Category: TEOTWAWKI

The Amusement Singularity

“It bends space.  Zod’s ship uses the same technology, and if we can make the two drives collide, a singularity can be created.” – Man of Steel

Bemused means to bewilder, but what if I’m already Wilder?

After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office.

“Man, it has been a long year,” I said.

“Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.”

This really made me think.  I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year.  It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on.  All the time.

I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur.  For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor.

I mean, propane, right?

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas?  Car.

I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts.  If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants.

Really.

I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof.  Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives.  The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip.  If they were lucky.

In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty.  And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today.  I mean, they love ice dancing, right?

They told me I couldn’t be a stand-up comic, but no one is laughing now!

This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate.  Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before:

“Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em”

It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.

Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history.  I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results.  This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems.  I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.

Why is insulin expensive?  It’s not called liveabetes now, is it?

There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet?  It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information.

But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily.  However, it certainly has sped up the world.

When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait.  Stop.  Look at the board.  Think.”  It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight.  But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.

Magnus Carlsen was disqualified for using a computer to look for potential mates.  Stupid Tinder®.

Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker.  Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour.  The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity.  Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.

Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable.  I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers.  I think, in part, it is.  But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.

It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement.  An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high?  As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content.  In a year or two?  Maybe it surpasses human-generated video.

Yeah.  The amusement is accelerating.  Until it can’t.

I guess her children were born with carpet burn.

The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation.  The next time I have a problem?  I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane.

Is Struggling The Goal?

“He’s talented.  Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas

Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin?  The first one didn’t seem to mind.

Gifts can be a curse.  No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift.  I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.

Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve:  height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like.  These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality.  Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence.  I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.

I always was comfortable dating that blind woman.  I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

The flip side is what we do with those talents.  Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies:  diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example.  These are different than talent.  While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.

We call them, collectively, character.

Back to the idea of a curse.  I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence.  That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.

Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.

Why?

Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long.  At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is.  Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now?  Hiro is average.

It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview.  When am I supposed to bribe them?

But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?

Protagonist is toast.  He will fail, and fail spectacularly.  In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character.  Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.

This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does.  Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash?  There’s a record for it.

On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?

Of course not.  There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.

Zero.

To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life.  Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.

These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.

Those who fail?  Well, it tells us a lot about them, too.  I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase:  “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body.  Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually.  I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.

It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point.  Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it.  Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.

I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken:  Out of Context.

I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:

“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife?  Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment.  Temperature a perfect 98.6K.  Life was good, right?  Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known.  And then?  Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air.  Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”

I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right.  Life isn’t about being comfortable.  Life isn’t about being safe.  Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.

Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?

Without the challenge, our character suffers.  Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.

Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level.  Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.

Honk!  You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Date With Destiny

“You hear that, Mr. Anderson?  That is the sound of inevitability.  It is the sound of your death.  Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.” – The Matrix 

I heard that Epstein got a clue to the inevitable – the last guard he tried to fist-bump left him hanging.

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

Volume VI, Issue 6

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

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 – A Date With Destiny – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Big Fraud – 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 below) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

A Date With Destiny

Like most people, I believe that I have free will.  Whether that’s true or not isn’t my call, so it’s certainly at a least a pleasurable fiction that I maintain.  Free will, however, only applies to our choices, and doesn’t apply to our circumstances.  Every person reading this is going to die.  We pretend like that’s not the case, but I assure you it is, and there is no way to make a choice that will avoid that fate.  Death is inevitable.

So, that’s one example.  Another example where free will and choices don’t matter is when uncontrollable forces have been unleashed.  For instance, if I drop a stripper off of the Empire State Building, there’s no way I’m not getting glitter on my shirt.  It’s inevitable.

I think we’re at the same place with Civil War.  It’s inevitable no matter who “wins” this election.  That’s not to say that it might not be postponed for a bit, but like death and stripper glitter, it’s coming.

Why am I so cavalier in saying that?  Well, it’s obvious if you look around.  The things that are most likely to cause civil war are tied to what’s going on in the country.  Here are your indicators:

  • Popular immiseration. This means that people are miserable.  Inflation and declining prospects have made most young people miserable, and tortured them, to boot.  Generations ago, a bright young man could support his family by being the local butcher or running the local sporting goods store.  Now, he has to go to college, study, maybe get two degrees, and have his wife work to get the same lifestyle the guy selling letter jackets had.
  • Lower birth rates and later marriage age. I recently heard (though I don’t have a source) that when the age of first marriage exceeds 28, civil war is inevitable.  Every single time.  We’re at 30.
  • Too many elites. Just like all those young dudes are going to school for years in the hopes of being able to maybe one day buy a house, maybe, there are at the same time too many billionaires competing for power.  Bloomberg, Trump, Cuban, Gates, Musk are all looking to see who can rule.  There isn’t enough room for all of them, and their dissention forms the core of the leadership for civil war.
  • Belief that the system is fraudulent. Sure, we’ve all expected that the system is rigged, but 2020 was a slap in the face to election integrity since the very GloboLeftistElite that denounce anyone who doubts the validity of the election OPENLY BRAGGED about twisting the system in the pages of Time® magazine in 2021.  I’ve heard of more election fraud before election week than in any pre-election period, ever, and don’t doubt that more is taking place behind the scenes.  A fraudulent system that is brazen provides the casus belli for that civil war.
  • A failing economy. This ties to immiseration, but the economy has been juiced for so long with such amazing amounts of money that it is mathematically impossible to unwind without amazing amounts of pain.  And pain causes . . . civil war.
  • Unpopular wars. Who wants to die for Ukraine?  For Israel?  For Taiwan?  For South Korea?  Yup, thought so.  Yet there are rabid hawks on both sides that are willing to drag a thoroughly unwilling populace into a war they cannot win.
  • The fact that there have been at least two attempts on Trump’s life shows exactly how stable our society is right now.

Folks, I cannot stress this enough:  this is inevitable, and only the timing is up for grabs.  I’ve said before (in 2018 or 2019, I think) that 2025 was the first opening date for Civil War 2.0.  I’ll stand by that, but I don’t think it’s likely.  I still put the range as 2025 to 2040, with the most likely range being between 2030 to 2035.  Big nations have a lot of inertia, like a train after you shut down the engine, keep going for a long time.  But not forever.

