Category: TEOTWAWKI

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.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Dances With Dementia Edition

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

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

  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 2

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Felon and Fading – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Immigration Update – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Felon and Fading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence and Censorship Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden’s Misery Index

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

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

But technology will save us, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

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

Illegal Aliens:

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

Immigration Update

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

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

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

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

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

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

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

 

Good Gal

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

 

One Guy

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

 

Body Count

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

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

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

 

Vote Count

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

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

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

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

 

Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illegal Immigration: It’s a Pyramid Scheme

“If you’re trying to extort us because we are immigrants, we know the law.” – Taken

If you would like a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our lives, please press 1 for English. (All memes today are as found.)

As I look to the vast, teeming hordes of illegals washing on to our shore daily, I ask myself, what rational nation would make it easy for hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to easily enter the country each month, every month, for the entirety of the Biden administration?

Some have claimed that as many as 11 million to 13 million of these fighting-age men are entering the country every year.  That’s a total of nearly 40 million in the three and a half years since Biden assumed the office.  Of military aged men.  Who won’t be in the military.  At least not our military.

It has even gotten to the point where the normies that tend to vote left (not the committed GloboLeft, mind you, but the normies who voted for Biden) have come to realize, “No, this is too much.”

It’s gotten to the point where other immigrants have said, “No mas.”

It’s gotten so bad that Joe Biden, he who Executive Ordered out of existence Trump’s border strategy in the first forty minutes after he took the oath, had to pretend it was the Republicans who were against border security last month.

Oh, and a few minutes after that he then offered immediate legal status to 500,000 spouses of illegals.  It must be wonderful to be a GloboLeftist and have the memory of a goldfish.

Of course, one of the main reasons the GloboLeft want to haul in illegals over the border is that most people who are illegals want free stuff, and most immigrants in general (not all, but in general) have come from countries where a higher degree of socialism is the norm.  Plus, many don’t speak the language, so they’re left to whatever the local GloboLeftist “Community Organizer” tells them for political beliefs. 

But, perhaps, another reason that the GloboLeft wants so much immigration is debt. If you look at average debt in the United States, it’s at $104,000.  Even Gen Z is getting on the debt train:  the average Zoomer debt is about $30,000, even though the oldest Zoomer is 26.

Average illegal (or legal) immigrant debt load?  Zero.

The opportunity then appears:  load the illegals up with loans at silly high interest rates.  Keep in mind, they have crappy credit, so a 20% interest rate to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place seems like a good deal.  Illegals also have, generally, lower reading comprehension and less experience with the debt-industrial complex, so renting to buy a tv, a car, furniture (rent to own!) which makes it look like the immigrant is actually adding to the economy rather than subtracting from it.

And they are subtracting from it:  medical care, schooling, infrastructure, housing, and criminality all pile on.  While American might have become a third-world hellhole all by itself (which I doubt) illegals are a pyramid scheme.  The scheme requires more and more illegals to take on the debt and consooom the resources.

The solution to all of these problems brought on by the immigration?  GloboLeftists want to import yet more illegals to solve the problems caused by all of the previous illegals.  The endpoint of this is disaster.  It ends up destroying the countries, no, nations, that were insane enough to practice this importation.  A nation, like Ireland, filled with Irish people ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish.  A Moroccan born in Ireland is no more Irish than a mouse born in a stable is a horse.

No, Ireland then ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish, and then it becomes a country, and it will never be the same.  I think the Irish have figured this out, as they’ve been pushing back on the GloboHomoElite as of late.

Several years ago, I was listening to NPR™ before I gave up on it entirely – it was probably 2016.  This was an out-and-out propaganda piece, and I realized it at the time.  In this snippet, the child of Iranian parents that had lived in California had moved to Copenhagen.  He was quite upset that his daughter (born in California) was not considered to be Danish.

Well, she’s not.  She never will be.  Persian?  Sure.  Danish?  Never.  At best, a resident.  Her children, three or four generations hence?  Maybe so, as soon as they are named Viggo or Alfred or Clara or Freja.

These changes have consequences that range far deeper than just the economic.  England was a country made for the English, and that’s how it works.  The customs and attitudes of India or Pakistan?  Well, import enough of that, and England won’t be England.

America is not Ireland – I’m of Scots-Dane-English extraction, and no Scot, Dane, or Englishman would claim me as anything but their very distant kin, which I understand.  But I am more than three generations American, so I have no other home, no other place that is mine.

