Silly Predictions – Page 11 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult. I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible. We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese. I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more. And safe? Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school. I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson. Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me. I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls? Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football. This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was. We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school. And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of. And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility. That being said, I started to research a bit deeper. What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday. Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother. One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK). I didn’t think the article was great. But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

Control of the Media: CNN®? Leftist think CNN™ is centrist. Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box. The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less. It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court. All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act. Snowden, anyone?
Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting. Also: say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts. As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6^th. End of story.
Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person. It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee. Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019. It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system. Trump didn’t restore law and order. Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly. But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan. The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy. There are two problems with this:

There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny. The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“The historical cycle seems to be:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy,
from apathy to dependency; and
from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them. All they have to surrender is control. And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator? They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now. He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time. It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt. It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?). No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative. Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan. Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man. It won’t be a woman: the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered. Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not. The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government. In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record. I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well: The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds. Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident? Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

Food
Money
Pharmaceuticals
Media
Politics
Culture
Technology
Communications
Family Structure
Energy
Immigration
Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch. All for the greater good, of course. Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas. I’ll close with this happy thought: Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty. And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people. Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us. Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next: (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone? He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series. Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War. The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
Legalized disco, and
Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact: It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.© Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget: in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional. War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty. His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today. As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready. It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer. It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse. It makes me so mad: if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste. He created power structure after power structure in the country. Social Security. Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only. Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency. And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued. What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator. In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs. The easiest way to do that? Dispersed knowledge. Incentives. Voluntary cooperation. In short, capitalism. The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States. It’s ironic: the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here. They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

Colleges and Universities
The K-12 educational system.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The American Medical Association.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho. How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society. It rots society from within. The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough. The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary. Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®. I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States. We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency. This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing. In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture. Now? Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy? That’s a lot of hungry people. A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope. A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions. The Strong Man.

The response? That’s Friday’s post: The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World. They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed. As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy. That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need. As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative. Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life: you can’t outrun your teeth. But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them. Will one a week kill you? No. Will one a day? Maybe. Same with chips. I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago. Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy. Same with donuts. When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product. Which they are. Corollary: don’t let your teeth dig your grave. I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff. A baked potato or French fries? Baked, thank you. Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap. If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week. At most. Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today. It sure made his parents mad.
The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier? Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full. Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour. Insulin tells your body to store fat. Do the math.
Get exercise. It’s good for you. If nothing else, walk. If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain. One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away. Keep moving. Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
Avoid it, except, say, once a week. Maybe. I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®. I want to hear the news.” Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth. Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting. Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative. And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week. Don’t believe me? Ask Psaki about COVID.
The media lies. But I repeat myself. “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet. Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait? She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Look it up. Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this: your emotion is the aim. Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad. There’s plenty. Twitter® is a sea of it. Most social media is a sea of it. That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13^th
For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now. There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them. Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy? There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad. When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim. Stop it. Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once. It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage. These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on. It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago. If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care. A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly. And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps. And never go casual. Get competitive.
If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why? Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values. Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have? Yours? The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate. Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice. Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it. Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
I have one. I could pay it off in cash. Why could I pay it off? Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997). I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month. Second, there’s a moral cost. Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character. But every month, and forever? It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time? Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights? GTA is a life stealer. And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
Why live in a big city? The high housing cost? The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you? Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them. When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question: “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?” If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on. The worst case? Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau. How will you prepare for that?
You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away? It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic. It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life. He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario. It isn’t. Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us. The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating). This last one deals with the essence of the modern world: Money.

We are being farmed. For money. For time. For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s. I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman. To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee). Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921. Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough. Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car. Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies. You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys’r’Us© kid . . . bankrupt and empty inside.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff. Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me. The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction. Then they (generally) fail. I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required. Example?

Car insurance. There was a time it wasn’t required. As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding). Before 1956, no states required car insurance. Is it a good idea? Yeah. But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird. The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking? The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

Cable TV,
Subscription streaming,
Internet,
Elvis impersonators,
Property taxes,
Mortgage or rent,
Trash,
PEZ®,
Water,
Water soluble dog wax,
Sewer,
Johnny Depp, and
Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going. Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes. Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory. It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association. And Johnny Depp? Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse. It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income. Then, enter feminism. It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®. Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s. Help the Clampetts? I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday. I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce. So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result? Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much. The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress. The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me? Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up. And government dependency went up. Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes. How can the Left keep winning like this? That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money. The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™. The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business. But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school. But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan. This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school. I don’t think I can ever repay you. I kid. But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013. I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts. More students plus higher tuition led to more loans. This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000. The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go? To climbing walls. To cool dorm rooms. To spring breaks. To new buildings. And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have? Part C.

