Silly Predictions – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Don’t Ask Why People Are Poor. Ask Why They’re Wealthy.

“Some actually value wealth of knowledge over material wealth, Harper.” – Andromeda

My butler just quit his job here at my stately home. He said he refused to be ordered around in that manor.

I find it sort of hilarious that economists spend a lot of time fretting about what causes poverty. I love economics, but often think that they create pocket universes to study that have no real connection to the here and now. I think that’s called sniffing their own . . . uh . . . emissions.

But sometimes it’s not just economists who ask the wrong question. As bad as they are, the worst offenders are politicians. Let’s start with the dumbest question that has been asked in my lifetime (at least in the United States):

“What causes poverty?”

That’s letting Whoopi Goldberg loose in a chocolate factory stupid. It doesn’t help the chocolate and leaves Whoopi sticky and needing an insulin shot.

But why is that a stupid question?

Because poverty is the dominant condition of humanity everywhere since we didn’t have two rocks to fight over. People throughout history have been devastatingly, living in mud hut, sleeping in straw beds filled with more bedbugs than straw. Mary and Joseph had to walk uphill, both ways, to get to the manger.

That’s a joke that keeps you coming back for myrrh.

Only in rare times, and only for a small percentage of the population of the world have some humans felt prosperity. Fewer still have felt prosperity for most of their lives. Fewer still experienced enough wealth in their society for them to think that wealth was normal, and poverty was the exception. We call them Pampered Coastal Elite Leftists.

Why? Because every farmer in the Midwest, every rancher in the High Plains, and every shrimper in the Gulf (among many, many others) knows how close they are to failure, and how close poverty is, especially if a free-range Whoopi Goldberg is free to eat and trample their crops.

Ma Wilder was impacted by the Depression (she was a lot older than my biological Mom, I was adopted) to the point that, living up on Wilder Mountain she’d save aluminum foil and old pickle jars and have enough food for six months because, “You just never know when you’ll need it.” It was kinda cute until she made us re-use Q-Tips®.

The Wolf is always at the door.

I couldn’t find the wolf, which I guess makes it a where-wolf.

So, the question to ask isn’t “what makes people poor”. We can see that as all the systems around us break down like they are now when morons are at the helm.

We should ask the important question: “What makes us wealthy?”

That’s a much better question to ask, since LBJ’s War on Poverty has just subsidized being poor and created a permanent underclass of voters for Leftists to farm, dependent on the Left for a constant stream of handouts. If you were late to Leftist language class, that’s their word for “compassion”.

So, what makes us wealthy? I can only go from history in those places where the world has deviated from the “nasty, brutish, and short” version of life to that “shining city on the hill”. What matters?

The first thing that comes to mind is Liberty, tempered with Virtue.

When a kangaroo gets hurt, it requires a hop-eration.

Liberty is important, but Virtue tempers Liberty and creates a boundary, otherwise Opium and Fentanyl Den™ would be the new Waffle House®. Or is that the existing Waffle House© after 2am?

What Liberty does is provides options, for millions of people to make individual decisions on how to better serve fellow citizens. Virtue means that they shouldn’t destroy their fellow citizens in the process, since that’s generally bad for business. I guess that cigarette companies have found that it’s okay if you kill them slowly after decades.

Not only that, it’s regulation. Who loves regulation? Big companies. Regulations make it hard for small companies to start, make it hard for them to compete, but increases their profit margin. I mean, I would have loved to compete with Pfizer® with my “Super Saline Covid Injection” that didn’t cause myocarditis, but they would probably want to make sure mine was entirely WD-40® free.

Which would still likely have been better for people than the mRNA Vaxx. But who is counting? Not the CDC®.

What else?

I hear Senator Mitch McConnell stole my rabbit. Mitch better have my bunny.

Intelligence. If you ask ChatGPT® about the correlation between intelligence and national prosperity it blows a fuse. Bing™ chimes right in: “There is a correlation between IQ and economic prosperity. A one point increase in IQ is associate with a 4% increase in welfare for the average country. High IQ is associated with high per-capita GDP and fast economic growth, as well as more equal income distribution.”