Finally, this is not a wish, since I believe that everyone underestimates how gruesome this will be.  I anticipate that China and Russia would gladly airdrop weapons to both sides when they’re not heading to their microwaves to make popcorn while they watch.  But, just like throwing a trash bag full of vegetable soup into a jet intake, we all know what’s going to happen.

It’s destiny.  Oh, and speaking of Destiny, she’s up next on stage 3.

Violence and Censorship Update

Obviously, there are things we can’t talk about openly because the consequences are too dire so that people were censored off of YouTube® for trying to report this.  Until the lies break:

What happens when FEMA is on the side of the disaster?

And anyone who isn’t lawfully here?

Ahhhh, diversity.  Bringing in Afghans to do killing Americans won’t do.

Trump Derangement Syndrome:  It’s real.

Looks like Kamala only wants to allow certain speech.  Anyone here surprised?

And NPCs on Reddit are with her:

And if Trump is Hitler®, then soon enough:

And speaking of the media, I wonder if they coordinate with the Kamala campaign?

Never forget, they have plans for you.

Biden/Harris Misery Index

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

Yup, up again, and peaking upwards as interest rates are starting to spike.  Hmmm.

But not all people are miserable:

And some are too stupid to be miserable:

But people can’t afford McDonald’s anymore.

 

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is up significantly, and this should be higher given that Venezuelan gangs are turning parts of US cities into no-go zones.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is down a bit.

Economic:

The economy took a huge drop – I think the hangover from all the juicing is coming.

Illegal Aliens:

The latest numbers are simply lies.

The Big Fraud

Regardless of what follows, go out and vote.  It makes fraud slightly harder.

Signs of voter fraud in advance of the election are through the roof.  Here are a few:

This is illegal:

Ooops, that was election fraud from the last election.

Oh, the Colorado Secretary of State (above) also left nearly all of the voting machine passwords unprotected on the Internet.  But it didn’t stop Democrats from suing to keep noncitizens on the voter rolls.

There are more issues, likely into the hundreds by now.  At some point it should become clear that this is a humiliation exercise meant to drive home that you have no power.  They can lie and cheat to your face, and “What Timmy gonna do?”

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1844861906361909266
https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1847669300422639725
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1844125924301984148
https://x.com/TrendingEx/status/1843359191077138512
https://x.com/NoahPollak/status/1847006345662550219

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1852394961330692486
https://twitter.com/i/status/1845646215452496049
https://x.com/i/status/1850126594418815417
https://x.com/i/status/1845866508259627261
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/some-mass-shooting-survivors-want-more-good-guys-guns

ONE GUY
https://archive.is/eB7iD

BODY COUNT
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt
https://archive.is/hfs5Y
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1844839172907123183
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1849634400851341410
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2024/10/10/non-english-speaking-students-are-overwhelming-pa-schools-and-racking-up-millions-for-small-towns-data-show/

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/i/communities/1848518910653415584
https://x.com/PeterBernegger/status/1850565226690654556
https://x.com/scrowder/status/1850924883678498871
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1849977065925189699
https://catholicvote.org/millions-of-christians-religious-people-say-they-are-not-voting-in-november/
https://x.com/emmagcawood/status/1850522383863390392
https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/1850611709549146405

CIVIL WAR
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/10/22/quiet_before_the_storm_151815.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/185053/civil-war-reenactors-virginia-play-acting-expect-war
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/25/dc-residents-leaving-election-week-00185313
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13933435/MSNBC-host-claims-Trump-family-preparing-civil-war-former-president-warns-America-faces-enemy-within.html
https://slaynews.com/news/clinton-strategist-james-carville-trump-arrest-males-color-elected-calls-armed-uprising-harris-loses/
https://x.com/DrewHLive/status/1820859923787591846
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/06/firebrand-leftist-jamie-raskin-said-congress-must-disqualify-trump-predicted-civil-war-conditions/
https://tomklingenstein.com/is-the-left-preparing-for-war-if-trump-wins/
https://truthovernews.org/p/democrats-plan-for-color-revolution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/23/cold-civil-war-cultural-secession/
https://news.yahoo.com/news/hurricane-relief-workers-forced-evacuate-102606823.html
https://studyfinds.org/america-verge-of-world-war-iii/?nab=1
https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-top-3-predictions-for-post-election-america/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-trump-american-civil-war-b2634731.html

MANIFESTO
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747

Prepatude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you don’t feel like physically preparing.

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

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

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

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

Well, that’s embarrassing for FEMA.

This, really, is the opposite of city life.

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

GloboLeft prepping aisle.

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

Such a vibrant big-city culture!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know their priority.  It isn’t you.

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

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

Lists.

Economics Of War, 2024 Edition

“Well, it seems to me, sir, that God made me a fine instrument of warfare.” – Saving Private Ryan

I guess that there’s no thyme to tell all his stories.

War is one of the natural states of humanity.  Although we don’t have records back before when Grug was living in Switzerland before hot cocoa was invented, we do have Ötzi, a guy who died about 5,300 years ago.

What we can tell about Ötzi is that, first, he’s dead.  Secondly, we can tell that he was almost certainly murdered.  By who?  Don’t know, but it’s a pretty good bet that they guy who inflicted the wound died, too.  Unless he was killed by Keith Richards, who we should probably put on a space ship because only he could live long enough to travel to another star.

Why would I say that the murderer was dead (unless it was Keith Richards)?  The Yanomami people of the jungles of South America are as close as we have to “pre-civilization” people, and they killed themselves in at an astonishing rate.  About half of their men died in combat until fairly recently.

Do your part to keep him immortal.

The economics of the Yanomami violence are pretty simple – a bow, an arrow, a stone knife, and an enemy.  Heck, they don’t even have money, so I have no idea how they can get a rental car.

In one sense, we are the opposite of the Yanomami and Ötzi.  We have been fortunate enough to live in the Good Times, when the horror of nuclear weapons has thus far lowered the percentage of combat deaths since 1945 to what I think could be a historic low.  Why?

War is like football.  Everyone comes out of the huddle, and then lines up.  What the team on the offense is going to do?  Who knows.  It’s the job of the defense to respond and stop them, though using snipers is considered to be unsportsmanlike.  Creating surprise is now pretty difficult, especially surprise on a large scale.

My buddy said he made a voodoo doll of me.  I think he’s pulling my leg.

Let’s look at the Ukraine Conflict.

