Purpose – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Prepatude.

“No harm in being prepared.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

If a detective solves a murder quickly, is that a brief case?

(most clips/memes from here on out are as-found)

Prepping is a subject that has been near and dear to my heart since I was a kid.

The Wilder family would frequently go on long hikes and snowmobile trips into the backcountry. Likewise, we’d go hunting and fishing. Before most of those trips, Ma and Pa would talk to me about the dangers on the trip, what to do if I got lost, and what to avoid. I’m still at a loss as to why they covered me in honey when we were in bear country and referred to me as “Hansel” but I did pay attention.

Our spot of land on Wilder Mountain was 15 miles to the first town, which was a metropolis of about 800 people during the school year. It had a grocery store, and a doctor’s office that was open (I believe) two days a week because the doctor went from town to town. It was a time and place where, when I was bitten by a local dog, the doctor asked me to describe it.

“Meh. Probably not rabid. I wouldn’t worry.”

It was a different world back then and Gen X kids, who were pretty free-range.

Got arrested for smuggling books into Washington D.C. Got off on a technicality, since no one there can read.

The winters on Wilder Mountain were cold at -40°F (-40°C) being a regular low, and with snowfall that could total to over three feet in a single night. There were no natural gas lines, or even artificial gas lines, and we heated the place exclusively on firewood. There were times the road was closed, and when the power was out, it was out for hours while the power company scrambled people from nearly 50 miles away to come and fix whatever had broken whereas fire always worked.

Ambulance? Forget it. When I was young, the closest ambulance (I believe) at least half an hour away. The ambulance was whatever car you had and the State Troopers told people to put their emergency flashers on when speeding to the hospital. Did I say State Troopers? Nah, there was just one within 45 miles.

There is an official denial that this is a true story. More info will come out.

And, obviously, no cell phones. Heck, our first line was a “party” line which was shared among four houses, and all the phones would ring for an incoming call. You could tell which call was for your house because each house had a distinct ring pattern, sort of like Morse code for Martha.

From a very young age, I knew that my safety wasn’t coming from some distant location. I was responsible for myself. Our family was responsible for our family.

As the slogan goes: no one was coming to save us, and we knew it. We also lived it, having provisions of food for more than a month at any given time, a freezer full of meat, and enough firewood to last two winters. When the power went out, we had candles, and Ma Wilder had the wax to make more.

I was raised with prepping as a mindset. We lived it.

I could go into more details, but you get the point – nearly everything we did was predicated on the idea that if things went tango uniform, we’d likely have to do all the digging out ourselves, which we did on more than one occasion.

When you don’t feel like physically preparing.

Looking back on it, that was a wonderful way to grow up. It’s really the opposite of being a victim. If I had gotten into a situation that I couldn’t have gotten out of while maintaining a 98.6°F (-40°C) body temperature, I knew it was my own fault.

It taught me this lesson: I’m never a victim.

This is also the story of the founding and conquering of our nation: people setting off to far lands across a sea, and then finally crossing the continent with everything they owned in a wagon, a little island of humanity that would sink or swim.

I’m a descendent of those that managed to swim, and probably, you are, too.

Well, that’s embarrassing for FEMA.

This, really, is the opposite of city life.

For someone in New York, they depend on other people for almost everything. Trash. Food. Heat. Water. Safety. Security. Elevators. Like I said, almost everything. They exist as a cog in a technological machine that uses them for a specific purpose and then puts them to rest in the off hours so they can complain about how alienated they feel to psychiatrists that charge $400 an hour.

GloboLeft prepping aisle.

To them, prepping probably means avoiding scary people on the sidewalk, but even that isn’t any sort of guarantee of safety. Nor is a guarantee that the systems that work to punish those who will do Evil is in any way functional. It looks like those are breaking down at a rapid pace, and that will do nothing but increase the level of violence and corruption already inherent with large numbers of people from divergent cultures living close to one another.

Such a vibrant big-city culture!

For them, prepping isn’t an attitude, prepping is something other people do, because the stores are always open, 24/7.

More than anything, however, preparation is a continual situational review of what you have and what you have to have. I write this now because I sense we’re in a greater degree of danger than at any time during my life, with the possible exception of 1983 when things almost got extra-spicy with the Soviets, who were nearly finished with updating their weapons from World War I.

Now is really the time to assess where you’re at, what you’re doing, and what you would do without things that are “essential”.

Essential is relative: 2 minutes without air, 2 hours without shelter (depending on conditions), 2 days without water, and 2 weeks without food (though lots of folks including myself are pre-prepped for that contingency). How many GloboLeftists could last an afternoon, though, without the warm affirmations of their fellow travelers that they’re on the Right Side of History®?

Why wouldn’t they want people reporting on this? Embarrassed, or wanting to kill opposition voters in a swing state?

No, prepping isn’t about a day or a time or an event, it’s a way of life, because of the horrible things that have happened to me have been none of the ones I expected, like that time I nearly ran out of beer. But since I had prepared generally, well, I was prepared. I have 200’ of rope in my truck. Why?