Ouch! That’ a truth bomb that most folks don’t want to hear. IQ is not really something that anyone can change for the better. Sure, I can drink a few shots of Jim Beam® and take mine down, but what I’ve got, is what I’ve got, from birth.

But smart people in an economy can keep a more stable economy, and can better grow a complex economy than a group of people who don’t know what vowels are. Sure, I’d like to think that groups of dumb people could get together and solve the nuclear fusion problem, but I’ve met dumb people – they can’t figure out how to split a restaurant tab without a knife fight then a follow-up sacrifice of a live chicken to Gorto the Destructor god.

Or I could have just said, “Imagine Haiti” and everyone would know what I meant.

Why is Haiti spelled without an “e”? Simple. They hate e.

Again, I’m not blaming Haitians for making Haiti, well, Haiti, but if you want to cry, go look over the difference in income between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I’ll save you the time – the Dominican Republic has nine times the per capita income, despite being on the same exact island. The data I found (on the ‘net, mind you) has the Dominican Republic has an average IQ of 80. Haiti has an average IQ of 67.

Haiti has an average intellectual capacity (if this data is correct) at the level where Social Security would consider them disabled (on average).

Having great resources? That doesn’t appear to help. It’s the System. It’s the People. If Hong Kong and Singapore can create wealth out of zero resources in a location that almost anyone in the United States would consider so crowded they’d have to make an appointment to change their mind, it’s not space, it’s not stuff.

We can change our laws to allow more Liberty and increase Virtue and reverse the trends away from the nonsense of the last fifty years that encourage large corporate growth at the expense of the People.

But if we change out our People?

Who are we? Will we see the continuation of turning our cities into Haiti on the half shell?

Studies of the genetics of dead Romans (LINK) showed that “intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27).”

Why did Rome fall? Many reasons. It lost Liberty, it lost Virtue, and it replaced Romans with people who weren’t Romans.

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

Steps Forward, Steps Backward, and The Long Road

“Not according to the recent Supreme Court case of bite versus me.” – House, M.D.

No one complained when I got into Buddhism and became a Buddhist. No one complained when I got into Affirmative Action and became an activist. But get into fashion?

Today the Supreme Court (it’s like regular court, but with sour cream and tomatoes) said that, under the Equal Protection clause, that discriminating against people (or even for people) based on race is against the Constitution. I guess you could say that the Supreme Court has changed since Ginsberg passed away: it’s now Ruth-less.

For the longest time, the courts were sort of ignored by the Right. The judges appointed by the Right (when they were in power) were often horribly Leftist advocates of state power. At some point, the Right started picking justices based on choosing people who actually weren’t horrible Leftists in disguise (looking at you, David Souter). The Federalist Society® was the catalyst for this. Of the current Supreme Court, six of the nine justices are current or former Federalist Society™ members.

Yes, this is a real Tweet® and not a parody account.

The vote to kill affirmative action on campuses was six to three.

That’s an important number because it shows that the Federalist Society©, founded 41 years ago, has now defined the Supreme Court and the judges that have been nominated.

This is a victory.

But it wasn’t easy, and the span of effort to get that victory took decades of effort. When the Federalist Society™ was founded, the court system of the United States was an absolute shambles. When the Leftists couldn’t pass legislation that let them do things they like to do, like killing moar babiez, the courts could be counted on to find a new right that was somehow stuck in the “penumbras and emanations” of previous rulings to let them do whatever was popular with the cool kids that week.

Think that’s what happened to the Titan?

What always bothered me was that they could take a simple phrase like, “shall not be infringed” and twist it through precedents and rulings and interpret it to mean, “shall be infringed whenever we feel like it, you stooge”. The “you stooge” part wasn’t actually in the ruling, but it can be inferred through the “emanations and penumbras”.

Why did Roe v. Wade get struck down to allow states to make laws against baby killing? Because of the Federalist Society™. If you’re ever able to go buy a .50 caliber Ma Deuce at your local convenience store in full auto as God intended? Thank the Federalist Society©.