And just like England was made by and for the English, America was made by and for the Americans.  Whoever is coming across the border is not an American, but someone who is actively destroying America.

None of the GloboLeftElite care that this will ruin all of the nations of the West economically or demographically.  As an anon put it,

“They’ll destroy it all, all of society, for a lifetime of personal hedonism and debauchery, funded off of the suffering of billions.”

I’m not sure that’s right.  The forces of the GloboLeftElite do like their pleasures, but many of the foot soldiers of the GloboLeft simply want to watch it all burn.  They don’t care, particularly, to see anything grow in its place, just so long as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are destroyed.

Destruction, though it may be easy, and though it may be very common in the coming years, will not be the final say.  In the end, since the beginning of man, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good have proven to come back alive, again and again, even when the night seemed the darkest.

I have never said the path is easy, and I’ve never said any of us will live to see the end of the tale, and I hate to give spoilers, but we’re not done.

Not even close.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Trump Trigger and Complexity

“Rita, you’re a convicted felon, and now you’re an escaped con.” – The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

They fired me from the clock factory because of all the extra hours that I’m putting in.

  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 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 – The Trump Trigger– Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Stairway to Where? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

The Trump Trigger

Donald Trump scared the hell out of the GloboLeftElite when he was elected.  I’m fairly certain that he makes many of GloboLeft rank and file lose sleep when they think about him being re-elected.

Rand Paul was quoted in Zero Hedge® (a reader sent this in):

“I worry about strife. I worry about war in the streets. I worry about 50 percent of the public believing that the court system will be used against them . . . I worry when half the country thinks they won’t be treated fairly, what happens and how people react.”

Huh, I thought he was dead.

Where we sit now, Trump may never spend a day in the pokey.  And he may never even be convicted – yes, there’s a jury verdict, but until the judge finds him convicted, there’s just a vote by a jury of twelve GloboLeft peers, one of which may have violated the rules and talked about the proceedings.

Oops.  There are other very, very valid reasons that Trump has for appeal – selective prosecution among them not identifying the charge against him – they never specified the other crime that Trump supposedly committed.

Rand Paul is right.  The judicial system has been weaponized at every level against Trump.  The fact that the Federalist Society has produced a slate of judges over the past several decades that aren’t woke Sotomayor-level GloboHomo soldiers will apply actual justice at the federal level.

But what if they don’t?

If Trump is convicted and sent to prison that will a very dark day in history – one that will show to millions of normies that the republic is irretrievably lost, a conclusion that many on the TradRight have come to years if not decades ago.

Does this lead to immediate chaos?  This is a tough one – I tend to think not, but then again, the number of people that support Trump and MAGA are significant.  It will be a sign that businesses need to create a quick exodus from New York, California, or any other location where the business has a political difference with the GloboLeftElite agenda.  I mean, it’s not like elections matter.

But I’m told it was a FaiR ElEctIoN.

Perhaps Musk moving to Texas is beginning to make a lot more sense.  On the bright side, it means that the Republic of Texas will be born with it’s own space force.

Violence and Censorship Update

The issues in Israel have done several things – they’ve increased the level of fighting in the GloboLeft as the Pro-Palestine wing and the Pro-Israel wings slug it out.  As Bracken notes, it is a weird GloboLeft/Palestine alliance.

Of course, as soon as the GloboLeft makes one of their crappy villages, they . . . put up the borders that they claim to hate.

The other side of the coin is the reaction in Congress, which is entirely at odds with that pesky 1st Amendment:

And, Massey has a very good question, especially since they committed $300,000 to ads attacking him:

Oh, and questioning the “Muh Immigration is Good” narrative is worth a banning:

They’re still trying to ban JK Rowling for telling the truth:

Propaganda, anyone?

Oh, it’s not like they’re trying to suppress anything . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

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

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

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

Economic numbers are up a bit.  But so are prices.

Illegal Aliens:

Second Highest May is actually down.  But the normies are waking up.

Stairway to Where?

History never repeats exactly, but the same themes keep coming up again and again.  While there is no guarantee, there are patterns.

The lead up to civil war is often the same:  misery, rising tensions, and too many elites fighting each other for scraps of power.  The wars are often drastically different, and depend on things like ideology, geography, technology, and telepathy.  Okay, maybe not telepathy, but the other ones all count.

But, just like Led Zepplin©, there are two paths you can go by . . . and two outcomes.