It started out as a grand, strategic move like a great World War II battle with tanks and bombs and planes.  That did surprise the West (me included) because it seemed so out of place given the safe world we live in – as /pol/ would say:  “nothing ever happens”.  The initial gains of the Russians were large, but by the time the Ukrainians got their feet under them, the Russians had a logistical snarl and found out that rubber tires rot if you just leave them in the garage for thirty or forty years.

Oops.

The war went from swooping strategy to what exists now: a series of mainly small-scale actions where when an infantry squad breaks through, it sometimes makes the news even though a gain of 500 yards is a big deal.  Why?  Because large troop concentrations are visible from space.  And anything visible from space is a target.  Neither side can effectively generate the schwerpunkt or focal point of forces required to break through and create a war of movement.

Are doctors who graduate online called Google® Docs?

Nope.  The latest development is that small squads of Russians are now using small, cheap ($2500 or less) dirt bikes to get to the opposing trenches fast, disposing of them as they storm the trenches.  This helps them avoid the ever-present drone swarms.  It’s like The Road Warrior, but with fewer shoulder pads.

And tank warfare?  For now, at least, it’s gone.  Just like bat is the “chicken of the cave” so is the tank now the “aircraft carrier of the land”.  They’re mainly just expensive targets, and a variety of cope cages, turtle shells, and electronic jamming have been field-innovated to try to protect them.

But when you lose a tank, you lose a pretty big investment.  Russia can only make (depending on your definition of tanks) about 1,500 a year, along with 3,000 other sorts of armored vehicles.  A big chunk of those tanks are modernized and rebuilt Soviet-era tanks.

A Russian T-90 tank costs about $4.5 million.  A drone with bomb costs less than a thousand dollars.  One economist estimated that the Russian tank losses alone was about an $11 billion dollar hit.

You do the math.

Remember when the Biden/Harris administration shot down the Chinese balloon?  At least they tried to stop some inflation.

Likewise, aircraft have had to stay well back because of surface to air missiles, of which the Russians produce a pretty good variety.  The Russians claim (heavy emphasis on the word claim) their radars can easily see the F-35 and F-22.  Claim.  An F-35 costs about $109,000,000 per aircraft.  An F-22 cannot be replaced – we lost the tooling.  Fun fact:  $109,000,000 in quarters would weigh five and a half million pounds, or the equivalent of the weight of pre-printed Biden ballots the Democrats had to dispose of discreetly after Joe dropped out.

As of January, 2024, we have 234 operational F-35s.  We have 187 F-22s.  And, yes, those babies can unleash a lot of havoc in short order, but missiles are cheap, and if it takes dozens to knock one of our fighters down, it’s dollars ahead.  And, let’s be clear:  they’re not always flying.  The US response to the Me-262 wasn’t to try to dogfight a German jet with a Yankee prop, nope, our aces hung around the German air bases and shot them as they had to land.

Is a boomerang their weapon of choice?

Every weapon has a weakness, and rarely can those weaknesses be overcome by papering them over with hundred-dollar bills.  But just as the object of making weapons has gotten bigger and bigger, our ability to fight a World War II style war has gone to zero.  One anecdote is that a captured German fighter pilot was bragging about shooting up a large quantity of American planes on the ground at an airbase.  Being at the airbase, the US officer took him outside and noted, “They’ve already been replaced.”

The German reportedly said, after a heavy sigh, “And that is why we are losing.”  That, and my great-grandfather, Johan von Wilder, who was responsible for downing five German fighters by himself.  Worst mechanic in the Luftwaffe.

The trend, though, is less $100 million fighters, but now seems to be looking towards large numbers of inexpensive, nearly disposable weapons that are cheap, lots of missiles that cost a few million bucks, and fewer “so expensive it’s silly” systems, except for those that give the really important part of the battle:  information – satellites and radar and the like.

But for all of that, the goal in war seems to have changed.  Rather than breaking stuff and killing people, the goal is more based on long-term fights whose goal is to cause the enemy to become unstable to topple their own leadership for someone more favorable.  I’m betting this is really a legacy of the Cold War.

I put my desk in the elevator.  I hope it takes my career to a whole new level.

I don’t think that we’re in any shape to fight an actual war against a determined opponent in a conventional sense for longer than a month or two, and wholly incapable of fighting in an area where we don’t have uncontested air dominance.  From an industrial standpoint, our ability to make more stuff isn’t serious:  outside of small arms and helmet and clothing, I’m not sure that there’s a weapons system that we could make without the help of overseas firms for critical items.

We just don’t make it here anymore, and building the basic industries to allow us to do so will take decades and trillions of dollars in capital invested.  I think we’ve reached the point where our primary weapon is financial.  There’s a precedent that situation can last a long time – the Byzantine Empire lasted in one form or another for over 1,000 years.

The Byzantine Empire had a gold stash that would make Scrooge McDuck® do whatever it is that ducks do when they’re happy, however.  We don’t.  Our wealth is based on paper and mathematics, and can move across borders in milliseconds (megafarads if you want an SI unit).

What would Ötzi’s people think about that?  I don’t really know.  I guess we’ll have to ask Keith Richards.

Are We In The Middle Of A Planned Revolution? Yes.

“Day 93 under the dome.  With necessities growing dangerously low, who knows what spark will set off this powder keg?” – The Simpsons Movie

I saw two men in matching outfits so I asked them if they were gay.  Turns out that doesn’t make the NYPD happy.

A phenomenon that has sweep the world in the early 21st century has been the “Color Revolution”.  This is characterized by a “grassroots” movement whose aim was theoretically to create a liberal Western democracy on the European model.  An example would be most Western European countries, with the exception of the Islamic Caliphate of France.

What methods were used in these “peaceful” revolutions?

  • Leadership by Non-Governmental Organizations Civil Disobedience
  • Civil Disorder/Disobedience/Protests
  • Total Lack of Chill
  • Use of the Internet to Organize
  • Heavy “Student” Participation

When I read that list, I see a single conclusion:  the CIA did it, sometimes with the help of George Soros.

Probably one of the first places that this method was used was the Soviet Union.  All of the “spontaneous” protests at the beginning were likely anything but spontaneous.  The wonderful part of this type of operation is that if it works, great, an enemy is off the board.  If it doesn’t?  Everyone involved can put on their “so sorry that happened to you, buddy” face while preparing for the next one.

To be fair, I don’t think that most of the people that were trying to get the Soviet Union to collapse thought it was going to work as well and as completely and as quickly as it did.  One minute, the Soviets were all “Viktor Drago” and the next they were all “Trotsky after meeting an icepick”.