I don’t remember Linda leading the Leftist Karen Brigade in the Amy Coney Barrett Insurrection . . . do you?

Another place where the Left has lost is on carry of weapons. In 27 states you can take your favorite hand cannon and pop it right under your vest without a permit, and without asking anyone for permission. It’s what’s called “Constitutional Carry”. This didn’t happen by accident. It took dedicated groups working locally through decades to get these laws passed.

That’s the key. Victory isn’t won in an afternoon after a training montage where Luke© spends 22 minutes with Obi Wan® and learns the Force™. Nope. Victory is won by grinding it out, day after day, putting people in place. Having conversations. Convincing people that the idea of freedom is better than the idea of government control takes time.

Remember, it only works if you have goals.

One view is that, from the viewpoint of the Right, that there has been nothing but a long string of loss, and there is no way that we can every come back.

Clearly, that is wrong. The grassroots pushback against the insanity of The Narrative can’t be stopped. Why, exactly, do gays and transexuals and drag queens need access to our children? That question is in the minds of enough people that celebration of Pride Month, 2023, was a bit limp.

I guess we’ll have to re-purpose the journalist machine, after a fair trial, of course.

Have we lost most university campuses? Have we lost the military senior officer corps? Have we lost the senior management in most Fortune® 500 companies?

Yup. We’re still down in many places. But Budweiser® is afraid now. And we don’t have to destroy every company that goes woke. There’s an old Chinese saying: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” We don’t have to destroy every company, but I’m certain that the distinct lack of Pride stolen rainbow colors in June on every damn corporate logo was a result of that Budweiser© chicken being plucked.

Where will the next victories come from? They will come from places that passionate people have been working for decades. It doesn’t require money, it requires work. As the other saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”

The seeds of our future victory are being planted right now in the heads of they youth. They see the lies, greed, and envy that are the only things outside of Nancy Pelosi swimsuit pictures that the Left has to sell. Today, removed from their menu, is the idea of Affirmative Action. That idea is dead.

I know nobody wanted to see the swimsuit picture. You’re welcome.

The battle is not over. The Left is always better organized than the Right, but the Right has a wonderful thing on its side: the Truth. As I have always maintained, we will win. And as I have also always maintained, the final victory won’t be tomorrow, or next week, or next year, though some events will certainly happen suddenly.

And the Supreme Court? They can go out to dinner together again since Ginsberg died. She used to steal food from people at diners – they called her Booth Raider Ginsberg.

The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20^th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.

Dispatches From The Culture War

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” – Star Trek: TNG

My body is like a Greek temple as I age. In ruins.

There is so much going on any given news cycle in the last few months that it’s now difficult to be amazed about anything. Credible sourcing that Joe Biden took bribes? When asked about it, he said, “Then where’s the money?”

That’s not the way that innocent people act, rather, that’s a taunt that’s similar to a mobster saying, “You got nothin’ on me, copper.” Biden did it, might even remember he did it, and is now telling the world that he’s above it all and doesn’t fear anything. Of course, he’s a thousand years old now, so he’s probably pretty deep in “old guy DNGAF” mode.

Certainly, Biden (or whoever has the remote control that makes Biden say thinks like a big flesh robot) gave the nod before Trump was indicted. This was intentional. There is something about Trump that the Left and Official Washington and Big Money despises that caused them to set up a propaganda campaign among their followers like few before it. They even got high on their own supply, believing that the echo chamber that they had created was a reflection of reality, rather than just their own words played back to them on an infinite-repeat loop, like I play The Accountant, or Big Trouble in Little China.

Regardless, the split is deep, and, although I don’t think Pew® has updated their Left/Right split data, I think that the split has become ever deeper. The Los Angeles Dodgers® can’t even fathom why Catholics would protest the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT+ group that openly mocks Christian faith. They can’t understand why most Americans don’t want to go to war due to two oppressive Eastern European countries fighting each other over land that’s been fought over so many times that I think they’re on the Juneteenth Battle of Kharkov.