Broadly, when civil wars occur there two things that can happen as a result.  The first one is what happened after the Russian Revolution or the American Civil War 1.0 – that is, a drastic reduction in freedom for citizens.

But I’ve been assured that everything is fine.

The American Civil war did increase the freedom of slaves, and granted them full citizenship, to be sure.  But for the common man who hadn’t been a slave?  Freedom declined.  There had been a balancing act between the Several States and Fed.Gov, but after the Civil War was done, the States were no longer sovereign, and, in fact were nothing more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This was drastically different than what existed before.  The Several States were recognized as just that, complete governments.  They only banded together, reluctantly, to create an organism strong enough, just barely, to resist being beaten up and conquered by the various European powers.

After the American Civil War?  The process of eliminating the rights of the Several States has been an ongoing battle every year since 1865, and, with a few exceptions, has been largely won by the United States.

If increased central control and tyranny are one outcome from a civil war, what’s the other?

Increased complexity.  Think back to the fall of the Soviet Union.  A huge, monolithic, multicultural tyranny if ever there was one.  It looked to the world as if it would never be defeated – heck, the view of the Russians in the 1980s (I know, I was there) was that, while they didn’t have lots of different consumer products, they did have a huge technological edge over the West.

But when the end came, the fighting that did happen was minimal – the Soviet Union (like the multicultural British and Roman empires that came before) didn’t end so much with a red tide of blood, but rather a gradual realization that no one wanted to play anymore.  The sad, shattered core of empire let all the parts fly to the wind.

I met the guy who puts the symbols on maps that say what things are.  What a legend!

It seems that one key is the “multi-cultural” part.  Whereas you could make the case that the United States had Irishmen and Scots and Norwegians bopping around back in 1860, the vast majority of Americans were just that, Americans descended from (by and large) stock from the United Kingdom with a common language and common religious and cultural heritage.

That led to Tyranny.

The seat of power of Imperial Russian was mainly . . . Russian.  The Russian Revolution led to?  Tyranny.

It seems that there is some tipping point where a Civil War results not in tyranny, but in Balkanization, heck, the name “Balkanization” is literally exactly what we’re talking about.

The more I think about it, unless there is a Caesar sitting in the wings (and I don’t see him) then we will end up Balkanizing after a Civil War.

Disagree?  This is a newer thought, so, love to hear comments.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1788630900781047856

https://x.com/i/status/1797153228032815184

https://twitter.com/i/status/1787518756756901901

https://x.com/i/status/1795801690014429550

https://x.com/i/status/1790510753952194692

https://x.com/i/status/1796322999056163026

https://x.com/i/status/1797272685791117522

 

Good Guy

https://x.com/i/status/1797274250438476199

 

One Guy

https://www.actionnews5.com/2024/05/29/scjc-alleged-teen-triggerman-deadly-community-center-shooting-fired-self-defense-wont-be-prosecuted/

https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2024/SCO/0307/221482.asp

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/man-shot-killed-overnight-in-a-carmichael-apartment-deputies-say/

https://apnews.com/article/roger-fortson-stand-your-ground-race-florida-2c6a585f3fa5b2bd21179b84ff258b1d#

 

Body Count

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F04d489f3-35f1-4579-80f6-dc5babc003cf_936x528_png_92.jpg?itok=sQRpJ67q

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F13892e0d-32cb-47c1-8cef-b2e1554b9e62_1456x972.jpeg_92.jpg?itok=HMg63_9I

https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Population-Grew-51-Million-Last-Two-Years

https://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.240510.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/30142.jpeg?itok=jcgiDaxv

 

Vote Count

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/31/dinesh-dsouza-election-film-2000-mules-pulled.html

https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/13/heres-fresh-evidence-bidens-using-your-tax-dollars-to-turn-out-democrat-votes-in-2024/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2024/05/13/the-georgia-state-election-board-ensures-2024-will-be-a-2020-repeat

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/officials-overseeing-elections-swing-states-doubt-2020-results/

 

Civil War

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/biden-uncivil-war-rages-rcna150666

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13447357/THIRTEEN-conservative-counties-Oregon-approve-ballot-measures-SECESSION-vote-join-non-woke-Idaho-issue-list-demands.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13452561/Divided-states-America-Oregon-Louisiana-campaigns-secession-taking-place-local-state-levels-succeeding.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinion-we-are-starting-to-enjoy-hatred/ar-BB1nm54r

https://x.com/seanmdav/status/1796301843338789070

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-investor-ray-dalio-warns-115219371.html

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/18/unpacking-ray-dalios-alarmist-prediction-of-civil-war/

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

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/trump-trial-maga-internet-violence/678571/

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-guilty-verdict-online-maga-fanbase-war/

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/28/terrible-place-bill-maher-warns-a-civil-could-happen-here–some-already-pining-for-it/

What Is It All About? Humiliation.