Yes. Medical care. In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can. Eat healthy food. Get exercise. Stay hydrated. Wash your hands. Try not to get crushed under heavy things. Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry. Healthy people are lousy customers. Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea. No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight. No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes. And they actually want you to get cancer. This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report: “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm. Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now? If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event. Does that sound sustainable? I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites. The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset. According to their thoughts: We’ll own nothing, and like it. Then, our time could be farmed forever. Our desires could be controlled and programmed. We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed. And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable. Don’t believe me? Listen to them, in their own words:

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure you can inflate construction costs and launder money through it.” – Ozark

I wonder if everyone can figure out why China built their own Internet now?

Biden has miscalculated. Again. As he has his entire life. He has moved from one miscalculation in his life to the next. So, it’s not surprising that perhaps the greatest failure in the history of the United States has shown up on his watch. Let’s go, Brandon, indeed.

To be fair, it’s not entirely Brandon’s fault. The United States economy, as I’ve gone to great pains to show over my posts, has been hollowed out over the years. We have gone from one that manufactures things and exports goods to one that mainly manufactures movies (we’re very good at that) and consulting and intellectual property and Starbucks™.

The thing that we’ve been best at is printing and then exporting dollars. For decades now, we have been exporting dollars that we printed and then importing stuff like fidget spinners and PEZ®. It was a great deal for us. People used those dollars and we got stuff, but it was essentially a global tax on the rest of the world.

That ability to tax, however, only works as long as people believe that the dollar is worth something, and that the holder of that economic power won’t bend the rules. Just like the bank runs up in Canada started when Trudeau broke the promise that the banks won’t steal people’s money, so the same principle applies to international affairs.

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

When Russia attacked Ukraine, Biden declared sanctions. Sure that’s a fine idea when dealing with a tiny random country, but Russia isn’t tiny. And Russia isn’t any random country.

See, one silver lining!

Russia is of huge importance to world commerce. Russia exports the stuff that makes modern economies go:

Food
Steel
Fertilizer
Titanium
Nickel
Oil
Refined Fuels
Natural Gas
Coal
Gold

In almost every commodity listed above, Russia is in the top five exporting nations. In several commodities, it is the world’s largest exporter. Check out the graphs on energy and wheat when the market gets disrupted:

What does Russia import?

Telephones
Car Parts
Computers
Medicine

Russia also exports nearly double what it imports. If there is a country that is nearly self-sufficient in this world, it’s Russia. There is an economic concept called “autarky” – or a nationwide independence from imports. Looking at the list of companies that are leaving Russia, well, could it be that Russia is better off without them?

Yes, Pornhub® and OnlyFans™ are on the list. I wonder what the effects will be? 21-year-old girls will have to find jobs that involve wearing clothes?

Russia isn’t independent. But it’s close enough. Most things that it is missing can be bought from either India or China. No iPhones®? China has a bunch of other kinds of phones. And all those businesses that left? It’s not like the Russians don’t know how to make hamburger and buns, so McPutins™ could open up tomorrow, though I’d skip the polonium sauce.

Russians are talking about nationalizing all of the assets of companies that have abandoned them. Why wouldn’t a country do that? Well, other countries could seize the overseas Russian assets.

Oops. Too late. So what’s stopping the Russians?

What is the threat from the West? That Russian audiences won’t have Netflix®? The things that Russia has been denied are, frankly, not very scary. They won’t get to see the next Marvel© movie? Oh, yeah, they also went after Russia’s money and tried to cut it off from the dollar-based economic system and . . . entertainment.

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

What happens when that bluff is called, when Russia and China decide that they don’t need dollars? What happens when Russia will sell natural gas to Europe only in yuan? Or for gold? Or that they won’t trade their commodities for anything at all?

The tent collapses, and by that tent I mean the dollar.

I actually think that Joe’s head is so far up . . . well, I’ll be kind and guess that he has Alzheimer’s rather than being this stupid. Oddly, this is viewed as an ideological opportunity by the Leftist henchxirs in Washington. They hate fossil fuels to the point of not caring about the relative plight of the American consumer. Don’t believe me? Listen to them:

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal. No matter what it costs.