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

Trump embraced the LGBT+ agenda explicitly, so it’s not that. His performance on illegals, while much better than Biden’s, looked more like Obama than Eisenhower. So, it must be the war thing, since Democrats and the Neo-Con branch of the RINO party have been all-in on Ukraine for decades.

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO? Sigh.

Whatever was the common core of America is no longer common. Using Michael Savage’s mantra of borders, language, and culture to define a country (not a nation, that’s different) is a bleak exercise.

Borders: The Right would like some. The Left thinks that borders are fundamentally racist and that everyone is a citizen of the United States, they just haven’t gotten here to vote for them. Biden still thinks that Borders® is a bookstore.
Language: The Right would like just one, English. The Left celebrates multiplicity of mutually unintelligible people. A few years ago, I listened to an NPR® station that had a late night talk program that focused on the idea that it was racist if you couldn’t understand what some dude who just crossed the river or got off the boat said, regardless of how heavy and thick his accent is. I mean, at least fish have an excuse for having a Finnish accent.

Archeologists never get married. They’re only interested in dating.

Border and Language are in absolutely horrible shape. Culture, of course, is the worst off.

One of the constant cries of the Left is that the United States has no culture. This is patently a lie – fish don’t know about water because they’re surrounded by it, all the time. So are Leftists, but they hate it. But I said it was a lie. Leftists do see the culture, and want to destroy it and rebuild it to fit their ideology because the last thing they want is to see happy people. Here are just a few segments of culture, and what the Left is doing to try to destroy it.

A huge target for the Left has been the effort to dismantle the history of the West. Slavery? Even though it was far from a Western invention, and even though the United States fought a war to end it, and even though Great Britain used their navy to end the trade, it has been painted as only a sin of the West. The effort is also in full swing to distort and demean every single historical figure that generations of schoolchildren idolized. Why did the Left start tearing out statues? Any previous hero must be destroyed so that the Leftists can choose new, acceptable heroes.

I kept making a statue of St. Peter and the city kept tearing it down. Then they gave me a ticket – they said I was a re-Pete offender.

The customs and traditions are being erased. Examples are everywhere, but just look toward the military of the United States for some particularly egregious examples. I’m fairly certain the Marines will soon be issued Nerf® guns so they don’t hurt themselves. Etiquette is also falling apart, where Americans are told that they have to conform to the etiquette of foreigners and Leftists. Previously, it was accepted that aliens would have to adopt American customs and traditions. In 2023, that is racist, of course.

The arts and literature of the nation are being changed. Movies, which morphed from the pro-American fare of the Disney® era now is actively anti-American. Thankfully, many of the ideologically driven writers, directors, and executives that are now in charge make horrible movies, but it’s clear that the last decade has brought fewer good movies than the year 1986 did by itself. Literature now consists of horrible screeds against racism, but they’re not content with that – publishers are now actively editing works from the past to make them conform to Leftist principles. Electronic media is all subject to that so books and DVDs might be the only way in the future to see the real deal.

Education is a cornerstone for any culture. Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” The commies have always focused on this, and they’ve done a really good job on the education centers of the world. But it doesn’t happen all at once. First, they grabbed the colleges. Then, bit by bit, they grabbed each teacher that they could coming through the system and indoctrinating them into Leftism. When I was in school, the real first wave of hardcore Leftists were hitting the schools, but it was just one or two. Now? Videos I’ve seen in big cities show they’re Lefty, through and through. Even in Modern Mayberry are they attempting to take over. Thankfully our school board is pretty good at keeping those zealots out.

And Joe is smart enough to figure out how to make a train go across the Indian and Pacific oceans!

I started writing this post on Fathers’ Day, and was amused because it’s not really Fathers’ Day anymore, it’s “I’m a single mom so I am both father and mother and this is about me” Day. The destruction of the traditional and nuclear family structure is the first thing Leftists have attacked, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution to the communist version of Spain that Franco destroyed. It’s a shame Franco didn’t have helicopters. The social organization of a country is the what regenerates it. Family structures and gender roles reinforce the culture. Every wonder why those are marked for change?

