides for them.

As we were walking through the park, a young blonde man of 18 or so ran up behind me. It wasn’t a sprint, but the easy strides of a high school football player in top shape – like Michelle Obama, the kid looked like a linebacker. “Sir, sir!”

I turned around. “Yeah, how can I help you?”

“You dropped this.”

What did Mike Tyson say to Vincent van Gogh? “Are you gonna eat that?” (meme as found)

The kid handed me two $20 bills. This is unusual, since normally I have to at least pull up my shirt for anyone to give me $40 so I’ll put the shirt back down.

I stuttered, “Th-thank you!” I felt in my pocket, and, sure enough there were two twenties that must have followed my hand out of the pocket like a structured thought sneaking out of Joe Biden’s head.

The blonde kid smiled, waved, and ran off before I could even offer him a fiver for his honesty. And, thinking about it, he might have been offended if I offered him money. I know I’ve turned cash down before for similar acts of honesty or help.

You don’t do it for the reward. You don’t do it for the glory. You don’t do it for the free shrimp and talcum powder. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. Period.

That’s one type of society.

This type of society functions pretty well. The prices (back then) at Silver Dollar City™ were much lower than at other attractions of a similar nature that I’d been to. The park itself was clean and tidy, and every local business was polite. Did they want our dollars? Sure they did, but they were great about wanting to come by them honestly. They wanted to earn my money.

That’s the way that Modern Mayberry is, mostly.

Sheriff Taylor retired to a farm, so he could see Barn every day.

But San Francisco? Wow.

I haven’t been there in almost a decade, but the pictures I’ve seen recently show a city that’s not in decline. It’s in free-fall. In Modern Mayberry I always lock my car doors because it’s a habit from living in big cities. In San Francisco? People don’t lock their cars.

People don’t lock their car doors (and many leave their trunks open) so prospective thieves can see that there’s nothing to steal without breaking the windows of the cars to rummage around themselves. The people have surrendered to the criminals.

Porch pirates are everywhere in SF, and steal whatever they can. People live on the streets in tents, and often defecate and do drugs in public, because, why not?

San Francisco is also leading the nation in stores disappearing or locking up all of their items. Why? Because mobs loot the stores, in broad daylight. If the thief is caught, they’re immediately released. The only solution for a store that wants to be in business is to sell you the item, go get it from a locked room, and then give it to you after you’ve already paid.

Want to watch Mad Max: Fury Road in the most realistic way possible? Go to San Francisco.

Lefties, I’m sure, have plenty of theories for why San Francisco is like this. White privilege. Institutional racism. Failure to provide mental health services. Lack of reparations. It’s Wednesday. Spin a wheel and pick an excuse. But every one of them is a lie. And I can prove it.

How?

Go look at the streets today where President Xi of China will be when he travels San Francisco. The homeless are gone. Crime is gone. The streets aren’t covered in poop and needles and Disney™ products.

If the city of San Francisco can do that for Xi, it means that they can do it. Even Governor Gavin “Plastic Man” Newsom said the quiet part out loud:

“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s because it’s true.”

A poll was taken by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office which asked whether people who live in California think Illegal immigration is a serious problem. 29% of respondents answered: “Yes, It is a serious problem. 71% of respondents answered: “No es una problema seriosa.”

Guess he wants to impress people that don’t live there.

San Francisco doesn’t have to be like it is.

The only reason that San Francisco is a horrifying dump is because people want it to be a horrifying dump. As I’ve said before, the solution is obvious (We Already Know The Solutions). Criminals need to value the gain they make from a crime less than they fear the penalty for when they get caught. That’s it. The equation is simple.

We know exactly what we need to do to solve almost any problem. And, as is on display right now, the Powers in San Francisco know exactly what solution is required to solve this problem. But they don’t, or at least limit the solution to times when world dignitaries visit – the effort for just common people is too much.

I wouldn’t worry about it. It was a he said/Xi said situation.

Why, exactly do they allow a kleptocracy to fester in California?

They don’t like guns. Guns have been the great equalizer
They will ruthlessly target and destroy common citizens who defend themselves or their property because in their minds only the State should be able to wield force to protect itself.
There is no punishment of the criminals, because they’re a favored voting group.