I have no idea what specific episode I’ll need it, but experience shows that in the next decade someone will say to me . . . “I have no idea why you had the rope, John, but it sure stopped that runaway nuclear reactor meltdown!”

I mean, most people only stop one nuclear reactor meltdown. But two?

Know their priority. It isn’t you.

My prepping background is my parents. We lived near the wilderness, and lived like it. One thing that neither Pa nor Ma would accept, at all, was a victim.

Having a proper prepping attitude, or prepatude is all about that – setting yourself up so that being a victim isn’t in your future. Then?

Lists.

Distractions, Pascal, And Postman

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club

I then started a summer camp for people who wanted to be plastic surgeons. Arts and Grafts was very popular.

Distractions.

Blaise Pascal wrote about them in his book Pensées, which is French and means “reflections” and is pronounced “Hamwich” because the French never properly figured out that sounds in words should be connected in some fashion to the letters used.

Pascal was a mathematician, a physicist, and invented the laptop computer, which was initially a plank of wood. In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him.

Pascal was also a philosopher, and thought a whole bunch about Christianity. This was back before the “let’s get a cappuccino and listen to Pastor Dave talk about why God wants lesbian ministers” type of church, and instead when there were debates on how salvation occurred and if free will was a thing.

Thankfully it didn’t take them too long to clean the kettle out, though they did ask me where I got six gallons.

Pascal wrote: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet, it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.”

And, although he’s dead, Pascal was entirely correct. We see it all around us right now.

Distraction is seductive. I remember we were on a family vacation and stopped at a Denny’s® to get breakfast. There was a line, and about 30 people (mainly families) were waiting.

As I looked, every eye was focused on a phone – 30 people sitting next to each other, yet distracted by whatever it was that they were looking at. They had escaped reality, and also escaped talking to each other, almost as if they were addicted to the distractions coming to them over their iPhones®.

In reality, many of them probably are technically addicted to those phones. Much of the internet, even back then, was built on the premise of stimulating dopamine to create engagement with the phone, and not with the world surrounding us.

Such a wonderful society we have to take pills to deal with it. Meme as found.

Were those people worried about their bills, their jobs, or their immortal soul? Nah. They were distracted by flappy bird games or Faceborg™ or InstaChat©. They were allowing the moments of their lives to drain away into that sea of distraction rather than confront reality.

They did have bills. Their jobs sucked. Their immortal soul was in peril. But that’s difficult to think about, so it’s much easier to look at pretty colors and cat videos for ten seconds before flipping to the next infotainment bite. The distraction was total.

Is it any wonder that coping skills have been drastically impacted in the generation raised on the distraction of phones? Kids can’t cope because they’re never forced to confront themselves until the stakes are high. This creates a group of victims.

I hate victims. A lot. They’re whiney and they suck every bit of energy out of the room, like psychic vampires. Oh, wait, I just described The View. Huh.

If you ever feel uninformed, remember that some people get their news from The View.

Absolutely, there are people who are in situations that are far beyond their control. And, absolutely there are people who don’t deserve what fate has given them. However, when I look at people who have self-control, who have looked fate in the eye and said, “Yeah, so what? I’m still standing here, chump,” I feel admiration.

Neil Postman was a professor and writer, but then he died. Perhaps his best-known work is Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985. The Mrs. introduced me to it not long after we met, and I knew she was a keeper. In it, Postman talks about the impact of amusement. Amusement is close enough to distraction for our purposes and both Postman and Pascal are dead, so they can’t put up too much of a fight.

Again, Postman wrote about this in 1985, well before the every distraction, every place, all at once monster of the smartphone appeared. In it, Postman identified television as a drug. If so, it’s a gateway drug like aspirin, and the Internet is heroin.

Part of distraction is that it discourages the formation of complete thoughts. I think at least partially that’s part of the inspiration for this place, since I want to create and bring forth ideas that people might not think about, or might have forgotten in all frenzy of flashing lights, free porn, and distractions of Instabook© and Facegram™.

If idiots could fly, TikTok® would be an airport.

It’s a world where, “Excuse me, I’m talking” becomes a replacement for actual thought and people thinking deeply about issues like old Pascal becomes rarer and rarer. A side effect is that the information we get becomes information we can’t take action on. Want to complain to your congressman? How would you even contact them? How would you get their attention? Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions.

Instead, you’ll complain to your neighbor.

Worse, though, is the impact that’s happening to our youth. The lesson that bad crap is going to happen to them so they need to learn deal with it simply isn’t taught because they just distract themselves away from the Truth they don’t want to consider. It’s not their fault – their brain is optimized to live in villages, and we distract them with the hardest hitting drug in history: the smartphone.

Failure is an option. And failure is a teacher, but when the teacher is fired and replaced with social media? The lesson is muted or ignored.

I bought a book called “How to Hug”, but it turned out to be volume seven of an encyclopedia.

How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist?

I guess Pascal was good at avoiding distraction and dealing with pressure.

The Drive To Kill The Constitution

“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – Return of the King

I had a sacred, flammable piece of wood once. It was a match made in Heaven.

All memes “as found”

One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.

Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do.

The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”

The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10^th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”

The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10^th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.

This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17^th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.

Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it:

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.

If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.

Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.

Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual.

Yeah, that was the plan.

Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2^nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.

A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.

Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).

The pesky 1^st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:

It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win.

Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men.

The only thing that stands in their way? Us.

Change, Batman, Male Prostitutes, And Bears

“You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own.” – Fight Club

My Chinese friend gave me an iPad. I just love homemade presents!

I can tell when I’m really ready for change. I don’t think about it. I don’t plan it.

I do it. I become it.

Instantly.

How can I tell when I’m not ready to change?

I think about it. I plan it. I consider ideas like, “starting Monday, I’m going to . . . “

Then Monday comes around. Meh. There’s always next Monday.

Change is instantaneous, it’s a drag racer (I mean cars, not men in dresses that for some unspecified reason like to read to children) after the pedal has been pushed to the floor and the car is launched. The desire to change? That lingers and hangs around on the couch, eating curly fries and thinking about what it one day might do.

Shame on you if you haven’t heard of Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, who offers professional hygiene, discretion, and animal gratification.

One of my friends when I was living in Alaska shared this story:

Wife: “I’m leaving.”

Husband: “What, what the hell? You’re leaving me?”

Wife: “No. I’m leaving Alaska. I’m moving.”

Husband: “Why? I thought that, while we had our ups and downs, our marriage is pretty good.”

Wife: “No. I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving Alaska. It’s fine if you want to come, too.”

My friend (who I will call Tim since that’s his name) said that this was a constant pattern that he had seen. Perfectly happy couple, and then one day, bam, the wife said she was outta there, done with Alaska except for the rearview mirror. He said it generally happened about 20 years after the couple had moved to Alaska. Sometimes 19 years.

Do mimes with invisible walls have obstacle illusions?

He had no idea why it happened, but it was frequent enough that he’d seen the pattern play out again and again.

Now that, my friends, is change.

Another example more relevant to me is biking. I used to bike a lot, and I know from experience that the only thing that is as insufferable as a gay vegan-Democrat-Crossfit® enthusiast is a bicyclist. But when I decided that I was going to use biking as an exercise to get into better shape (which worked) I went all in. No, I didn’t buy the silly jersey or the clip on shoes or a bike that weighed .03 ounces (351 kiloPascals), but I did buy the gear I needed to be good enough to lose some weight. Hell, I wasn’t racing, I wanted a heavy bike so I had to work my fat ass harder.

So, after 5,000 plus bike miles a year for two years, I found I lost approximately 10 pounds.

Why didn’t the bear go to college? Because bears don’t go to college.

Hmmm, I guess I can’t ride my bike faster than my fork, but when I was on my bike, even though I was far from a world-record anything, I was training as hard as any world-class athlete. Just not as long, and just without the talent that they had. I mean, I was dedicated, but there was no way I was gonna cut my testicle off like Lance Armstrong.

But, again, the change was instantaneous. Just as instantaneous as when I decided to stop biking because I noticed it was causing some damage to my body, and having a bad ankle wasn’t worth losing 10 pounds.

One day, bicyclist.

The next day?

Not.

So, change itself is instant. And also predictable – it always has and always will require just three simple things, as Ludwig von Mises (who is dead) wrote:

A Vision of a Better State

A Path to Get to the Better State

A Belief That My Action Along the Path Will Get Me to the Better State

If you have Vision, Path, and Belief, you change. If I don’t have them, even if I’m missing just one of them, I don’t change. At all. I just sit on my couch eating curly fries.

Anyone can want to change, in fact I’m sure we all want to change. But until we get those three simple keys, we won’t.

When my youngest was five, The Mrs. and I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Batman”. Now he wonders why we won’t take him to the theater.

Why do people who have heart attacks sometimes become fitness devotees? Because they now have A Vision of a Better State – not being dead next year. They have A Path to Get to the Better State – exercise and eating right. They now have A Belief That Their Action Along the Path Will Get Them to the Better State – their doctor told them, and now they’re paying attention.

That’s a rather extreme example, but it’s one that gets raised all the time.

I think the reasons that more people don’t make changes comes from a few simple reasons:

Despair: They don’t believe that anything that they do can change the situation that they’re in so they don’t even dwell on a better state or look for a path. They’ve given up.

Not Looking: They simply won’t open their eyes to the possibility of something different, or feel guilt, and also can’t see a way, even if it’s abundantly clear to others.

Apathy: They don’t care. Curly fries are easy. Work is hard.

Sometimes change is a conscious choice, but I’ll also admit that sometimes change is forced upon you like the Alaskan husband from Tim’s story above.

If you have something you want to change, change it. You can’t make yourself younger, but you can make yourself stronger than you are today. If you want more money, you can’t write yourself checks based on an IOU that you wrote to yourself (like the government does) but you can earn more or save more or both. I guarantee it.

My grandfather once told me it was worth it to spend money on good stereo speakers. That was sound advice.

Once I asked a friend (not Tim) to write a sentence of their choice as small as they could. They did. Then, I said, write it again, and make it smaller this time.

They did. Generally, the power is within us to do amazing things, but we have to first believe. You can choose change, or it can choose you.