Finally, the values and beliefs of a culture help define it. It used to be that prostitution was a dirty little secret. Now? Leftists argue that “sex work is real work” and Moms spend time making money on Only Fans®. Was there hypocrisy in old America? Sure. But shame and ostracism were powerful motivators to keep the rot down.

I did hear that Hunter was sad because he wasn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas.

This list could go on and on – I have over 10 more categories where I could go through the same exercise, but the answer wouldn’t change and this post would then be 4,000 words and I’d get no sleep at all tonight. The Mrs. keeps reminding me that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, and I’ll have plenty of time to rest after I’ve died.

As I’ve recently been saying, the idea isn’t to conserve our culture, since it has been turned into a smoking crater by Leftists appealing to the vanity and pride of susceptible folks. This will end as it has always ended, since the reason American culture was successful will cease to exist as American culture ceases to exist. From there, there will be tears.

And then? Our job is to rebuild and restore. And most of the people that formerly fell into the Leftist trap of dismantling the success and wholesomeness of the culture will welcome that restoration, after having seen what their depravity has created.

Rebuilding a culture takes time. It won ‘t be done in my lifetime, but probably will be in the lifetime of my children. And that’s good enough for me. Our job is to keep the fire lit, and to not let the Left get away with the lie and call the destruction they’ve created to be simply called “bad luck”.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Don’t forget to celebrate Juneteenth!

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – May Edition – Lies and Immigration

Newspaper Headline: “Roman Moroni Deported to Sweden. Says He’s Not From There.” – Johnny Dangerously

How should they be deported? Juan by Juan.

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

Volume V, Issue 1

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 – Immigration Crisis – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Spark, Part 2 – 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 over 790 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Immigration Crisis

Immigration has been a continuing and contentious issue throughout my life. The major reason people immigrate in this age is not due to mistreatment, but due to economic factors. If it weren’t economic, the Guatemalans would stay in Mexico, which is culturally much closer. But it’s all about money for the majority of immigrants.

This is difficult, because the people coming into the United States mainly don’t like the United States all that much, they like the money and free stuff – that’s why they have their flags held high as they march toward our country.

It’s the same in most other Western countries – the immigrants coming into Germany, for instance, haven’t helped as much as they suck from the economy – only half of the immigrants to Germany since 2013 have paid employment.

They want the stuff.

The numbers coming into the country are undercounted, significantly. And there’s no longer any place to stack them. New York is saying they’re full. The black people in Chicago don’t want any more of them. The average American voter doesn’t want them, and I’d guess the average Dane or Italian would feel the same way.

So why do they keep on coming?

Because the Left wants them – Leftist businesses for cheap labor, and Leftist politicians for a vote farm of poorly educated, easily led (because they don’t speak the language) voters. And it’s not that the immigrants are choosing this themselves – millions of dollars (likely your tax dollars) are spent getting them to our borders. This video shows the massive amounts of money being spent on them as they make their way north. Similar groups are spending millions in Europe to destroy it in the same fashion.

Your tax dollars at work.

And the government is in on it in a manner that many might call treason:

Even in Canada:

The end result is a push towards greater chaos, which can end in nothing but conflict:

Violence and Censorship Update

This month is less about violence (the biggest events of the month were the NYC protests about Jordan Neely’s death – Neely was the Michael Jackson impersonator that went nuts on the subway). The big takeaways is that government is lying to us and covering up for the Left.

I know, this is my shocked face. First, the only people who didn’t do anything wrong in the “Russia colluding with Trump” lie are Russia and Trump. The FBI lied. I know that this isn’t surprising to anyone, since May has been just about the worst month for the three-letter agencies being shown to be partisan Leftist liars. Let’s continue with more FBI:

It looks like the very best way to get fired from the FBI is to try to be honest and follow the law. Thankfully the CIA is . . . oh.

Yup. The CIA lied. Shocking! What about the DOJ?