Probably the biggest reason is this:

They want the people to be scared. They want the people to feel helpless, as if there’s nothing they can do and they don’t care how much money it costs you. They want to use this to get just a little more power.

That’s it. The reason for the kleptonomics on the street is because it serves those who could fix the problem.

Me? I’ll take Silver Dollar City© and Modern Mayberry any day.

Snapshots Of The Economic Collapse

“I’m the source of all your misery? Who closed the store to play hockey? Who closed the store to go to a wake?” – Clerks

I found a store that only sells donuts, bagels, and macaroni. It’s called Hole Foods.

Misery is a state of being includes suffering, but suffering is short. Misery is like suffering crossed with my ex-wife talking about my faults: it goes on and on and never seems to stop.

Misery is OJ.

OJ is up. And you don’t need to be worried about your throat being sliced open followed by a weird car chase, because in this case it’s not Orenthal James, it’s Orange Juice. Since 2020, OJ has gone up in price by 315%, while Orenthal James probably hasn’t killed anyone in that time period. Here’s the graph:

What’s the difference between O.J. Simpson and the movie Caddyshack? One had a Bronco pursuit and the other one had a Chevy Chase.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of OJ, because if there was, I’d expect to see a shortage of vodka, too, and there’s no shortage of vodka, I mean, not that I’d know. But when orange juice is headed through the moon, I expect to look around and see Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd swapping a dollar on a bet.

I suppose that orange juice isn’t required for living, but you have to live somewhere. I was talking to an acquaintance the other day, and he mentioned his kid had graduated from college and had a job in a major metropolitan area – not one that’s known for being expensive, mind you. The apartment building is probably in a sketchier neighborhood because he mentioned it was gated. The rent? $1,700 a month. For a fresh college grad and his spouse.

How many ants to fill an apartment? Ten ants.

Ouch! They’re probably not saving a lot of money, fresh college grads, at that level. Is it any wonder that the birth rate for folks who contribute to the economy is down? Who has money to have a baby when you have to cough up $1,700 a month, before utilities, to live in a neighborhood that requires walls and gates to be safe? I guess that’s where the vodka comes in . . . vodka: overriding good judgement in child bearing since 1405.

The impact of rent has been bad, but housing prices have done the youth of our country no favor, either. It has long been my thought that people shouldn’t make themselves poor by buying a house, and, yet, they do, with the exception of Joe Biden, who has made buying the White House pretty lucrative.

Not my meme, but you can tell it’s classy by the “FF” in “PROFFIT”. At least he’s doing well in this economy . . .

It seems like the market is rigged to extract the maximum amount of money out of the people consuming housing, especially when compared with the 1950s when a single manufacturing income could afford a decent home for a family. I can’t imagine a rent of $1,700 as a new college grad – that’s more than I’m paying right now on my existing mortgage. I know that $1,700 sounds like Heaven to those of you living on the coasts, but this is a mid-tier southwestern town.

Houses have gotten worse. In August, the average asking price in the United States was $445,000. Due to inflation and interest rates, the average price that a purchaser could afford was $356,000. This is an obvious recipe for deflation in housing prices in any other economy. But in 2023?

How do Millennials fireproof their home? By never owning one.

And, yet, there’s a housing shortage. How could that be?

Could it be that millions and millions of people have hopped the border since 2000? The minimum is 6,300,000 since Biden became Resident. Minimum. It’s likely that the number is much higher, and it’s nearly certain that tens of millions of illegals have poured across the border since 2000. Want cheap housing? You’re competing against people who often don’t pay taxes, live many families to a dwelling, and, when finally given the opportunity, will vote far Left to elect people who want us to eat the bugs and live in the pods.

In any previous world, we have the makings of an economic catastrophe:

Unlimited labor,
Massive cash printing,
Mass illegal immigration into crowded cities,
Bidens,
Housing shortages, and
Skyrocketing food prices.

What’s happening is that the things that are required to live, food and shelter, are becoming very, very expensive. The blame is mainly left at the feet of the United States’ government and the Federal Reserve Bank®, but there’s more to go around. McDonald’s© is selling a Big Mac® meal around Modern Mayberry for about $9. That’s ludicrous for what you get in both quality and quantity, but that’s what it costs. On the East Coast, it’s $16. Here at the locally owned butcher shop, a very, very good ribeye from a local cow is $12.95 a pound. Take your pick: meat® on a bun™ or juicy, delicious steak?