But what you and I do with that? It’s up to us.

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

“It was O-Ren Ishii and her powerful posse, the Crazy 88, that proved the victor.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

My friends always made fun of me in high school for having an imaginary girlfriend. Of course, the joke was on them: they were imaginary, too.

One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question:

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly. This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar. Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.

First: Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts. The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question: what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want: food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

The result? The mice died out. At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting.

If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right. For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.

My friend told me I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic” which was ironic because it was Tuesday.

I think it started in the 1960s. I’m just guessing. I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version. It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen: the 1990s. If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.

I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s. We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him. Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©. Who knew? We had a generation that was lost because they had everything.

I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is: “Why are we even here, dude?”

Never take diet advice from a fat guy, and never take life advice from Kurt Cobain.

Second: Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids. Was I serious? Yeah, I was. One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”

The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve. And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person. Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it? Yes. Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?

Yes. Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.

No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character. Without challenge, development is stunted.

I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.

Newsflash: the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make. Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere. It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

As a society we face many of the same problems: what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish? We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program.

I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is: “Why am I so worthless?”

Third: Societal Atomization Due To Tech

As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly. The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently. Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.

Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led. Why else would sane people want zoning regulations?

The good news is I can have up to six Eldrich Abominations without asking for a zoning variance request.

But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building? Who do we turn to?

Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed. People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.

They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are. How do I know tech is driving this? Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped. Why? No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments.

Yes. That’s a thing.

The iPhone™ is a big driver. It puts connections in the hands of kids. I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids. By the end of high school, it was all phones. Friendships dropped, and dating dropped. Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.

Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her. This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside.

I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”

When I was a kid I thought my dad was Superman®. Later, I wonder why he put a cape on after drinking bourbon.

Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:

Stand for nothing
Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives
See no point in anything other than the present moment
Are distracted
Think they’re too good for PEZ™
Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism
Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do
Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline

There’s good news.

All of this is self-limiting. We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink. Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better. Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow.

We lead. Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.

Learn This One Weird Trick

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s weird and pissed off.” – The Thing

The Mrs. is so weird: she starts every conversation with “were you even listening to me?”

All memes today are “as found”.

In the recent week, a miracle occurred. It seems like every Mainstream Media® pundit found the exact same word to describe Donald Trump, JD Vance, or both of them.

“Weird.”

Yup, “weird”. That’s the Kamala campaign’s strategist attempting to frame the 2024 election. Republicans are . . . weird. Master Persuader Scott Adams analyzed this. His conclusion?

This was “mean girl” politics. And the person who came up with the idea was . . . a woman. Her idea was to use the “in-group/out-group” method of attack.

What’s that? Well, simply enough, a junior high girl would describe someone as “weird” in order to get her friends to form a united group against someone. It only works, mind you, in junior high and also if it’s true. With Trump and Vance?

Well, not so much, for a couple of reasons. First off, they’re actually the weird ones:

See what I mean? We aren’t the weird ones. Nothing about us is weird. Okay, some things about me are weird, but most of them in a good way. Most of them. Those memes above will have a visceral impact, mainly on those who already agree with us. Some of them, though, especially at the bottom end of the list will be far too much for the normies in the middle. They might chuckle, but they’re gonna be pretty hesitant to share them. Regardless, if they see them and they’re not already consumed by the Woke Mind Virus, they’ll start to grow the doubts about who is really “weird”.

Here are some that are a bit more sharable:

See what I mean?

My take is that the following, though, are knockout punches to the middle, because they really hit the values that define us, but that the normies in the middle have a hard time seeing as weird – it builds a cognitive dissonance – the look at that, and realize that’s a far, far better world than we live in today.

Which makes these memes something that might move them.

And that’s my take. YMMV. And if someone called me weird? I’d say, “Hell yeah, I’m so weird I believe in marriage and intact mothers and fathers raising their kids with moral values.” Agree with them, and amplify. Because every single time that they try to paint us as something, it’s something that they fear others think of them.

If There Are Seven Basic Plots, Which One Is Yours?

“There’s no plot. It just goes on like that for an hour.” – Videodrome

Why don’t they use thyme as medicine? I hear I heals all wounds.

Last week’s post was about life as a three-act play. It may or may not work, and, like all metaphors, it’s flawed and suspect. Perhaps I should used something better, like a metaphive?

The Third Act

During the post, I also mentioned that a dude named Christopher Booker had written a book called The Seven Basic Plots. In it, he broke down most everything we watch into, well, seven basic plots. I guess he completely blew the suspense with the title. These plots all follow the same three acts discussed last week, though this week I’m using “hero” more as a descriptor than “protagonist”.

But what are the plots?

Overcoming The Monster: Destroying a great evil that threatens good. Examples: my divorce attorney from my first marriage, Star Wars®.

Rags to Riches: Start out poor and drunk, get money, lose money, get more money plus the girl and a private helicopter. Examples: Sonny Bono, Brewster’s Millions.

The Quest: The search for and attainment of a thing or place after being found worthy. Examples: losing my virginity, The Lord of the Rings.

What kind of magic to GloboLeft wizards use? Soycery.