Yup, them, too. A loss of trust in government fairness and in-your-face corruption is often a precursor to Civil War.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. I guess he wants demolish everything so he can Build Back Better®.

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 jumped up – it’s getting warm out.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit, though people are thinking a lot more about Civil War.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back down, a bit. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

I’d say the border is wide open, but we have no border. New York and Chicago are now irritated because they want these illegals to go back to Texas. Huh.

The Spark, Part 2

Last month, I wrote about the idea that the very successful boycott of Bug Light® might be the beginnings of Americans realizing that they don’t have to put up with the culture that has been forced upon them for decades. I am pleasantly surprised that this spark, this countering to the current culture is spreading. In general, American media has controlled the messages that go out:

The Internet really changed the game and still allows people to put out alternate viewpoints, and memetic warfare is fighting for the hearts and minds of the people. And it worked.

Bud Light® isn’t the only victory. Here are some others:

When they call me an economic terrorist because I won’t buy stuff from people who hate me, it feels kinda good.

And every marketing executive now is afraid. It’s no longer a cost-free proposition to pump Lefty ideas into your ads. And I think they’re finally beginning to understand who they’re dealing with:

Can we fix the culture? No. I think it must be restored. And I don’t think it will be easy, either, but we will win.

The Babylon Bee© and a wag on Twitter™ are pointing the way back . . .

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1661097342051942401

https://twitter.com/ArabChicago/status/1660324204502212609

https://twitter.com/ppv_tahoe/status/1654983449701220352

https://twitter.com/DeanPreston/status/1656023543333933057

https://twitter.com/DeIudedShaniqwa/status/1657507128322523139

https://twitter.com/i/status/1653398943978385408

https://twitter.com/i/status/1658857771217854469

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/canvasser-shooting-eddie-brokenbough-onepa-20230509.html

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/TheRightMelissa/status/1656861108697800705

https://twitter.com/KarliBonnita/status/1656862956896878595

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1661191693260165121

One Guy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/conservatives-hail-daniel-penny-as-hero-after-killing-man-on-subway/ar-AA1b98jg

https://www.foxnews.com/us/marine-veteran-nyc-subway-chokehold-death-faces-tough-legal-road-experts-say

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/05/the-lesson-of-jordan-neely-your-courage-and-sacrifice-will-be-punished/

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/man-arrested-after-he-returns-fire-at-car-thieves-outside-of-his-shelby-county-home/article_cb42209a-f354-11ed-a2c9-b7e1f051cd76.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/was-florida-man-justified-in-killing-gunman-after-the-shooting-stopped-a-jury-decides/ar-AA1bqiNy

Body Count

https://twitter.com/TVNewsNow/status/1657178704039034882

https://news.yahoo.com/nyc-chicago-clash-biden-migrant-141046631.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F05%2F04%2Ftitle-42-countdown-700000-migrants-in-mexico-waiting-to-rush-u-s-border%2F

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Fblog%2F2023%2F05%2Fless_than_a_week_before_511_migrant_rush_everything_is_going_swimmingly.html

https://nypost.com/2023/05/16/google-meta-amazon-hire-low-paid-foreign-workers-after-us-layoffs-report/

https://archive.fo/OwgOY

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/05/18/industrial-civilization-needs-a-biological-future/

Vote Count

https://headlineusa.com/maricopa-county-election-director-told-woman-to-abuse-voting-system/

https://www.libertynation.com/watchdog-reveals-how-easy-it-is-for-non-citizens-to-vote/