YMMV, but for me that’s an easy choice.

My doctor suggested I eat at Burger King®. I know, technically, he said, “no more McDonald’s®”, but I know what he meant.

But what about McDonald’s©? Surely they must be having a McAwful™ day to have to raise prices that high. Nah. Their stock price is doing fine and they’re making lots of money – they beat the profit that Wall Street thought they were going to make. McDonald’s® isn’t hit by inflation – they can just (at least until now) make everyone else pay. That probably won’t last, but it sure is miserable for many now.

To summarize, the things that are required to live are going up. The misery created by the current bad set of choices by bankers and elected officials is real, and getting worse by the day. So, tonight, let’s put all of our worries aside and enjoy a television show about a bunch of hot people who are rich and successful!

Bikinis, Garbage Loans, And Fishy Finance

“A 30-year mortgage at Michael’s age essentially means that he’s buying a coffin. Now, if I were buying my coffin, I would get one with thicker walls.” – The Office

Most garbage workers don’t get official training. They pick it up as they go along.

The Big Solution to the Great Recession was printing lots of money. I would have (back then) thought that it would have hit the economy all at once. In reality, what the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury did was send all that money they printed off to the banks.

The banks didn’t lend it. They kept it on the books, and in fact many of them redeposited their free money with the Fed™. In reality, the Fed© was scared about was the entire system locking up. It was pretty bad in 2009 – basic chemicals that were necessary (say, sulfuric acid) for a basic, functioning economy just stopped production.

No one knew who had money, or who would have money. As one friend of mine noted at the time, “When the tide goes out, you finally see who isn’t wearing swimming trunks.”

My office above a bank, my assets over tens of millions of dollars.

The inflation stayed “within target” for the Fed™, flipping up and down around 2% during the decade following. Again, with all of the money printed, I expected it to be more, and I still don’t trust the official government figures on inflation since that would be like trusting a used-car salesman on that gently used 1995 Ford Taurus© with only 350,000 miles on it.

COVID was the final straw, though. People produced less stuff, so there was a lower supply. The government printed a lot more money and then gave it to everyone, who most definitely didn’t save it, and in fact bid prices up on everything. Making nothing and buying everything?

Inflation. Or my ex-wife.

Inflation finally triggered interest rates to go up. That posed a problem for the banks. Let’s take me: I have a small mortgage left on Stately Wilder Manor. I’m in no hurry to pay it off because I can get a CD for 5.5%, but my mortgage is only 4%.

How did Metallica stop people from pirating their music? They started releasing garbage.

My mortgage is worth less to the banks now than I owe on it – if I were another bank, they’d sell it to me for less than I owe. That’s a problem for banks that have exposure to mortgages and didn’t sell them off or hedge them.

It’s not just mortgages – Silicon Valley Bank® decided to invest in lots of long-term bonds and such because inflation had been so low. Buy a corporate bond yielding 4%, pay depositors 1%, and profit!

But when interest rates started heading upward, the same sort of math as with the bank that owns my mortgage applies – what used to be worth $100 is now only worth, say, $80. Oops. When the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the bank, money that wasn’t insured, find out?

Bank funs. Er, bank runs.

And it’s gone . . .

How bad was it? Of the $172 billion deposited at the bank, only 11% was covered by deposit insurance. I imagine that there were quite a few tense billionaires like Oprah worried that she’d have to get a job at the McDonald’s® drive through, and how could she resist those perfectly salty fries?

Since billionaires were in danger, the FDIC immediately said, “Rules? Who needs those. All money is safe in Bartertown!”

My initial expectation is that we’d see more bank failures right around now as interest rates increased and the piles of garbage on the balance sheets of the banks started to rot. Instead? Banks are still (I believe) happily lending money borrowed by the Fed™.

How do they do it? They manage to do it by having the Fed© allow them to mark their assets to what they paid for them, not what they’re worth. So, they’re lying. I’m fairly certain the Fed™ is buying this stuff to get it off the balance sheets of the banks and lending them more money whenever they don’t have enough caviar.