There are even well-meaning Lefties starting to write articles to cope with the failure:

But here’s a sign: Joe tried to get meetings with the Saudis and the very friendly folks over at the United Arab Emirates. They wouldn’t return his calls. Imagine: a foreign leader refusing to even talk with the President* of the United States. It’s almost like he’s a fraud?

I wonder if he’s going to drunk-text the Emir tonight?

One person sums it up . . . .

Beyond that, the price of wheat is getting ready to go even higher. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce over 25% of the wheat exported in the world. A quarter. Ukraine’s planting season has been slightly impacted by current events, and Russian exports might be diverted to feed Ukraine.

The United States is certainly self-sufficient in wheat, but the prices of wheat are like oil: they’re tied to the international price. What happens when a loaf of bread is six dollars? Nothing good. But if there are price controls? Bread will be priced at two dollars. There just won’t be any in stores.

Domestic inflation is bad enough, but what happens when the Saudis start taking gold for oil from the Chinese? Or start paying for Russian wheat with the gold they got from the Chinese? The dollar, once indispensable, is done as the international currency.

The message is loud and clear – the end of the dollar is near. Why is gold up over $2,000? My question is why is gold only up to $2,000? I fully expect that, should Russia succeed, 90% of the dollar’s purchasing power will be gone in the next 14 months.

That will lead to massive changes in our economy, political unrest, and, potentially, the dissolution of the United States as we know it.

Thanks, Joe! Where is ¡Jeb! when we need him?

Civil War 2.0 On Hold: Russia, Russia, Russia

“If Russia mobilizes, there will be a war.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

I saw a billboard advertising clocks the other day – I guess it’s a sign of the times.

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

The Clock O’Doom has dropped back. For now. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Clock Retreats – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Hungry Days – 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 650 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Clock Retreats

February was on a pace to at least keep the pressure up.

COVID was causing Canada to rip apart.
The Department of Homeland Security decided that (see below) that anyone who put forward “misleading narratives which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” was a threat.
Truckers in the United States were getting ready to replicate the Canadian example in D.C.
Biden was less popular than syphilis.

Then? Ukraine. It’s completely stopped the concern about COVID. Corona is . . . gone. All hail Putin – the man who cured COVID. The truckers are still on the side of freedom in the United States, but the press isn’t covering them at all.

From the Civil War 2.0 standpoint, though, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has completely sucked all the oxygen out of the room. It is the only thing being discussed. And public perception is moving quickly. When the invasion was first launched, only 26% of people (mainly Leftists) wanted to have any American action taken.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution 426-3 supporting Ukraine, up to and including troops. It’s a resolution, so it’s not a declaration of war. But the Congressmen think their voters support intervention. They’re right – 74% of people in the United States support a “no-fly” zone over Ukraine.

The only way to do that, of course, is for Americans to directly shoot down Russian planes. I don’t think the Russians would take that well at all. I don’t expect a no-fly zone because even Biden isn’t foolish enough to consider that. I hope.

Regardless, the focus of the American public has been distracted. They’ve stopped fighting each other (sort of) and for the moment, Civil War 2.0 is off the menu. This is only a short-term event. As we’ll cover down below (and in much more detail on Wednesday), this reprieve is only short term. The invasion carries the seeds of stress that will ultimately make Civil War 2.0, much more likely.

For now, though, I’m moving the clock back to 10 minutes to midnight.

Violence And Censorship Update

As mentioned above, at the beginning of February, stress was actively added to the system. First, the DHS decided that differing options counted as terrorism. I’m hoping that they don’t see me calling their little note a blatant violation of the First Amendment as being in violation. I mean, who wouldn’t trust a government that doesn’t want alternative views published?

See for yourself:

Certified Genius Adam Kinzinger (just kidding, I’m not sure he’s smart enough to spell his own name) said that “targeted assassinations” were coming if civil war breaks out. I’m just hoping someone finds a room where he can have his coloring books in peace.

TD Bank, in Canada, gave funds for the Canadian truckers to the courts. Why? Having a different opinion means you’re a target. The Emergencies Act gave them the right to do that. As well as cut anyone who supported them, even verbally, out of the modern economic system.

And never forget – the Left wants people who love freedom bankrupt so they can never have a voice again.