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/arizona-signatures.jpg

https://www.westernjournal.com/lake-attorneys-closing-argument-least-70k-votes-not-verified-election-must-set-aside/

https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1660717421710155780

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/11/the-voter-registration-machine-flipping-the-states-blue/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthestarnewsnetwork.com%2F2023%2F05%2F19%2Franked-choice-voting-proposed-for-pennsylvania-municipalities%2F

https://www.revolver.news/2023/05/rfk-jr-sparks-a-wildfire-us-election-fraud-becomes-a-blazing-issue-in-2024/

https://warroom.org/controversial-zuckerberg-group-purchases-storage-center-for-voting-machines-and-ballots-for-election-offices-ahead-of-2024/

https://redstate.com/kiradavis/2023/03/29/bombshell-james-okeefe-uncovers-massive-potential-political-money-laundering-to-democrat-campaigns-n723020

https://zarkfiles.substack.com/p/the-first-discovery

Civil War

https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2023/05/15/secession-is-not-the-solution-for-rural-oregon/

https://www.kuow.org/stories/pnw-secession-movements-arent-new-but-lately-eastern-oregon-is-feeling-idaho-curious

https://news.yahoo.com/rural-america-dreams-secession-eastern-011532936.html

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/allen-texas-shooting-white-supremacy-greg-abbott-20230509.html

https://www.wboc.com/news/state-senator-talks-secession-cites-underserved-southern-delaware/article_67541026-eebc-11ed-8c89-8bd0d754ba06.html

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-05-23-battlefield-reports-new-civil-war/

https://www.wpr.org/reporting-front-lines-slow-civil-war

Survival Economics, 2023

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience. All memes this post, as found.

Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff. What “trivial stuff”? How about Ukraine? I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.

Ukraine? I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one. Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff). I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap. If Trump had a second term? This conflict wouldn’t exist. We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.

But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:

Food, and Energy. I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two. Of course, I’ll get to immigration. Sometime. Just like the US Border Patrol.

Let’s start with Food.

The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®. There is only so much food that can be created. It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth. We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza. Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.

Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.

That’s a big deal. This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry. The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.

What?

Yeah, mountains and winter. I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.

Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing. The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there. This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.

While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable. This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa. In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event. In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event. In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.

When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful. The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk. This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry. Except if Bill Gates gets involved:

In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.

Yet the impulse from the Left is to:

Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.

Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.

Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.

What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well. We have

the technology to maximize crop yields,
the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.

It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one. There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.

And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it. California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts. They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet. It’s too dry. I want to live in a mall.” They weren’t serious about it.

And food? One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs. The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak. I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:

The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem: Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs. People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

Energy is not much better.

Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer. It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.

Let’s take a big picture look:

Oil is awesome. It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much. It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.

And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power. I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.

(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples. Sue me.)

Oil is a gift. But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited. Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.

I love oil. But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past. Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.

One way to produce nuclear power.

Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store. The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills. We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.

All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food: People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

No. We need the free market. But we also need a plan. Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.

No. We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there. We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity. And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.

The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions. Or it won’t. And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.

Pretty sure this is a parody. But in 2023, who can tell?

Beer, Bad Movies, and Bathing Suits – Ending Woke One Dollar At A Time

“Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?” – The Evil Dead

Yesterday I had a nightmare that my Facebook® account was deleted. When I woke up, for just a second, I was really scared that I had a Facebook™ account.

It’s happening.

Despite the Left fully holding the levers of most of the power in the country, the one thing they didn’t seem to count on was a people that they pushed too far. Historically, they’ve always pushed too far and outpaced the populace, at least in European or Western nations. It’s like The Mrs. trying to get me to do chores. Don’t push, I told you last year I’d get those socks picked up.

In France after the Revolution, it ended with Napoleon – a strong man to push back the insanity of the Terror. In Germany, after the public revolted after the (failed) communist revolution, the economic destruction of the 1920s and the unbridled degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, to, well, you know what happened.

Stalin managed to take a gun after taking power and shoot everyone to the left of him, setting himself up as the single source of communist thought (well, after also taking an icepick to a rival living in Mexico), which I’ve heard referred to as the Leftist Singularity. It’s like the old joke, “Robespierre and Trotsky walk into a bar. There are no survivors.”

An example of the Leftist Singularity in action. All memes (from here on, including this one) are “as-found.”

Leftism is inherently unstable since it nearly invariably ends up feeding on itself. The college Leftist poets are despised by the “real” Leftists. Real communism has been tried, and every single time the results are the same. But this time, will it be different?