Does the Sturgeon General recommend caviar?

The rot, though, is still there – it’s only a matter of who pays for the rot. Debt always gets paid, the old saying goes, either by the borrower or by the lender. I do know of two local businesses that are going bankrupt. Their debt is what drove the bankruptcy. My guess is that, combined, they have a debt of a million and a half dollars (or so). Who will pay it? In the end, the lender will.

I think that might be at least part of the big jump in debt that the United States owes. As interest rates go up, Uncle Sam is acting like a raccoon and jumping straight into the trash can to eat the garbage loans and bonds that the banks had to throw out because they were stinking up the fridge. Here’s proof:

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Eventually, printing lots and lots of money is like a magic trick the magician does one too many times and everyone sees how it works. Will it work this time?

Unrelated, frequent commenter Ray notes this Give Send Go. I’ll let him explain more. GiveSendGo – Loco Needs Divorce from Prostate: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We At War? and Invaders

“Maybe we’re at war with Norway?” – The Thing

I’m sad, because 6:30 is the best time on a clock. Hands down.

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

Volume V, Issue 5

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

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

In this issue: Front Matter – At War Already? – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Invaders – 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 815 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

At War Already?

This month I had a post up titled 14 Signs Of An Unfree Country. One of the responses I received is below:

It’s a very fair question, and one that deserves some thought and a response.

One of the first issues discussed on the early Civil War 2.0 Weather Reports was the idea that Civil War 2.0 would likely not resemble Civil War 1.0 with opposing armies in uniform moving across open battlefields. No, in my opinion there might be some military trappings, and some form of “regulars” on either side, but for the most part this Civil War will be very different, and a large part of the action will take place via individual and small, only loosely coordinated groups.

But the question remains – are we at war?

The January 6 prisoners would certainly say so. The concept of justice for most of them has been a farce, they’ve been sent to prison in some cases for their political beliefs. The Left fully castigated the GOP for releasing all of the tapes which showed much more of the reality – and causing the ridiculous Buffalo guy to get released immediately.

In some cases (at least!) the prisoners have been treated in conditions that the Left would normally call inhumane. For the January 6 prisoners? No indignity has been spared them.

And no indignity has been spared on the heritage Americans. Our one virtue when it comes to the Left has been our ability to provide the backbone of the United States military. Now that traditional military families are opting out since, well, the country hates them, the idea of a draft is now embraced by people who ran to Canada to avoid it when it didn’t suit them.

What about the sacred right to vote? Well, again, that’s a sacred right only if you vote for the Left-approved candidate. They absolutely oppose voting for anyone not on the Left, and, guess what? While you were out keeping the economy going or serving our country, they infiltrated the governmental entities that count the vote. California is even going to ban manual vote counting and mandate only machine counting be legal.

What about the people who are being humiliated by watching the history of their nation erased, statue by statue, name by name, and child by child as they are drip-fed estrogen from the age to three to be turned into weird abominations that will be consigned to a tormented life as neither man nor woman.

So, the legal system is a fiction, and the cultural situation is grim.

Violence is at a high, as well. I keep warning people to get out of the cities. The latest murders in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia of Leftist enablers provide a glimpse of the decline of those cities – they weren’t hidden like the everyday horrors of the average father or grandfather or child killed at random by groups of murderers who believe that they won’t be punished because they haven’t been punished for (in some cases) over 50 felonies.

Are we at war already? If, like me, you live in a Red state? No, not really. Here in Modern Mayberry it looks a lot like it did thirty years ago, except for the rot that Leftism and globalism has done to the economy.

If you’re on the Right and live in a Blue state, or if you challenge in any manner the power of those who would rule?

It looks like that answer is, “yes”, they’re at war against you.

Violence and Censorship Update

There is no way on Earth that the United States was more racist in 2015 than it was in 1970. Zero ways. I would suggest that in 2008, when the United States voted in a black guy as president that would have ended that forever. Especially since the 1990s in the United States were probably the least racist decade of any country on the planet, ever. But the push is in: everything is racist. This is used, primarily to shut down actual discussions of actual problems.