Voyage and Return: A trip to an unfamiliar place, a learning experience, and a return as a changed hero. Examples: The Mrs. and I moving to Alaska and back, The Hobbit.

Rebirth: External events happen, and force the hero to change for the better. Examples: I was adopted. Duh. Groundhog Day.

Comedy: External things keep happening and pile up to the point that they get more and more confusing, but then sort themselves out in the end. Examples: My first marriage, any episode of Frasier.

Tragedy: Bad things happen to good people because they let temptation spoil their virtue. Examples: Me giving up on a drug-addicted friend, Macbeth.

Yup. Seven plots.

Whether or not you agree with them, all of them (with one exception that we’ll talk about in a bit) all have the same basic idea: the hero goes out, does stuff, and grows. That personal growth is what leads to ultimate victory in the climax of the story. Sure, luck can play a part of the victory, but to have a really emotionally satisfactory end, the victory comes because the character has faced his past mistakes, worked, grown, and is now a better man.

Our new puppy can’t write a decent plot. The only thing he can get out is ruff drafts.

This is a wonderful story and sings to our hearts: who of us hasn’t lost? Who of us hasn’t worked hard to get better, and then won in the end, even if it was just a small victory?

It is the personification of a story of virtue that we want to change to improve, to work to a higher goal, to pay the price in effort, and to win. Who wouldn’t want their children to live that life?

An aside: one of the (many) reasons modern movies suck is because, especially with victim-class characters and girl-bosses, they can never be shown in any sort of negative light. Looking at the stupid movie that made me hate Star Wars™, The Girlboss Awakens©, the main character starts off as invincible, invulnerable, and never has to grow. Why should she? From the first moment she can pilot the Millenium Falcon© better than Han Solo®, fight better with a lightsaber™ than a man who has spent his entire life in perfecting that skill, and is way better at The Force© after hearing about it for the first time.

No struggle. No growth – how could she need it? She was born the BeSTeSt EvAR hero because she’s a girl. This is of course, even though the character was written by people who would tell you that gender doesn’t exist and that you’re a bigot for not liking girls even though they don’t exist either. Bigot.

Her next movie? Fifty Shades of Rey.

It’s also the deprivation of that challenge that’s ruining our kids. I had a conversation with a Zoomer the other day, and he noted that, yeah, they were a generation that lived on phones, didn’t have bullying, and were afraid of real challenges because they never had to face them. Why are Zoomers on anxiety meds? Because their parents protected them from the dragons and never let their kids work themselves out of a hole that they’d dug for themselves.

We need to let kids do heroic things, dammit!

Okay, I’ll step back away from that ledge, and end this aside.

Fun fact: most coyotes, despite years of effort to teach them, cannot do simple calculus.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, plots. There’s one different plot.

Tragedy. This plot shows how temptation lures in the innocent hero, corrupts him, and then causes his ultimate destruction.

This is also a story we want our children to know. Regardless of intent, regardless of skill, there is a danger in allowing temptation to overcome virtue, allowing negative emotions to rule our lives.

Here’s a real-world example: the firefighter who was murdered (Corey Comperatore, PBUH) at the Trump rally. A tragedy? Do you think he’d look back at his life and call it tragic? A hero who died saving his family, who fathered children who love him and who was married to a wife who mourns him?

It’s not tragic. It’s heroic. There was no vanity, no anger, no petty emotion that led to his downfall. He didn’t have a downfall. He died a hero’s death. Tragic? Absolutely. The plot of a tragedy? No.

And, in this case, we find seeds of the important: the plot of our lives, as long as we breathe, as long as we can change, isn’t set. The ultimate destiny of whether we live as the hero on a quest or a villain who lived the plot of a tragedy rests with us.

Me? I’m trying, very hard, to be a hero. I can look back on my life and see places where I could have been more heroic, but also places where I’m damn proud of my actions and would do them again, no matter the outcome. I can also see places where my weaknesses made me the villain in a tragedy or two.

But, as long as I’m breathing, I’m still attempting to be the hero.

You can, too.

How Big Corporations Ruin The Economy, One Town At A Time

“I still say genetics are stronger than will, and blood is thicker than altruism.” – Andromeda

Should we rejoin Great Britain? It’s not like we mind taxation without representation anymore.

At the turn of the century, in 1900, that is, 25% of the people who worked had jobs for “larger” companies, think “something someone would say a robber baron owned”. These were things like railroads and steel mills and PEZ™ factories.

Most people worked for themselves or for smaller businesses. People farmed, which was a very big deal, taking up around 40% of the country’s labor force. The remainder worked for themselves or for small businesses, being a lawyer, working for the butcher, or delivering home-grown artisanal PEZ©.

The result was that the majority of the profits stayed local. The owner of the bank that loaned for the mortgage for Farmer McWilder didn’t ship the interest payments back to New York: those profits stayed in the community. People were more independent: the local optometrist didn’t work for Opti-Co™, a Ramtron© company, which is a division of GloboChunk®.

Introverts hate being optometrists. They have to make eye contacts.

When BigDrugStore® moved into Modern Mayberry, what did they do?