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 flat. February isn’t (usually) a big month for violence, so that’s to be expected. I would expect the next few months to remain calm as well, perhaps turning back up in April.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, but instability fell in February. Short month, and the focus is now more outward.

Economic:

The drop in economic confidence turned around this month, mainly on lower unemployment. This is short term.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Again.

The Hungry Days

I’ve tried to model the way that people feel about the economy, politics, and violence above. One thing those models don’t do is predict. Here’s where a prediction is coming in, but it’s easier to predict what’s going to happen than predicting what will happen to a chocolate Easter bunny if you leave it alone in a room with a fat kid:

Ukraine is a tremendous producer of food for the world.
So is Russia.
Ukraine produces a lot of fertilizer and exports it.
So does Russia.

In the very best case, Ukrainian harvests will be far below normal. If the war continues, the harvests may be nearly zero. Ukraine may export no food – zero. Their industry for producing fertilizer might be wrecked beyond use, or the docks might be destroyed. Or the docks might be in Russian hands.

Russia, even if allowed to export, may choose to export food only to countries that don’t have sanctions against it. Would you choose to export to people that have cut you off, and might not even have a mechanism to pay you, to people who cut off your Netflix®?

What happens if wheat producers comprising nearly 26% of wheat exports in the world . . . stop selling to most people either because they can’t or don’t want to?

The world gets hungry. And if the millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas is off the market, the world gets poor.

So, we can end up in a world that is cold, hungry and poor. Quickly. And those are ideal conditions for Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1490379402005393413

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1487927709456031749

https://twitter.com/i/status/1484612953672347648

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490144736732188677

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1489137527659319298

https://twitter.com/i/status/1491418120086454278

https://twitter.com/Networkinvegas/status/1489654175570874368

https://gab.com/DrPaulGosar/posts/107814488157277312

https://twitter.com/NY_Scoop/status/1493116710173429761

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10483307/Shocking-video-shows-man-beaten-gang-Harlem-run-passing-car.html

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-bad-is-crime-in-l-a/

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/BettyKPIX/status/1494117970221547521

https://youtu.be/R4Y-6zg6rL8

https://youtu.be/Z0qSqtKcUtQ

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494460147246067720

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494431313452941323

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490900444494712834

https://twitter.com/Orwells_Ghost_/status/1491944537299771400

https://roycewhite.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-the-black-bourgeoisie

One Guy

https://youtu.be/WOZI59tSv_4

Body Counts

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/2021%2001_OCME%20Overdose%20Report.pdf

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/gun_control/gun_violence_most_americans_want_stricter_enforcement_not_new_laws

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542549/More-Americans-killed-GUNS-car-crashes.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500759/Police-shot-dead-record-1-055-people-2021-young-black-men-disproportionate-majority.html

https://nypost.com/2022/02/06/bidens-first-year-in-office-saw-73-police-officers-killed-most-deaths-since-1995/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-cartel-terror-schools-in-mexico-give-cannibalism-exams-failure-is-not-an-option

Vote Counts

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1486032341210480645.html

https://apnews.com/article/elections-wisconsin-local-elections-election-2020-general-elections-6f786ced357f2d89f61a6bd32afcdd08

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/01/breaking-special-counsel-finds-mark-zuckerbergs-election-money-violated-wisconsin-bribery-laws/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/12/texas-voting-requirements-ballot-rejections

https://www.newsweek.com/film-claims-it-has-video-mules-stuffing-ballot-boxes-2020-election-1679583

https://heritageaction.com/toolkit/election-integrity-toolkit

Civil War…

https://rollcall.com/2022/02/03/civility-downhill-biden-poll/

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bridgewater-s-ray-dalio-sees-u-s-on-path-to-civil-war-as-political-polarization-rises-1.1718043

https://www.conwaydailysun.com/opinion/columns/ross-douthat-let-s-not-invent-a-civil-war/article_921df052-74a0-11ec-a4e5-b37129c65643.html

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/ross-douthats-civil-war-blame-game

https://www.oleantimesherald.com/opinion/is-america-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_280c209d-0480-5284-9421-95d71b83eb9b.html

https://bobschaffer-53068.medium.com/how-does-one-grasp-a-civil-war-5101af781ba2

https://greensboro.com/community/rockingham_now/opinion/are-we-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_9caf04b4-a6f0-5687-b55d-040a1271fddc.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/january-6-civil-war.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-close-to-violent-conflict-book-how-civil-wars-start-2022-1

https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/stephen-marche-next-civil-war-review.html