Why would a Leftist leave a weapon on the battlefield after they’ve won the battle? Elon Musk rustled all the jimmies when he bought Twitter®, um, X™. So what’s the solution? Stop anything Musk does.

Okay, this didn’t officially happen, but I’m thinking that most of his staff thought it:

Apparently selling soft drinks in Russia is bad:

As is using the word “female”.

But that’s okay, kids should be taken from their parents for any old reason.

And the press should just ignore the “why” of a story.

And also the “who” of a story.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Looks like Biden is going for the record. Who says he never gets anything done?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is up again, again slightly – I was expecting more during a long, hot summer. I’m guessing that people don’t even notice it anymore.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, up. I expect December to be a time when this starts to head upward, significantly.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back down again this month, but I expect October will be a bit more interesting after earnings reports.

Illegal Aliens:

The border numbers are up only slightly, and I think that (shockingly) the government may just be lying or that the Border Patrol is being told to leave the illegals alone. Why would I think that? That’s what the next story is about.

Invaders

It is now abundantly clear that the people in Washington and New York now view heritage Americans as I view an infestation of rabid squirrels. We’re pests.

The idea is to replace us with people who will work cheaply forever and are okay with living in a repressive regime as long as they have ramen and soccer on TV. They want slaves.

The other part of this plan is increasing taxes and injecting feminism (and LGBT) directly into the brains of the youth to slow down birth rates. They really don’t care what this does. The elites can live anywhere that is nice. They’ll live in the most favorable places with all the stuff they could imagine needing.

It’s also interesting that everywhere except for Europe and the United States that booting illegals out is considered “Tuesday”. Even before Hamas went kinetic on Israel, they were getting ready to boot out any black people. Probably to Europe, sure, but they were getting ready to boot them. Can we have the same illegal immigrant (invader) policy as Israel?

Well, not with Biden. They cut the razor wire because . . . ? Who cares what the reason was. The Border Patrol now just wants to get more immigrants in. I call this the “Biden Plan”, but really it was also the Bush plan and the Clinton plan, too.

How bad is it? A developer has created a base for over 75,000 illegals. They live there, have gangs there, and sell drugs from there. We know where this is. If any administration was serious about this, the developer would be in prison, and the deportations would start . . . last week. Instead? We have a place where the laws of the United States don’t really apply and any illegal can settle.

We know where they are. We’re doing nothing. We are the carbon the globalists want to reduce, since we keep asking such inconvenient questions as our country is invaded.

And it’s not just Hispanics. It appears that all of Africa is streaming across the border.

And why not? Africa is growing at an astonishing rate despite having exactly the same ability to feed itself as a drunken toddler.

The upshot is that this will be the last generation of heritage Americans, ever, unless the tide changes.

But, it looks like Blue state people are (finally) waking up:

Which way, America? The solution is, still, very simple. When will we adopt it?

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1703658363542700433

https://twitter.com/i/status/1701238979557761319

https://twitter.com/i/status/1707364236077277309

https://twitter.com/i/status/1705460875472052712

https://twitter.com/i/status/1703043847037587892

https://twitter.com/NewportBeachNBT/status/1702853152276717830

https://twitter.com/i/status/1705623045254057994

https://twitter.com/i/status/1700257920112644268

https://tvpworld.com/73183231/us-three-leftist-activists-killed-in-separate-incidents-in-one-week

ONE GAL

https://twitter.com/k0ssed/status/1709252993512861804

https://nypost.com/2023/10/02/philly-motorcyclist-stomps-on-back-windshield-of-nikki-bullocks-car-video/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12588897/I-just-wanted-protect-kids-Fearless-mom-bravely-faced-biker-thugs-one-stomped-car-smashed-rear-window-children-5-2-backseat-speaks-out.html

GOOD GUYS

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12594639/Cody-Heron-motorcyclist-smash-windshield-Philadelphia-arrested.html

BODY COUNT

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4218666-ai-girlfriends-are-ruining-an-entire-generation-of-men/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12437519/Gender-affirming-surgeries-US-nearly-tripled-pandemic-dip-study-finds.html

https://admin.americanaddictioncenters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Substance-Abuse-Estimates-by-City.jpg