What do you call a man with an ice pick in his head?  Anything you want – he clearly doesn’t control the security apparatus of the USSR.

But there is more at play here.  Ricky emailed me an article from 2014 that talked in depth about Color Revolutions and their mechanics by Andrew Korybko which inspired this post.  You can find that article here.

The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of the Core Mechanics

When we look at a Color Revolution, it’s like looking at an iceberg:  you only see the bit above the water but miss entirely the part that’s going to cause James Cameron to make a billion dollars and inflict those stupid Avatar™ movies on us.  No, Color Revolutions are years in the making and start with:

Ideology:  In the Color Revolutions to date, all of them have been based on the attempt to create a Western-liberal style of government, hence my suggestion that this was the CIA attempting to export “freedom” to a group of people who have consistently and convincingly desired to not be free.  Sure, some Egyptians want to live in a Western-style democracy, but most of them don’t.  Hell, most of the Muslims that have moved to Western Europe don’t want, at all, a Western-style democracy.

They want Sharia law, they want a government based in Islam, and they want all the wealth that the Western-style liberal democracies seem to create.  They want to live in Cairo on the Thames, not the actual, crappy Cairo on the Nile.  Why did Egypt’s Color Revolution fail?  Why did Libya’s?  Why did Syria’s?

They didn’t want that Western liberal democracy ideology, they just wanted the stuff.

Telling a good joke about the French Revolution is all about the execution.

Cash:  As NASA astronaut Gus Grissom said in the movie The Right Stuff, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers®.”  In a Color Revolution you could say, “No simoleons, no Napoleons”.  That’s as close as I can get unless I retcon Stalin’s first name to Moolah.

But money has to come from somewhere, and most of the people that make up these Color Revolutions are poor college students who live on ramen and despair.

Where did BLM get money?  According to the Claremont Institute (LINK), Microsoft® pledged $244,400,000 to Black Lives Matter.  Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization pushing radical GloboLeftElite disruption.

Microsoft© is funding a Color Revolution

Against . . . you.

That’s a pickup line that could work for Boeing, too.

People:  There is always an inner circle of leaders of the Color Revolution, probably hand-picked by the funders.  The are willing and passionate about the Color Revolution, primarily because they see themselves as the ones who will get power after the event.  Because someone has to drink the Kool-Aid®, there are also followers.  Those are broken into two groups – the troops and the members of general public that are sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Propaganda:  First, the message is crafted.  It is prepared in advance for the moment it will be communicated, and the People mobilized.  The propaganda may already be in place, sitting on websites prepared by and for the movement.  It may have been trained into the foot soldiers of the Color Revolution.  Regardless, the message gets out, and the goal is to get sympathy and support as the revolt proceeds.  In the United States, mainstream media is fully onboard with the GloboLeftistElite plans – would anyone be surprised to find out that ABC® gave Kamala the debate questions?  And answers?

I do think the debate about Mobius strips is a bit one-sided.

Spark:  Once all of the above are in place and ready to go, all that’s needed is a spark.  George Floyd, for instance was a spark.  It wasn’t George Floyd, it was that there was a video of a dying junkie that met the needs of the Color Revolution, which was already prepared and ready to go, complete with Ideology, Cash, People and Propaganda, complete with a complicit media to fan the fiery but non-violent flames.

Once these all came together, Floyd’s death was chosen and someone, somewhere, said, “Perfect.  Go.”  It doesn’t matter that Floyd was going to die due to the incredible amounts of drugs in his system.  All that mattered was what the video showed of his on-camera death.

Korybko suggested, back in 2014, that examples of these Sparks included (all of these are direct quotes):

  • A rigged election
  • The jailing of an opposition leader
  • The signing of (or failure to sign) a controversial piece of legislation
  • A government crackdown against the opposition or the imposition of martial law
  • Declaring or being involved in an unpopular war

Of the three Sparks that Korybko suggested, the top almost certainly happened in 2020, and the second and fourth are being implemented in some fashion against Trump and/or his supporters.  The list is, obviously, not exhaustive, and the event need never have happened in reality, as long as people can be convinced it happened.

After the event, the protests start.  And grow.  And spread.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Floyd Protests were an attempted Color Revolution in the United States that was called off after the mechanisms to secure the 2020 election for Biden were in place, and, perhaps a warning of sorts to Biden that he’d best do what he was told if he could remember.

I was listening to a podcast tonight and Eric Weinstein noted that he had been assured that Biden does not have access to “the football” and that the United States is currently being run by a committee of the powerful.  The same committee, no doubt, that has put Kamala at the brink of power.  Note that Biden only dropped out after the (first) failed assassination of Trump.

Occupy Wall Street challenged the money powers of New York (not sure who was funding them, China?).  This was not to be allowed, so, to counter it, Trayvon Martin was used as a Spark, moving on to the “Gentle Giant” Michael Brown, and finally to George Floyd.

The fact that the clear self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin was used to get the hippies and AntiFa® out of New York and have them start protesting for black people instead of against bankers.  I guess the bankers got scared, and hippies and AntiFa® have a short attention span, or their leaders just like money.  They had to have something to do, and since it’s always easy to stir up a racial fight, that’s what the bankers picked, because a class fight might have endangered actual bankers.

One stolen joke is a coincidence, two is a pattern.  Thirty is an Amy Schumer standup routine.

These movements aren’t popular, and aren’t spontaneous, though they’re staged to appear so.  They aren’t even permanent – most countries that have had a Color Revolution revert to their old styles of government with just a little bit of time and often a lot of chaos.  Egypt went from its military government to a very brief “democracy” and then right back to a military government because that’s what Egyptians seem to want.

This may sound as crazy as predicting the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, but the government of the United States is nearing collapse, and the Color Revolution technique, or something like it, is being employed against you and funded by people like Microsoft® to guide the fall into, they hope, a situation where bankers can frolic freely.

That’s the rub – the importation of the endless hordes of illegals, the economic devastation of inflation and the contrived energy and housing crises and continual cultural provocations are cracks, big ones, setting the stage for a major change.  And, again, each and every one of them is intentional, and it’s gone far enough that I still believe we’re entering the danger window in 2025, with the early to middle 2030s the most likely time when the final Spark hits.

Beyond the Spark?

It’s up to us.

The Drive To Kill The Constitution

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

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

All memes “as found”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that was the plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only thing that stands in their way?  Us.

Will Great Britain Rise Again?