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

https://www.newsweek.com/our-second-civil-war-opinion-1670408

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/targeted-assassinations-coming-if-civil-war-breaks-out-adam-kinzinger/ar-AATKbqK

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2022-02-12/ucsd-prof-walter-civil-war

https://www.newsandtribune.com/news/worries-valid-troubling-but-civil-war-unlikely-experts-say/article_5a61c30c-7d40-11ec-ba25-67f07cf005fb.html

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/new-civil-war-apocalyptic-rhetoric-news-media-far-right-liberals

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adam-kinzinger-civil-war-warning_n_62022630e4b0725faacec344

https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaire-investor-says-us-seemingly-on-path-civil-war-2022-2

https://observer-reporter.com/opinion/op-eds/op-ed-vigilantism-and-a-new-civil-war-a-warning/article_01df8b3e-853c-11ec-a851-cfae67c239f1.html

…Is Not The Worst That Can Happen…

http://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/03/1969_NEWSCHELLINGMEMO.pdf

When Change Comes

“There have been three major disasters and you were the only one unharmed.” – Unbreakable

What’s white, loud, and makes you spill your morning coffee? An avalanche.

There is a time and place when everything changes.

Sure, summer turns to fall which turns to winter which turns to, um, Daylight Savings Time. Regardless, like the seasons, some changes are reversible. I can freeze water and turn it into ice. Then, I can melt it and it’s water again and then I can freeze it. I then put it over my eyes – at least that way I look cool.

I saw Vanilla Ice at the local arena recently. He sold me a hot dog.

Reversible changes surround us. But there are irreversible changes, too. If I burn a piece of paper, it’s just gone. Forever. There is no physical process that can unburn the paper. Or bring back that Tweet® once you hit send – just ask Rosanne.

Changes like that happen to people and systems, too. I’m not going to focus on Russia tonight, but looking at Russia and Ukraine is instructive. When the ruble fell, it’s reversible. Will it reverse? Probably. At some point.

Maybe.

Will Ukraine ever be uninvaded? Nope. Heck, if you look at the history of Kiev/Kyiv it’s invaded approximately once every seven months. If ever there was a country that was more invaded, it wasn’t China, since only one person would take the Khansequences. The Ukrainian currency is called the hryvnia and it appears to be missing vowels. If Russia ends up conquering Ukraine, it won’t need any, since it, like the Roman denarius or the Babylonian shekel, will cease to exist.

There’s going to be so much losing. You’ll be tired of losing.

There are some things that you just don’t go back from. And that’s life. I wish I could go back in time and tell Pa Wilder to buy all the gold he could when anyone could purchase it all day long for $35 an ounce. If he had done that, I would have been a bullion heir.

In retrospect, it looks obvious. When Nixon did the irreversible – disconnected the dollar from gold, what did Pa Wilder think was going to happen? He thought the dollar would keep its value.

Why?

Because, after decades of the dollar being worth $35 an ounce, why would it ever change? For forty years of Pa’s life – gold had been priced at $35 an ounce. Gold would be (in the average person’s eyes in 1973) not a great investment.

But people, including Pa, missed the point. There was no physical process that would ever result in the dollar being backed by gold again. Nixon took the United States off the gold standard because he’d printed too much cash. And, as Biden will soon learn, prosperity doesn’t come from a printing press.

Wait, he made his money in Ukraine . . . .

I was watching a video from TIK History tonight when he brought up the conversation between a German and his banker back during Weimar Germany. “If you had only bought Swiss Francs (backed by gold) you would not have lost half your fortune.”

“But these are government bonds. Won’t they pay back?”

“The government that issued them no longer exists.”

In the United States, we have been in a very, very fortunate position. Our currency has been only ravaged by inflation and political theft over the years. We’ve been able to print up large quantities of dollars and just ship them over to people in other countries and they send us iPhones™ and soccer balls made by 12 year-olds since they apparently don’t have printing presses. Or because they have excess 12 year-olds.

Honestly, I’ve had 12 year-olds around the house, and I think one 12-year-old constitutes an excess 12-year-old.

Also, little kids from Nigeria are trying to give him US FIVE MILLION COOKYS.

Many currencies, like the Russian ruble, have been rendered nearly worthless nearly immediately by geopolitical events. That event is coming for the dollar.