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12484069/US-deaths-mortality-richest-countries.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/covid-vaccines-causally-linked-to-increased-mortality-resulting-in-17-million-deaths-scientific-report-5499001?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=CFP&src_src=epochHG&src_cmp=CFP

https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1703540571598368901

https://twitter.com/i/status/1702400933928304652

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1706442804258296082
https://news.yahoo.com/many-people-mexican-drug-cartels-180057725.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/773022b3-8b34-4da0-850b-bfcaa8e7a28a_867x449.jpg?itok=ExPuHvoW

https://twitter.com/PaulHook_em/status/1706832820033692084

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/border-birth.jpg

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199417599/immigrant-population-us-foreign-born-census-bureau

https://www.dailywire.com/news/inside-colony-ridge-the-fastest-growing-development-in-the-u-s-is-a-magnet-for-illegal-immigrants

VOTE COUNT

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fjustthenews.com%2Fpolitics-policy%2Felections%2Ffbi-denies-foia-request-docs-investigation-possible-nationwide-voter

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/09/22/google-search-engine-sways-millions-of-voters-in-one-direction/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/09/25/whos-responsible-for-georgias-disastrous-2020-election/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/bias-or-bad-search-engine-optimization-biden-challengers-nearly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/05/zuck-bucks-grift-was-born-in-wisconsin-voters-must-ban-it-in-2024/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/now-we-have-proof-tgp-exclusive-massive-2020/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthemessenger.com%2Fopinion%2Fdemocrats-2024-magic-bullet-mass-mail-in-voting

CIVIL WAR

https://academic.oup.com/publius/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/publius/pjad035/7271459?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/9/7/sorry-trumpers-there-wont-be-a-us-civil-war-for-2024

https://thewire.in/world/america-is-on-the-brink-of-another-civil-war-this-one-fuelled-by-donald-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/03/the-only-us-civil-war-will-be-a-war-on-democracy/51c6e488-4a54-11ee-bfca-04e0ac43f9e4_story.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-second-american-civil-war-has-begun/ar-AA1dS2tp

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4187490-republicans-just-cant-stop-calling-for-civil-war/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ray-dalio-says-mccarthy-ouster-another-step-away-from-democracy-and-toward-civil-war/ar-AA1hO2PG

https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-greg-gutfeld-suggests-190456184.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/who-are-the-americans-who-support-secession/ar-AA1h4qrE

https://studyfinds.org/dont-trust-us-government-doomsday/

https://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1699596057678606451
https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1700996328799773109

Mechanisms of Control: Information

“He who controls information controls the world.” – Babylon 5

I was trying to finish a puzzle. I asked The Mrs., “Can you help me finish this one? It’s supposed to be a bird.” The Mrs.: “Put the Froot Loops back in the box, John.”

Last Wednesday I wanted to write about the mechanisms of financial control. Of course, there’s always more to write – that post was less than 2,000 words, but if I took the time I could probably write another 20,000 or 80,000 words.

It’s the same with this post. Even beyond propaganda, a big part of the game is information control. What information do we get, and where does it come from?

For quite a long time (I haven’t put any effort into going back in time, but it’s been here a while) the control of information has been used to actually create the news that Mainstream Media® uses. Sure, an earthquake is true and fair news. But 90% of the news that we are presented with in any given day isn’t news. Just like “processed cheese spread” or “buttery sauce” don’t contain anything resembling actual cheese or butter, most of the news we have is “manufactured news product” and doesn’t contain much news at all.

Have you heard of Karl’s sister, Onya? She invented the starter pistol.

A perfect example is George Floyd. He was a felon and junkie who died of an overdose. He wasn’t choked. George Floyd died because he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill Ecuador. The “news” created by his death was used and amplified for a purpose. In a normal world, Floyd’s death would have been ignored because “junkie dies of overdose” is another name for “Tuesday”.

Likewise, any sort of violence perpetrated by a white guy against (generally) black people is amplified, often to a national level. But the reverse? It’s suppressed and ignored to the point where black people think (really!) that they are the ones who are the victims, despite the fact that in 2021, 87% of violent crimes between black and whites were committed by blacks on whites.

But if black people watch TV or read the media, they’d be shocked and think that white people were the ones hurting blacks, and not the other way around. Why? The story that they’re selling is that white people are awful, and they’re willing to bend the language on a whim to make it so.