“They chose to murder and steal.” – The Dark Knight

Notes:  All memes are as found, and no podcast tomorrow – The Mrs. has to catch some sleep.

Alice Smith is a reciprocal follow on X®.  She’s the great-great-great-granddaughter of Scottish economist Adam Smith, and is a good person to follow (@TheAliceSmith) if you’re already following the most important account on X™, @wilderbyfar.  She’s from the UK, and had the absolutely best post I’ve seen on the current sickness that’s destroying the West:

Doesn’t that say it all?

Immigration to the West (Europe plus the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) has nothing to do with freedom or our culture for most immigrants.  It’s merely about the stuff.

The sickness?

It’s from the GloboLeftElite attempting to brainwash the world into thinking that:

  • There is no difference between a man and a woman,
  • Anyone can be a man or a woman,
  • There are no intrinsic differences between races and ethnicities,
  • No one can pretend to be a different race unless it’s been okayed in advance even though all races are the same,
  • White people should somehow feel shame for their race even though all races are the same,
  • There is no difference between people of differing I.Q.,
  • People who are wealthy merely “won a lottery”, and,
  • Every culture is valid.

It’s the last one that we should talk about right now.

I’m not particularly interested in going on a culture jihad, so, perhaps all cultures are “valid.”  I suppose, if cannibal, rape-y, stone age tribes are your thing, I guess you could call it valid.

But all cultures are certainly not equal in things like freedom, justice, morality, and economic output.

Here, for centuries, the West has been far ahead of the world.  Europe was free-ish (feudalistically speaking) since the Black Death, which greatly changed the relationship between serf and local lord.

And in a continent that was freer than any in the world, there was a place that was freer yet:  Great Britain.  Great Britain had a really big advantage:  after the year 1066, it really was never invaded by a external enemy army.  Sure, you could make a case the culture has been subverted by outside forces (and I will below) but not by force of arms.

This isolation as an island nestled right next to Europe allowed a strange development – yeoman farmers who were encouraged to take up the longbow and become soldiers so that while the English lost land in France, there was never a doubt about them losing England.  The Scotts in the north were much the same, being hard-headed independent herders, they had to be strong, and were used to fighting both against and with other Scotts as well as the English.  And, yes, that’s a complement. (I’m partially Scot myself).

This isolation of individually armed individuals set up an independent society with no safety nets.  If you were too poor, stupid, or drunk to make enough money to live, you died.  If your lord decided he wanted something out of line, well, your +3 longbow could outrank his +1 armor at a distance.  As a result, Britain’s I.Q. rose over the course of centuries because the culture itself winnowed out stupid people, yet the strong, stubborn sense of independence remained.

Even the song “Rule, Britannia!” has the following lyrics:

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves;
“Britons never will be slaves.”

This is a very, very different culture than that of the current people who opened the floodgates to Great Britain – they were unabashedly Globalist and Leftist, hated everything that Great Britain stood for, and were more than willing to start the migration into Great Britain.  I’d be lying to say that none of them pulled their weight – in some cases Britain got some of the best from their home countries, hence the term “brain drain”, but this was the exception rather than the norm.  Most of the immigrants to the UK have been a net negative to the country.

But no outside army ever conquered Britain.  Except the army of beggars that have invaded it have done something that no one thought possible – united the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – against the onslaught.  What does it take to get people who have been fighting each other for centuries to hold hands, literally, and march together?

Whatever it is, it sounds Evil to me.

And it is.  Evil.  Brought directly to the shores of Great Britain by GloboLeftists in misguided altruism and the GloboLeftistElite out of a calculated bid to displace inconvenient people who don’t want to be replaced.

There reaches a point where something so awful happens that a culture revolts:  it says, “That’s enough.”  In the United States for transgender acceptance, it was the murder of six children by a trans killer so crazed that they still won’t release her manifesto.  That was enough.  The GloboLeftistElite wanted to try to hide it (see how autocomplete will try to take you to murders of transgenders, but not murders by transgenders).  These murders is why Bud Light™ is Bud Deadtome© for so many consumers.

It appears that the United Kingdom (Great Britain plus Northern Ireland) has had enough of murderous vultures in their society.  The cause?  The murder of three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in a town called Southport.  By knife.  By a 17-year-old that had no place being in the United Kingdom in the first place.

English people had watched as rape gangs of organized sexual assault on at minimum 1400 young women that was denied to even exist in Rotherham because the victims were mainly white and the perpetrators were of privileged minority status – Pakistani, mostly.

This was covered up at a national level.  Filing cabinets full of the data on the case mysteriously disappeared.  That was never solved.

But would it matter?  Probably not:

Some of those convicted (many weren’t even tried) got as little as 2 years.  Britons can get more time for being mean with words.

Oh, and the last one?  She was posting Bible verses.

That set the situation, along with other, repeated, ongoing murders and rapes by people not fit to live in any sort of civilized society.  These three final murders were enough.

The response of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exactly what you would expect from a member of the GloboLeftElite:  he blamed the people pushing back against unrestrained and unrestricted illegals swarming the United Kingdom.  And if you complained online, even if you were more likely to be arrested than the illegals swarming the streets with swords and machetes.

They’re now calling him “two-tier Keir”, since his justice has two tiers:  a harsh one for actual English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish and one where all acts by any minority are ignored.  Probably because Starmer hates his own people, because he hates himself.

I guess that’s easier.

The United Kingdom has found a point where they say, No More.

This is coming soon to a country near you.

Oh, and if they offer the type of deal below?  We should take it.  Because it’s not about the stuff.

At all.

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

“You know what doesn’t look good?  A story about gross incompetence.” – American Hustle

My garden shears will never be obsolete, after all, it’s cutting-hedge technology.

My science teacher in high school, who I’ll call “Mr. Johnson” (not his real name except that was totally his real name) often lectured us on things entirely unrelated to science.  It wasn’t a doctrine he was trying to instill us with, it was merely that he was old enough and close enough to retirement that he really didn’t give a damn about 90% of the class.  I don’t think that he even cared if we listened, since he was only talking to 10% of us anyway.

You either got him or you didn’t.

One of his random asides was about the word “crisis”.  Mr. Johnson hated the use of the word crisis except to refer to a single moment in time.  His definition was that the crisis was a moment – the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone was poised to push the button, and yet backed away from world condemning us to live in a world where The View exists.

Regardless of Mr. Johnson’s definition, I think we’re in the midst of a crisis.