They bought the local pharmacies from the local pharmacists. They hired (then fired after a year or so) the local guys. Now, profits that used to go to funding the local little league team are funneled to investors in New York where they buy part of a bathroom renovation in the Hamptons.

Likewise, the local manufacturers have dried up, too. There used to be at least seven little widget factories that made various doo-dads and thingamajigs that now are produced either in People’s Liberation Army Factory #323 or in Whamco’s™ huge factory in Pakistan.

I guess that’s an everlasting jobstopper.

Big businesses have two impacts: they suck profits out of communities, and they make everyone less independent. There are several factors that have led to this:

Allowing corporations to live forever and do anything.
Having combined huge corporations making huge purchases so that the combined purchasing power of all of the (for instance) Wal-Marts® can be used to put the pressure on suppliers to lower every cost, including labor,
Burden small companies with exactly the same regulations as large companies, giving large companies the incentive to seek out stronger regulation to keep competition down, and,
Realizing that every dollar pulled out of the community is an extra dollar of New York profit for putting in that new pool house.

This did reduce prices, at least enough to put small businesses out of business, but it has hurt America by taking profits that were local and nationalizing them to the existing GloboLeftistElite. Yes, there were benefits, but each of these communities is now (over time) poorer for having these larger businesses in them.

DNA is like Taco Bell® – same four ingredients, nearly infinite results.

An aside: this process has funneled huge amounts of money to the GloboLeftistElite. Who are they? They’re the people who run and own the largest corporations, yet are Marxists. Don’t believe me? Look at all of the class struggle propaganda that shows up from their typical GloboLeftist company in a year. Trotsky would blush, I mean, if he hadn’t been killed with an icepick.

This has hurt rural America, which was built on individuals working and creating wealth locally. I look at small towns across the United States at their aspirational city halls and libraries, and think, “Could any of them afford to build those structures now?”

No, they couldn’t.

Why not?

Because the locally created wealth has been siphoned off.

In the end, what can be done? Here’s a modest proposal:

Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
Restrict corporations to a specific line of business.
Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
Ease regulatory burdens on smaller companies, making it easier to form and grow them.
Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.

I could probably think of more changes that would actually return more capitalism to the country. Yes, Apple™ isn’t fond of competition or capitalism or even the United States. GloboLeftBigCorp© companies that have done their best to concentrate capital and economic power while at the same time being overtly Leftist.

You should respect people like me who wear glasses. I paid money to see you.

Feel free to attack any individual points above, but the constant concentration and combination of economic power has to be stopped – inherently, it is anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, which leads to the failed ideology of group altruism. Besides, those were the result of five minutes of thinking and I avoided thinking about creative uses for lamp posts.

Why is group altruism bad? When .gov takes your money and gives it to another person it likes better than you, no one gets to feel the inherent power of helping people. Helping people is great on an individual level, because it reinforces the idea of humans helping humans. Helping people voluntarily is virtuous, especially if the help changes the path the person is on so in the future they don’t need the help. Those that help go from anonymous people who are tax farmed to people who have actual skin in the game in helping people succeed.

On the other hand, group altruism creates a situation those who are most in need become the most despised because they are seen as the irredeemable bit of society. Group (.gov) altruism doesn’t want to make people independent, because dependent people are dependable voters for more .gov and more regulations and money transfer, and .gov loves a divided people. Also, since people pay taxes, many of them feel no obligation whatsoever to help anyone. They’ve farmed out their virtue.

I read that a big company helped blind kids. But they meant the verb, not the adjective.

Want to know why Reparations for slavery from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves is popular? It’s the GloboLeftElite’s mechanism for creating a feeling of entitlement that will never go away. How much is enough Reparation? There is no answer, because the GloboLeftElite has said that there will never be enough Reparation. Never. That’s the result of group altruism.

Do I want people to not starve and also stay in Africa, or India, or (insert country name here)? I do. That doesn’t mean that individual organizations can’t help them, but to do so should be voluntary, and not the power of the government to take wealth and allocate it around the world or, through action or inaction, bring an unending supply of immigrants to our shore.

The solution in the future is to create a society where commerce is human scale, is focused on maintaining and encouraging the family (which is the atom of the nation) and is based on the nation, not on every person on the planet.

Anyone else ready to party like it’s 1899?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Dances With Dementia Edition

“We’re talking a Sunday drive into some serious dementia.” – Mannequin

Biden’s doctor told him he has dementia. His response? “I’m sorry, I don’t remember asking.”

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

Volume VI, Issue 2

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 – Felon and Fading – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Immigration Update – 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.

Felon and Fading

June is certainly the biggest month so far in the 2024 Presidential campaign, and it’s hard to beat may when Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York. Seriously, why would a business want to do business in New York now?

Regardless, I was expecting a bad Biden debate performance, but I wasn’t expecting to see the worst debate performance in the history of presidential debates, and probably in the history of the English language.

The other big bombshell was that Trump’s sentencing on his conviction has been pushed back until after the Republican National Convention, so there is this odd place where a Paperwork American (actually Colombian) judge is going to oversee the sentencing. How could he do anything but sentence the Republican candidate to prison? But that’s in September.