The grounds for a bit of optimism is that the American consooomer seems to have started voting with their wallets and is refusing to consooom the Woke products.

Disney™ has lost nearly a decade of growth in stock price, and has lost half of its value since 2021.

Disney© is the source of endless corporate cultural rot. Brought about as a child and American friendly company, it now openly panders to people who want to push sex-change surgery to kids. The result is oddly predictable – the people who have kids don’t want to take their kids to a movie to have their values subverted. Bud Lightyear™ was a character that everyone loved. Disney™ solution? Inject LGBTQIABIPOC+ into the movie. Result? Parents avoided it, and it was a huge money loser.

I’m thinking this might be the secret Disney™ corporate strategy?

Inject values about woke female empowerment? Everyone stops going to their movies because their movies are now boring because it would disrupt The Narrative if a woman had to learn something, if a woman had to struggle, if a woman ever had to be saved by a man, and if a woman wasn’t the best one ever at whatever she chose to do, the first time out. Huh. I’m thinking my ex-wife might be a big Disney™ fan.

Seriously, Disney® managed to make Star Wars™ boring and devoid of wonder, all in the name of Woke.

Oops.

I’m thinking some prankster changed the numbers on the sign, but if you notice, all that Bud® is still sitting there.

Bud Light® is now down over 25% in sales.

That’s devastating to the bottom line, and I won’t go into the story in too much depth because it’s pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But what’s not fresh is the beer, since it’s rotting on the shelf and I heard today Bud™ is now having to buy it back, and corporate is having to buy dusty, expired cases back. To make it even more amusing, now the LGBTWTF groups have disavowed Bud™, making them about as popular as polio or monkey pox, depending on the group.

Ooops.

Target® sold “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits, plus a line of “pride” clothing for kids.

Why is Target™ in the business of sexualizing our kids? In the “how could it get worse?” files, it turns out that one of the clothing designers for Target’s™ “Pride” line is featured in a shirt noting that “Satan respects pronouns.” Plus, well, look at him – nothing about him says, “safe to leave kids with,” and a lot that says, “voted most likely in high school to be found to own a house with a crawlspace filled with bodies.”

Target® is feeling the heat. They’ve reportedly (in at least some stores, crunched all the “pride” material into the back of the store into smaller sections. Apparently, this is mainly in the South, though stories are conflicting. Since Gavin Newsom has solved all of California’s problems and successfully revitalized San Francisco and stopped street pooping, he has taken the time to show great concern that one store stopped, under public pressure, selling propaganda materials.

Ooops.

It’s afraid.

I think this is what scares the Left. The idea that people will rise up without ever even talking to each other and destroy the companies that force-feed the populace a diet of propaganda and Woke. It starts small, with a beer. Now, at least some companies are backing off the idea of Woke.

Will this stop the Left?

No. I think they’re filled with hubris, and can’t see the real danger that they’re provoking, and the inevitable backlash as children become the targets of sexual predators is going to be stronger than all the Diversity Inclusion and Equity that BlackRock™ can extort. The backlash will end up in a predictable place . . . with a predictable reaction if we don’t stop it before it goes too far.

Now this is the kind of transitioning I can support.

Do we win? Yes I, I’m sure we will. This month? No. Next month? No. But people are awakening, learning that this is money we don’t have to pay to them, that this is a game we don’t have to play, that we don’t have to give them the minds and souls of our children, which in the end is what will end Woke.

FYI, friend in from out of town, might not have a post on Friday.

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?

Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:

Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
Declining heritage American birthrates,
Declining two-parent families,
Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
Increasing de facto censorship,
Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1^st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.

Computer Files And The Fate Of The World

“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS

For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)

I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.

I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.

Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.

The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.

Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)

I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.

Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.

I blame smart phones.

Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:

Easier to use, and
Harder for users to accidently goof up,

have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.

If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”

However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.

Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.

What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.

Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?

Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.

I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.

What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.

The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.

You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”

The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.

“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”

Bug? Or . . . feature?

Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)