Why do I think this stage would smell of old kitty litter and stale chardonnay?

Datapoint:

  • Crowdstrike™

The Crowdstrike© software incident from just two weeks ago brought down at least 8.5 million computer systems, and brought them down in such a way that they couldn’t restart.  To make it even better, once a fix was found, it had to be fixed computer by computer.  Why?  Because they didn’t test the patch.

Right now, the estimate is that this caused at least $10 billion in financial losses, though a communist would tell you that it was a good thing since all of those computer techs had something to do other than play Tetris™ and Minesweeper© while listening to Dan Fogelberg.

I think Boeing® should adopt a “no slippers” policy.

Datapoint:

  • Boeing’s© Starliner™

The Starliner® is anything but, more resembling a large orbiting bucket filled with cash than a spacecraft, it sits, useless, stuck against the side of the ISS.  If it were the only failure to Boeing’s©, name, that would be one thing, but it’s not.  Their planes regularly either fall from the sky due to poor programming kludges, or have random spontaneous partial disassembly of their planes in flight due to spotty manufacturing quality control.

Boeing™ had a pretty good reputation for decades as a company that took engineering seriously – the name of the Boeing® 707 was rumored to be an engineering joke – it’s one over the square root of two.  It kept showing up in their calculations, so they decided that was a good omen for naming their (then) flagship airliner.  In reality, it sounds like it was just a product number, with the 7 series being jets, and they liked the sound of the end 7.

Regardless, they didn’t call it a “Dreamliner™”.

NASA refuses to send a giant duck into outer space – they say the bill would be astronomical.

Datapoint:

  • NASA

I loved NASA when I was a kid.  They were generally seen as a triumph of competence and coolness under pressure.  They did real engineering, and also were great at managing the integration of multiple complex systems in a manner where they worked pretty well, Apollos 1 and 13 notwithstanding.

They literally wrote the book on getting man to the Moon using the very limits of known technology at the time.  Getting to the Moon was so hard that it was barely in our grasp, yet they did it, time and time again.  They even managed to get the ISS built.

But now?  Barrack Obama stated that the primary goal of NASA was Moslem outreach.  During the eclipse of 2017, they even spent NASA resources to make a Braille book about eclipses.  What was that meant to do, taunt the blind kids?  And, yes, the Webb Space Telescope has been pretty cool.  But the Space Launch System costs about $4.1 billion per launch, and each launch takes about six months.

I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.

Datapoint:

  • COVID-19

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 was horrific from an economic and medical standpoint.  From an economic standpoint, the government response was to blindly throw as much cash in as many places as possible as quickly as that could.  This was a bipartisan effort.

The panic and hypocrisy weren’t limited to the economic response, no.  The medical response was just as inept, as Fauci now admits he just made things up as some sort of medical theater.  Ventilators appear to have killed more people than they saved.  The abomination of the “Vaxx” has led to an excess mortality that many reckon has a body count higher than COVID itself.  I, for one, really hope that everyone who took the Vaxx® recovers, but can we forget a government and its accomplices who tried (and in many cases, succeeded in forcing people to take it?

I can’t, though the GloboLeftElite surely hope you forget.  But remember, there are no refunds.

I was wondering if this was going to be too dark, but then I realized it’s all under two and a half miles of water, so of course it’s going to be dark.

Datapoint:

  • The Titan Submersible

In one sense, I certainly admire the guts that it took to build a submarine from a pressure hull and off-the-shelf parts like an X-Box™ controller, but the hubris of the owner remains:  the CEO didn’t “hire 50-year-old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational”.  I wonder if we would have made it to orbit if Von Braun had a similar philosophy?

Well, I guess he paid the ultimate price for his hubris and disregarding competence in favor of the “inspirational” stories.  Most CEOs just lose their shareholder’s money, like Disney™, which I could write an entire post on.

The crisis we face is one where we’ve lost the capacity for competence and will to achieve that we had as recently as the 1960s even as our systems grow far more complex.  Again, one software update cost $10,000,000,000, NASA doesn’t produce spaceships that can fly with any reliability, and Boeing™ went from making some of the most reliable airplanes in the world by the thousands to a company that survives on government contracts, accounting errors, and inertia.

Maybe, though, this crisis will do what the Cuban Missile Crisis couldn’t do:

Free us from The View.  Wonder if they’d like a trip to the Titanic?

How Corporations Ruin Nations, Part II: Readers Strike Back

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

How many clickbait articles does it take to change a lightbulb?  The answer will shock you.

First:  thanks everyone for the comments last week, agree or disagree, it was an epic comment section with over 5,000 words of well thought out commentary.

One of the things that I think we all have to realize is that the thought process and institutions that got us into this situation are the thought processes and institutions we have to reform because that’s how we got here.  This is the same logic used by the Founders when they created this place.

I am first and foremost for things that make the family strong, and the virtue that comes from being observant is absolutely one of those things.  The Constitution isn’t agnostic, though it allows you to be.

I am furthermore very much in favor of limited freedom.  Well, limited how?  You know, pesky things like murder should be outlawed.  Does no-fault divorce with alimony and child support make women “freer”?  Yes.  But it’s horrible for our nation.

And I am for a mostly free market.  Should marijuana be legal?  Probably not.  Should Google™ be able to change its search algorithm with the express intent of keeping Donald Trump out of the White House?  Also, probably not.

Should every corporation be able to live forever and go into any line of businesses, leading to Facebook™ buying competitors just to keep relevant?

Yeah, no.

What’s the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and your wife?  Zuck knows more about you.

Below are some great points that I had to condense.  I tried with utmost sincerity to try to trim them fairly, so they didn’t lose context though I fixed a few typos.  Keep in mind if I had kept all the bits, this post would probably end up doubling to around 7,000 words, and ain’t nobody got time for that.  Comments are in bold italics, responses are mine.

Free market capitalism only works in a very homogeneous society with a shared and enforced set of Christian values, along with churches strong enough to enforce said values.

John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Freedom, and free market capitalism, really only works with a moral and religious people. Everything else quickly turns into some form of tyranny. Or tranny. Or both.

I disagree – the free market can and has flourished in many locations through history, see Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings.  Now, combining the free market with a mostly free society?  Yes, that requires a virtuous people, with a shared virtue founded in a shared religion.

The worst is altruistic people without religion:  those are monsters.