In June the debate made everyone forget Trump’s trial.

And now we are certain that the person currently holding the title of “president” is certainly no such thing. Whoever is actually making the decisions wanted to expose him so they could replace him. And no Democrat thinks Kamala can win because she’s either always drunk or stupid. Or both.

Where we are now is that Biden is done – the GloboLeftElite just don’t know what to do yet to make that so, and how to remove Kamala at the same time so that they can find someone electable. July will be an even more eventful month, if my guess is right.

This level of political intrigue is the highest since 1859 or so, and it’s quite clear that the glue that holds the country together is nearly gone, and this is a signpost on the way to Civil War 2.0.

Violence and Censorship Update

Although these Tweets™ are about a Canadian forum, the headquarters of Reddit™ are in San Francisco. San Francisco used to be about innovation, now it’s about conformity to The Narrative, which includes mass immigration, everywhere:

Before we leave Canada, look at your future if the GloboLeftElite get their way:

While technically not violence, the fact that basic infrastructure is being sabotaged in California probably deserves a mention:

And the Deep State is worried that Trump would do to them what they’re trying to do to him:

What happens to a story that doesn’t meet The Narrative? It gets ignored.

Oh, and I bet none of you heard about when Putin and Kim decided to crash a Pride parade:

Biden’s Misery Index

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

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

But technology will save us, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

The economy looks to be juiced, but thankfully we have housing options.

Illegal Aliens:

June is showing as down, since (my take) the .gov folks are just making up numbers now.

Immigration Update

I thought I’d just leave these here so you can form your own conclusions. I’ll be more wordy next month.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://nypost.com/2024/07/06/us-news/oakland-looters-ransack-gas-station-as-store-owner-sam-mardaie-claims-cops-took-hours-to-respond/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13325763/Gas-station-Atlanta-Decatur-Shootout.html

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1808303782922473571/video/2

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/07/05/chicago-fourth-july-violence-12-dead-55-shot

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-07-02/gang-violence-mexico-bodies-found-cartel-battle-for-drug-migrant-trafficking-routes

Good Gal

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13328107/university-chicago-student-fights-armed-robber-hyde-park.html

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13556823/Kyle-Rittenhouse-Kenosha-mom-sister-faith-gofundme.html

Body Count

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-fbi-stats-show-historic-declines-violent-crime-rate-murder-showing-rcna156573

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-urban-violent-crime-spike-is-real

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/VORO_US-Troops-Overseas_Site.jpg?itok=T8aq2vJ2

Vote Count

https://truethevote.org/news/want-to-do-something-help-review-voter-rolls-training-this-wednesday

https://www.themainewire.com/2024/06/49-states-including-maine-are-handing-voter-registration-forms-to-illegal-immigrants-applying-for-welfare/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/republicans-ballot-harvesting-fraud-claims-rcna151952

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/06/house-democrats-oppose-gop-noncitizen-voting-bill

Civil War

https://www.yahoo.com/news/secession-states-cities-wealthy-already-124257756.html

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/state/3010829/oregon-conservative-secession-plan-flee-liberal-state/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/19/oregon-idaho-state-secession-national-divorce/73677225007/

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/mo/st-louis/news/2024/05/24/pritzker-secession-vote-november

https://www.keranews.org/politics/2024-05-30/texas-secessionist-group-could-get-a-boost-from-new-state-gop-leadership

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/30/inpu-m30.html

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-gop-adds-secession-to-partys-2024-official-platform-34749083

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/-death-chaos-civil-war-furious-trump-supporters-out-for-blood-after-conviction/3236326

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

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/11/canada-us-civil-war-00162521

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13521773/Canada-preparing-American-CIVIL-WAR-election.html

https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump-fans-proudly-tell-cnns-donie-osullivan-u-s-is-not-a-democracy-predict-civil-war-if-trump-loses/

https://time.com/6991271/civil-war-conflict-ray-dalio/

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-issues-premonition-civil-war-warning-us-4th-july-1921191

Gamer Gate 2.0: Ugly Women Edition

“Report here safely, stop. Do not play video games.” – John Wick

Proof once again you’re an un-person if you remember the 1990s, intact families, and Christmas. (as found)

Pop culture exists, and I often write about it. The reason is that it is pervasive, surrounds us, and can absolutely be used to manipulate human feelings and behavior, so, in a sense it is a form of programming about who and what we are. In essence, it can be a myth that evolves with us, sort of like intestinal parasites.

Pop culture has always been around, but it has transformed over the millennia of human existence. It likely started with Grug talking around the communal fire, telling stories of the clan, their origin, and the evils they defeated, and how he had to walk uphill both ways to get back to the cave when he was a child and that they didn’t have any of those new-fangled flint arrowheads when Grug was small.

Through this mechanism, the ideas that the clan had, its virtues, its norms, and even its fears were transmitted from one group to another. It told the story of the group. Their story. That narrative bound them together as one – they knew the deeds of their fathers and sang songs about the virtues of their fathers.

My eye got infected with COVID. I had Corona-Iris.