I bet they ADL® really hates pandas. They’re black, white, and Asian.

Racism used to mean that someone felt a race was superior. Now? According to the (rapidly disintegrating) ADL® it’s an explanation of why white people are bad and can never be not-bad no matter what they do.

My thought is that the Floyd death was amplified to put out a trap for Trump. Trump’s media coverage was uniquely and pervasively negative for a president. Remember when it was national news that Trump got an extra scoop of ice cream? Pepperidge Farms® remembers. And I do, too. Anything, and I mean anything Trump did became the big complaint of the media.

The Mainstream Media® always has an agenda. But who feeds them news? The Left. The organizations on the Left are the primary news sources. Like scriptwriters on Disney® movies, they create news stories that meet what they need for their organization’s goals regardless of reality. Also, like scriptwriters, people doing the news don’t really have any need for the Truth if it gets in the way of what they want you to think.

Other things are not very truthful, either. Global Warming® is one of the stories I just can’t escape when I watch the news. But how have they twisted the truth in . . . the weather? Here’s an example:

I enjoyed all four seasons of that weather show on Netflix®.

I’ve seen others. In the span of only ten years, those that want to sell fear to bring viewers have taken the same temperatures and cloaked them in a dangerous red color. Is it hot in summer? Yes! And that’s why the stories about Global Warming Climate Change™ all show up then. And they will every summer, even if it gets colder.

So, news is created by Leftist organizations, which include:

The Media (including entertainment),
Most of the Fortune® 500,
Most Schools,
The ADL®,
The SPLC,
Most Colleges,
Military General Officer Corps,
Most Religions, and
Almost Every Government Agency.

These organizations pump out press releases daily which feed the news cycle. Who fact checks them? Why, a compliant media! Snopes® is run by Leftists, and expecting the Washington Post® to correctly fact check Joe Biden? You’d have better luck pulling out your teeth and leaving them under your pillow for the ADL® to bring you a shiny new quarter.

I’m a racist. I just hate the 440-yard dash. Too long for a sprint, too short for distance. And turning it into the 400 meters didn’t help.

This news is then pumped into the heads of Leftists, nonstop. Places like Google® and Facebook™ and YouTube© where alternative viewpoints aren’t allowed. Think that the Vaxx® was a big mistake? YouTube™ is still censoring that one.

Leftists, for the most part, I’m not concerned with. If they ever stumble upon these posts, they won’t be able to read them. They may be smelly virgins without a hope of ever having babies, but they’re not illiterate. If I say the sky is blue, they’ll immediately ask for a source because the Right to them is worse than Satan.

When no one laughed at Neil Armstrong’s Moon landing jokes, he’d just say, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

They don’t want to think, in fact can’t think, about some of the concepts that I write about here because their amygdala will stop them from listening. Literally, a Leftist can’t read one of my typical posts without getting so angry that they can’t read it.

No, I write for the Right, and I write for the middle. The Right is self-explanatory, since I’m on the Right. The Middle have been the people the Left is targeting. I’m sure that they believe that they can convince the Middle if they deprive them of any other viewpoint.

The Left is excellent at that. They want to tighten down Twitter, er, X®, Facebook™, Instasnap©, MySpace©, and any other place that the Right can disagree with the Leftist narrative. Wonder why the newspapers eliminated the comments sections? The Right was (and is!) amazing at getting points out that countered the information goals of the Left.

Quite simply, from their standpoint, that had to be stopped.

AOC had to write an essay in college about genocides. Took her a long time to decide if she was for or against them.

Again, remember that the “news” you get from the Mainstream Media™ is simply not news, but a product, like “buttery spread”. It isn’t news. Have some fun with it – count the number of stories in a day that you come across, and see how the Left is trying to manipulate you.

When you see it, you’re free to make your own opinions. And free to wake others up.

Mechanisms Of Control: Financial

“You must not take the Controller away. We will all die! The Controller is young and powerful. Perfect!” – Star Trek, TOS

Song lyric idea: “The Beautiful Sheeple, The Beautiful Sheeple . . .”