Kipling, Gods of The Copybook Headings, and It’s Different This Time

Ahh, when you get the smug feeling that comes from your altruism but somebody else pays the price.

the absolute number one reform on corporations that needs to happen is not on the list though: this is removing the liability shield. The shareholders of a company must be liable for the actions done in their name, as well as for the debts of the company, and they must be actual people, not other corporations. the debts are easy to prorate over the outstanding shares. the liability for damages or criminal activity, however, must be shared by all shareholders.

In researching this, although not all shareholders may have been liable, the managerial class of the corporation were legally and criminally liable at least for a time in the country.  I was surprised!  And, for the same reason you suggest.

Restricting corporations sounds great, but how could it be enforced? More .gov, more bureaucracy, more laws, more grift. Rather than strongarm huge national and international entities, think of ways to incentivize the local aspect. We don’t need any more .gov regulation mucking up our lives.

Just devolve it back to the Several States, it would be a rather simple Constitutional amendment.  Oh, and have the Several States select senators to protect their rights.  Much of this nonsense happened after senators became “super congressmen” with longer terms.

Sorry, looks like this picture has a piece of Schiff on it.

Corporations only exist because of government powers. They could not exist without the government enforcing their existence 24 hours a day. If the government were to simply no longer recognize corporations as legal entities, they would disintegrate in seconds. So changing the terms of that government support is not anything out of imagination.

Yes.  And there is historical precedent.  And don’t forget that AT&T being broken apart didn’t cause the world to explode even though they had a Death Star© logo.

The corporations MAKE the laws.

This is very, very true.  I reference the exact stats a little lower in the post, but if the Elite is for a regulation, then it happens.  Look at the endless hordes of illegals:  this was chosen by both sides.  Either could have stopped it, and either could stop it today.  But the Elites have bigger pocketbooks.

Peter Turchin’s End Times: There Be Dragons Here

Chain stores outcompete mom-and-pop stores. Customers prefer to buy from them. Why are you objecting to what customers have decided they want? It is not obvious that patronizing chain stores is contrary to customers’ interests.

Your policy prescription reads like the envy wish list from local pharmacists who can’t compete on price and selection, and demand government ban their competition.

At one point, I agreed with your statement wholeheartedly even though I’ve never been and never will be a pharmacist.  Customers do prefer lower prices.  Larger big-box stores can get those by several ways:  a good one is lowering the cost of goods delivered to the store via increased efficiency, a bad one is offshoring all manufacturing in critical industries.  But the impact on the community is not zero sum.  Profits that would stay local aren’t local anymore.  That has a cumulative effect.  If you really want big box stores and they’re 50% locally (in-state) owned with a specific mandate, and there are strategic tariffs?  Maybe we’re both happy and life is better.

Never put a catheter into a pharmacist, you’re just left with a harmacist.

The next comment went point by point, but I skipped a few points (length):

  1. Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
    And here we have the restriction that really silos the states from each other. I don’t know – CAN this be done at the state level, or would this require federal action?
  2. Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
    If the preceding point can be done, so can this.
  3. Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
    Ok, I know there’s a federal law on this – the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking Act.
  4. Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.
    Let’s add income taxes in here too, and combine this with points 1-6 above, and create a new legal entity – the “Domestic Missouri Corporation” (for example), which must have 50%+1 local ownership, a 50 year limited life, collects no sales tax, is exempt from as many state regs as reasonable; and income derived from a DMC is taxed at an extremely low rate by the state (if at all), and liquidation distributions from a DMC (at the end of the 50 year life) are exempt from state taxes. DMCs can be banks, and are then exempt from most state-level banking regulations.

There was an awesome longer comment talking point by point about the legality at the state level of doing this that I excerpted above.  Yes, it would require an amendment to the Constitution, because the Supreme Court (activist in the Robber Baron days) essentially nationalized corporations, primarily to protect the railroads (many of the court cases that changed the status of corporations from limited to infinite dealt with railroads).

Our local railroad has a good training program.

The big corporations collude with the government to use your tax dollars – stolen from you at gunpoint – to subsidize their costs.

A point I missed, thanks for bringing it up.  This is a particularly insidious trap – and it creates more input for the victim machine that is the GloboLeft – they import millions to undercut wages, profit strip an area, but are in favor of subsidizing the low-wage Potterville they’ve created.  People who depend on the government want . . . more government.  And (as noted by another commentor, they also look to have local communities give them a tax break, or even tax citizens to get them to pay for capital expansion (new stadium, anyone?).

. . . lots of corporations make contributions to local interests. WalMart posts these inside their store. In my neck of the woods, Family Express does lots of community support. On a national level, Thrivent does all kinds of stuff. All you need to do is ask. They approve even marginal stuff, though I know of no cases of them funding LBGTOMFG crap.

Back before the Boy Scouts went woke, I was a Cubmaster.  We went to Wal-Mart® and asked for contributions for day camp, even offering ad space.  “No.”  No large, non-local business contributed.  Local businesses did.  My experiences only.

I don’t disagree with any particular point, however, no set of laws will ultimately protect you from a group who A) is reasonably intelligent, B) is entirely unscrupulous and C) instinctively works together against outsiders. The only thing to do with a group like that is not deal with them and exclude them if at all possible.

Effectively, we are currently ruled by such a group. Until we are rid of them, these laws would grant temporary protection at best.

This is a significant problem, but it’s one that exists, well, everywhere.  Look at Indians (dot, not feather) that get jobs at Microsoft©.  What do they do?  They get on the hiring side and only hire additional Indians.  The same can be said of other groups that are insular – a friend works for a Mormon corporation.  He noted that non-Mormons can get jobs there, but never C-suite positions.  And, yes, Jews do this too and have been exceptionally successful at it.  One of James O’Keefe’s targets noted that at Disney©, there was no way that anyone but a Jewish person could get a top job.

Under a decentralized set of solutions as we’ve discussed, it is simply very, very difficult to concentrate that much power.

There’s a highway to hell but a stairway to heaven, which may be a commentary on the expected traffic load.

As an entrepreneur myself, I think all you really need is #1:  Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest. . . . (or) . . . Just make them play by the same damn tax rules. That’s probably sufficient.

How about we replace most taxes with tariffs?

Your great ape brain firmware wants to blame the competing outside tribe instead of traitors who look like you, but that group is called “middle class WASP voters”. That group has such a large percentage of the votes that no other group can force any policy onto them. Why then are there so many policies made against their interests? Are middle class voters mostly a bunch of non-player-characters whose minds are programed by the mainstream media? If so then voting can never work.