Control of that story, then, is very, very powerful, and Grug probably (rightfully) skipped the part where he pooped his wolfskin jockstrap the first time he had to fight someone from the Wilder clan. Grug’s stories and pop culture thus both provide and define the Overton Window – those ideas that are safe to speak about in a polite society.

An example:

The idea that JFK was assassinated by literally anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald acting totally alone was not acceptable to The Powers That Be®. What did they do? They invented an entire new term to disparage any idea that varied from the Warren Commission report – “Conspiracy Theory”.

Oddly, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked into the JFK Lone Gunman theory in the late 1970s, they decided that, no, it couldn’t have been Lee Harvey Oswald acting by himself. The results of the Committee were mostly ignored. The smear of anyone with a different opinion continued, and if it weren’t for the Zapruder film, I imagine they’d probably try to convince everyone JFK killed himself because he hated Dallas.

I promise, I don’t know any dirt on the Clintons.

The cast of people who benefited from Kennedy’s death was huge: The CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Mafia, LBJ, Israel’s nuclear program, the gun control agenda, and the Boy Scouts™ all benefited. Okay, maybe not the Boy Scouts©, but you get the picture. The only person I’m sure wasn’t involved was me, and that’s because I wasn’t born yet.

Beat that alibi.

But crafting that public opinion isn’t just for the CIA or whatever thinktank meme’d the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” into existence. Nope. Pop culture is largely put out by Hollywood™ and, increasingly game companies.

Hollywood™ (if I include television, which I should) was the biggest influence when I was a kid. Everyone in my grade was watching the same movies at the same time on the same station. If a James Bond® movie was on, you were watching that, because cable came to the vicinity of Wilder’s Mountain about the time I was finishing high school and you had three choices (no one watched PBS™) and James Bond™ was always going to be better than whatever else was on.

I’ve never played Warhammer®, so I’m really hoping that it doesn’t have a “Shoe” or I’ll feel more stupid than usual.

We watched the same television shows, too. And, I’ve related before, I remember wondering in middle school if there was a reason that the TradRight couldn’t be funny, since even in seventh grade I recognized that every comedy and drama on television was written from a GloboLeftElite perspective. Even in middle school I recognized that Hollywood™ was a Leftist enclave.

Television (and movies!) was a pipeline that was well in place as owned turf of the GloboLeftElite by the end of the 1970s. But a new medium was emerging, and the old monolith of the big three networks was fracturing.

The new medium was gaming.

I hear she wears Fruit of the Tomb™ underwear.

Gaming was, especially at the early parts, unabashedly libertarian, as was much of the infant Silicon Valley at the time. Games like Pac-Man™, Pong©, and that one with the plumber were big, and largely free of politics, which is to say skewed towards the TradRight in the opinion of the GloboLeft.

Games rose under Atari™, sank, then rose again, this time higher and higher with Nintendo™ and then Sony™ and Sega™ and finally the X-Box™. Each iteration brought more story and visual complexity to the games, but the consumer was mainly the same: young white dudes. Sure, women have always played games, but the biggest gamers have always been boys. Oh, and the Prussians. They invented wargaming when it wasn’t convenient to duel or kill someone just to pass the time (seriously, look it up).

And what do boys like? Girls. Thus, Lara Croft™ and the Tomb Raider© series came into existence, complete with her huge . . . eyes. And shapely . . . hair. Lara Croft® was about as realistic as He-Man® was, but that was okay. She was an idealized version (through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy) of what a hot woman looked like.

But the GloboLeftElite have started a war against hot women. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s because that women feel threatened by hot women. I will note that not a single feminist ever jumped out and said that Superman™ was an unrealistic body model, or has tried to get Brad Pitt out of movies and replace him with that guy that plays Paul Blart.

No. They want to uglify women characters in video games. I think so that ugly feminist women feel better.

The latest? Jean Grey™, that buxom fiery-haired psychic that, ahem, inspired so many young men, has been redone. Yup, here it is.

Yes, hot Jean Grey™ has been turned into a plank of wood that looks like Melinda Gates. And who was responsible? Not sure, but Sweet Baby, Inc. (links below) have allegedly been busy as they can be with Jean Grey, gumming up the works to make sure that all of the GloboLeftElite talking points and propaganda is included in the game and that the women in the games are as ugly as the Sweet Baby, Inc. women feel that they are inside. And outside, I guess.

When I play a video game, I’d rather play a cool strong character rather than Archie Bunker. Do women want to play as a hot chick, or do they want to play as a woman with a body best described as “tubular and featureless”?

Gamer Gate 2.0: Woke On Patrol

Gamer Gate 2.0 Update: Disproportionate Response Edition

It’s not just video games. Dungeons & Dragons™ has said that they’ll be happy when white guys stop playing their games.

Okay, done. (meme as found)

Disney’s© latest Star Wars™ flop, The Acolyte, has lesbian witches creating a baby without needing no man via the Force™. The producer also said that if we didn’t like it, don’t watch it, and then when we didn’t watch it, blamed us for not being the audience she (yes, you guessed it) deserved. I guess that in Star Wars©, they don’t need no man to have a baby.

You can do what you want, but I’ll be skipping this round. I like Grug’s stories better, anyway.