Currency started out innocently enough. If I wanted to sell my wheat and then buy some beer, well, I could trade my wheat to the brewer. But what if the brewer had all the wheat he needed, but needed, oh, hops? My wheat would do him no good. There is evidence of a guy making beer in the Bible, after all there’s a book in the New Testament named Hebrews.

I could try to trade my wheat to the guy who grew hops, but if he didn’t need any wheat, what was I to do?

The problem that currency solved was a simple one – how do I trade with someone who doesn’t need what I have? How can accountants get into amusement parks? How can ATF® agents do, well, anything since absolutely no one has any use for them?

The solution was some sort of medium of exchange. In one sense, it’s magic. As long as everyone believes, it works. When used judiciously (i.e., backed by gold on demand) it transforms into something that is hard to manipulate – what we’d call money.

How do you greet a German wheat farmer? “Gluten tag.”

When backed by nothing, (like now) it’s simply cash or currency.

The history of the last fifty years (and the last twenty, especially) has been the history of printing currency out of nothing and then giving it to a few small groups, and then they use the cash to buy up everything.

Once a group owns everything, there’s no reason for them to worry about profit: they already own all the things worth owning. That’s BlackRock©. The Aptly Named® Larry Fink runs it, and it’s no longer about profits, it’s about control based on his ideology.

What does Fink expect you to do when it’s cold? Huddle around a candle. What about when it’s freezing? Maybe then Larry will let you light the candle.

People (last I checked) still drive cars driven by sweet, sweet internal combustion engines. Those internal combustion engines (for the most part) require sweet, sweet crude oil to be turned into gasoline and diesel. Yeah, ethanol exists and so does biodiesel, but those can’t pull the load, and ethanol actively takes food out of the supply chain.

What if, however, the United Nations leaned on banks to get them to stop the supply of oil by choking off the supply of cash to oil producing nations?

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: it’s not about humanity or human rights – it’s about control.

Is the reason Saudi Arabia has so much money all the oil cash, or that they won’t let their women spend it?

Please don’t believe me, believe them when they say it. Here is the head of the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) saying that “central banks will have absolute control over all money (sic)”. This is in how each dollar (or whatever unit) is used, what people are allowed to buy, and what people are prohibited to buy.

One thing I know that they’d love to do is to make money evaporate to force people to spend rather than save. This can be done with electronic currency, and I expect they will do it to make sure that people can’t save and are forced to work every day of their lives.

Even more than now.

35% of Americans think they’ll max out at least one credit card this year.
38% are using their cards for expenses that they never used a card for.
62% are considering a “side-gig”, even if they already have a job.

-Fintech Times, July 25, 2023 (LINK)

Things are looking down for many Americans. When it comes to the point of using credit cards for financing life, it’s getting rough – I know, I was in that trap when I was in my 20s. I’ve seen it here in Modern Mayberry where the labor market is now getting tighter, and more people are looking for work. Employers can now be a bit choosier, which will put downward pressure on wages. The reason for this is simple: people aren’t going to McDonald’s®, they’re eating at home for half (or less) the price.

Another sign of control: in a recent month, 1.2 million “native or heritage”, (i.e., Americans actually born as Americans from American parents in America) lost their jobs. They were replaced by 600,000 immigrants. Low-cost labor is still being imported, and putting even more wage pressure on the middle and lower classes. The Biden administration even ordered that some of the gates in “The Wall” be welded open, which defeats the whole “wall” idea.

Looks like that Bill Gates was in charge of the wall, too. Look at all the Windows®.

To paraphrase William Jennings Bryant (among others), it is difficult to get a person to voice dissent when their next meal requires them to agree. That, then, is the nature of control of economic systems as demonstrated by BlackRock®, the BIS©, and the World Economic Forum™ – the desire is to make it so that the average person cannot resist without being kicked outside of the system that provides food, shelter, and the occasional luxury.

I’m sure it would be easy to start your own Central Bank . . . oh, maybe not.

Even that deal is in danger: the desire to dramatically change the way that people work and live is on the table for these groups. Who, exactly, do you think wants you to live in a pod and eat the bugs, and not own anything? Owning everything that matters isn’t enough – they want to own everything, and make your ability to have anything depending on you giving them all of yourself.

Even your thoughts.

And to think, all we really wanted was a beer. I guess it was pretty expensive.