But policy after policy has been shoved down the throats of the middle-class WASP voters.  Who voted for unlimited immigration?  Here’s Turchin:

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

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

Given inflation, the poor are revolting.  No surprise, soap is expensive.

I will say that communities becoming dependent on the corporations is a problem as well. Again, example here in New Home: We have two very large corporations in town and one just down the road that are likely substantial employers for this entire region. If they go, it will have a huge impact.

There is a place for larger corporations with longer lives.  But they need to be sharply held to task.  Why is Facebook™ still so big?  They bought all potential competition when the competition was still small.  Facebook® as Facebook™ is fine, but when they want to just buy other corporations to make themselves invulnerable?  No.  But someone needs to make aspirin and airplanes, and Bayer® and Boeing™ can do that.  Maybe if Boeing had maintained a focus on airplanes they wouldn’t suck.

One (of Denninger’s suggestions) was to eliminate the ability for large investment firms like Blackrock and Vanguard to vote proxy shares on the mutual funds of their customers. This gives them ginormous power to influence the country which is why we have DEI (among other things). With this power it becomes easier to vote themselves even more control. To stop this, the actual owner of the stock (even via a mutual fund) should be the one who votes the shares or else the votes are forfeit. That would deflate their power tremendously. I would go a few steps further though, and limit their ability to invest in certain areas (real estate for example).

Yes.  BlackRock® should be neutered.

Why wouldn’t you trust Dr. Anthony Fauchi?

Undertake to lay your finger on that clause in the Constitution which gives government that authority and power.

“To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;” – this is the literal and exact purpose of the article.  But note, this uses the proper word “among” meaning that Massachusetts couldn’t blockade Vermont if Congress said “no”.  It does not mean “within” which is the source of the mischief.  States are, however, given the power, and had it, and restricted the formation of corporations to a legislative event because they were so frightened of unbridled corporate power.

At the beginning, when the Founders were still around, most corporations existed for large, well-defined purposes for a limited amount of time, and couldn’t own things that didn’t meet that purpose.  This isn’t my idea, it was the Founders.

Yes.  It was and is misused horribly.  But it is applicable here.

Corporations get too big, and live too long (list of dead corporations)?

Yes.  Just because Sears© cratered as it was looted doesn’t mean that BlackRock© or Facebook™ or Google® should be allowed to wield unlimited power, either financial or via information restriction on the public.  The power of the corporation in public life can and should be limited by limiting their reach, lifespan, and ability to work across business sectors.

BTW, how did Smoot-Hawley do at saving American jobs?

Don’t know, ask China in 2024 – we’re not 1930 America.  At that point(1930) we had a trade account surplus.  Now?  Not so much, and it’s a race to the bottom.  A $5 tariff per $700 (at the time) iPhone™ would have swung the production cost to favor the United States.  By 200%.  Countries can (and do!) strategically target markets so that they can “corner” the intellectual skills and know-how to make strategic goods.  Domestically produced F-35?  No way, there are parts that in 2024 have to come from China, and the timeline for competency in that tech is measured in decades.

And how is NAFTA really working out for the economy?

I shot the tariff, but I did not shoot the subsidy.

Penalize companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, and you might be onto something.  But don’t subsequently bitch when American cars and medicines cost 20x what the same products cost overseas, where they’re made in sweatshops, and are uncompetitive in the rest of the world for the same reason.

That’s making my point for me:  we used to be able to do that – the P-51s flying off the assembly line and into Europe was because we had the capacity and the know-how.  Germany could figure out how to make cars.  And in what industry (exactly) are we 20x less efficient?0

I’ve been thinking a lot on this lately. Do communities really benefit from cheaper prices at stores like Walmart or DollarStore if all they are is conduits sucking money out of local communities? Or, banking at MegaBank Corp when the local bank is owned by shareholders in the community?

I know a guy who owns a bank here in Modern Mayberry. Has a nice house that he had built.  By local labor.  Bought the concrete at the local plant, owned by locals.  He also volunteers his time to lead a civic group.  Make him a branch manager of MegaBankCorp© and he’d be buying a crappy house, and too tired to go out and help out after dinner.  But, hey, with MegaBankCorp™ your interest goes to New York!

I’m guessing (hoping) this discussion is really just JW’s way of pointing out the dearth of anyone having read Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations, which came out the same year as the Declaration Of Independence, and therefore being wholly ignorant of how liberty works in a country not controlled by the state, cannot come up with one reason (out of any five hundred) why government control of any markets is asinine and stupid in the extreme.

Adam got a lot right theoretically but also wrong practically.  Yes, it would be silly to grow grapes in Greenland, but comparative advantage says not.  We’re not talking about grapes, though.  And, Smith was against tariffs, but the average tariffs went up as high as 60%.  During our industrialization phase up until 1930 or so, the average tariff was 50%.  Average.  And they made up 95% of federal revenue – so much that we didn’t need an income tax.

Adam Smith was against those, so we can see the United States was very weak and not an industrial powerhouse.  Oh, wait.

Socialists would be fine using the invisible hand to change a lightbulb, but it would have to be somebody else’s bulb.

Bonus points: When the government also decrees that the national minimum wage should be $20/hr, how many of you will venture to local restaurants to buy dinner out?

I’m against minimum wages.  Boot the illegals out, restrict legal immigration, let the price float while defanging .gov as well as .com.  Yes, government is a dangerous servant and a cruel master, but so are Facebook™, Google©, and BankAmerica®.  Defanging both of them isn’t a bad idea.

So you’re okay with a government corporate entity living forever, but the idea that private citizens could have the same ability and right to incorporate scares hell out of you?  And when, exactly, are the masters of that government held liable for the consequences of their actions?

Governments end.  We have successive congresses, and successive presidents (elected or not).  Putting all of them on trial like the Spartans did after their terms (limited!) end is maybe not a bad idea – it would be fun to watch Clarence Thomas in charge of such an event.  I think the bigger problem is the regulator class, which should be mostly eliminated by actually following the limits placed on the federal government by the Constitution.

That would probably make her Schiff her pants.

Thanks for participating in this little thought experiment.  Again, it’s clear that the concentrated power of government is bad.  It’s also clear that the concentrated power of corporations can be just as bad, since they appear to inevitably twist themselves into anti-competition behemoths that want to control governments, import endless streams of illegals, and support Leftist causes – hence, the GloboLeftElite.