I can’t tell you the date. I can’t give you the exact circumstances. But I will tell you that Charles Munger (Warren Buffet’s buddy) was in an interview where he flat out said that the dollar is eventually going to zero. The interviewer missed the point – when a currency implodes and goes to zero there is shock. There is starvation.

There are civil wars. There are revolutions.

But I can tell you after 2020, 2021, and now 2022 so far . . . change is in the air.

/pol/ Versus The Canadian Banking System

“Blame Canada.” – South Park, The Movie

Momma Bear angry! I hope she packed him an extra-special lunch for his next day when he had to go Prime Minister around all those mean other boys.

Notes: much of the memetic content is “as-found”. We’ll also livestream on 2/16 at 9pm EST at this channel.

Justin has had a bad run of it recently. His mommy had to stick up for him in public, and those gosh darn people won’t do what he tells them to do! Plus, he just recovered from his bout of the ‘Rona.

The problem is, first, that they were locking down his beloved Ottawa. As the Bee® notes, that’s Justin’s job:

And this was driving the people crazy. They felt like they were being held hostage:

Nothing Justin did seemed to make it better:

People weren’t at all sympathetic.

So Trudeau decided to double down.

One of the biggest fears that bankers used to have was the bank run. That’s the phenomenon where people show up at the bank and demand cash. Of course, the bank only keeps a few bucks on hand, so soon enough they run out. What happens then? People begin to get angry. Pitchfork and torch angry.

Trudeau’s wife was robbed at gunpoint at an ATM. The robber asked, “Do you ever want to see your husband again?” She said, “No.” They both had a good laugh.

For the record, only a small fraction of the currency in the country is actual, printed cash which is why if you want more than a small fraction of your cash from the bank, they’d pull out their pockets and shrug. The vast majority of cash is just a collection of ones and zeros located in computers in various banks.

It’s a useful fiction so socialists and people wanting to finance wars can just print more cash to pay, and everyone pretends that it’s not stealing. Countries have been very, very careful not to upset this particular applecart. A politician can mess up a lot of systems, but that politician would have to be a fool to suggest that he’d freeze the bank accounts of millions of his own citizens. Or that politician would be Justin Trudeau.

But I repeat myself.

That’s what Justin Trudeau did. He indicated that, because he said so, they’d take all the money they wanted from anyone who they thought was helping the protesters.

No, actually even Gilligan wouldn’t have tried this nonsense (apologies to Aesop for spoiling Gilligan by comparing him to Trudeau).

Seriously, what was Trudeau thinking? That the millions of people that, using emergency powers normally reserved for war against an outside enemy would just be pulled out because people wouldn’t take a shot he wanted and drove trucks and protested peacefully? Oh, sure it was a peaceful but honk-filled protest, but that’s akin to a world war?

Honk War III? World War Honk? The Honkening?

Yup, I guess. But this time there’s an amplifier. /pol/. /pol/ is a website run by the notorious hacker, 4chan. /pol/ is, well, its own place. It’s essentially an autism-powered supercomputer that has its own interests, language, and customs. I really don’t recommend anyone go there. Besides, they’re full.

But /pol/ is capable of wizardry. The night that Kyle Rittenhouse created two good commies in Wisconsin, /pol/ had videos from every angle before and after the shooting, and identified the people Rittenhouse erased, including criminal records within hours. They also tracked down an Antifa® killer from Portland and had his name, address, employer, and location before the police.

So, the crazy new idea to steal people’s money more quickly? /pol/ jumped on that.

It didn’t take long for the word to get out to the world:

And it didn’t take long for the news suppression to hit:

Understand that this will probably come to nothing. But also understand this: the banking systems and veneer of civilization is thin . . . unlike future Trudeau.

I hear he stress eats.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India. The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this: Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead. The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!”

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news. Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish: Tarp City) and looting them. What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch. Amazon® packages. Best Buy™. Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails. Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them. They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online. Except for books. And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast. There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant. Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in? It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas. Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks. Oh, they have? Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so! Oh, wait, it’s completely so. Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time. You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000. In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard. They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No! They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it! They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws. They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever. (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility. The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right. No, farther right. Yes, farther.

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work. Everyone not making big bucks? Inflation is eating the raises of most people. So who’s winning? I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff. Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless. Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless. Who owns things? Rich people. They’ve done very, very well. Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars. Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh? Honestly, it’s not a stock: it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something. Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff. Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why? Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up? No. You sell a meme. And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers. We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either. Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.