“You throw away your biggest opportunity, over a dog!  And then you humiliate me by stealing my boss’s car!” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

I think, I hope, the base image is A.I. generated.

I had originally started writing a post about Trump, but I thought it would fit better in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  That’s where it fits, anyway.  Instead, I thought I’d write indirectly about it for today.  I’ll start with the words of Theodore Dalrymple:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.  When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious likes, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.  To assent to obvious lies is . . . in some small way to become evil oneself.  One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.  A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.  I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

The GloboLeftElite does not care about being right, it cares about control.  Dalrymple references political correctness, which is a way to control thought by controlling the language that can be used about a subject.  What followed?  Microaggressions, a manner in which any sort of normal patterns of speech can be considered inspired by the deepest hate.  Soon enough we’ll have to stop calling them black holes and call them “BiPOC gravitational anomalies”.

They do this to break you down like a person might break a horse.

It then jumps into things like hiring.  “Hiring the best person for the job” is considered a microaggression according the GloboLeft.  Why?  Some bafflegarb about history.  The explanation didn’t make sense, but that’s part of the process – people are supposed to buy this nonsense.

YouTube™ even enforces it with a set of rules that are never shared that can be unknowingly violated and then the creator is silenced, often forever.  Why?  They won’t give a list.  You’re guilty when they say you’re guilty, and the rules change over time so previously accepted speech is now verboten.

Vox Day wrote about the general process that they use to ostracize people in his Social Justice Warrior books.  It is:

  1. Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative.
    2. Point and Shriek.
    3. Isolate and Swarm.
    4. Reject and Transform.
    5. Press for Surrender.
    6. Appeal to Amenable Authority.
    7. Show Trial.
    8. Victory Parade.

The point is only partially to humiliate the victim of the process.  The most important part of the process is to scare other people who might take similar actions.  There doesn’t have to be a formal recruitment to the GloboLeft, giving in is all that it takes.

I was a bit confused when I saw the GloboLeftElite attack Graham Hancock.  If you’re not familiar, Hancock has a theory that there was a civilization older than what is currently accepted.  Okay, he’s either right or he’s wrong.  Instead of arguing about Hancock’s ideas, it was an attack on anyone who would give him a platform.

Hancock didn’t back down.  But anyone who has any belief that is contrary to the narrative must be shut down – I was reminded of that today when I tried to find a story on Bing™ and Google© but was forced to use Yandex™.  Why?  It had to do with an alternative theory about an aspect of COVID.  Even as these alternative theories are proven, they are suppressed.  Why?

Because to the GloboLeftElite, these Narrative violations, no matter how small, leave deviation for thoughts.  The frightening part is now the GloboLeft NPC foot soldiers are so easy to steer into a mob with pitchforks and torches, screaming words like “disinformation” or “dangerous to our democracy”.  Hancock was even accused of racism, which is the word that seems to have lost a lot of impact when they define down “hiring the best person for the job” as racist.

This humiliation ritual is on full display – drag queen story hour and three-year-old “transgender” children are nothing more nor less than that, and “living in the pods and eating the bug” is more of the same.  The reason that these exist is to humiliate society.  They want it because they know you don’t want it, and want you to feel you can’t stop them, so that they can humiliate you.

Who supports those?  Those who are weak and don’t think for themselves:  the GloboLeft NPC.  They’re programmed because they simply must follow the popular opinion.  I don’t know how much of a proportion of society they are, but it’s not as much as the GloboLeftElite would like:  Bud Light™ is an example of a brand killed by those who simply refused to be a part of the humiliation ritual.

Don’t think that the January 6 and Trump trials and convictions are anything less than this – they’re a humiliation ritual for Trump and the people put into prison for January 6, but they’re also meant to show everyone what punishments wait for them if they go against The Narrative.

However, the GloboLeftElite has not won, and won’t win.  The Zoomers and Generation Alpha see what’s going on, and want none of it, swinging wider right with every poll.

And that’s a good thought to start the week with.

Notes:  I had more memes, but thought I’d just let this one stand.  Also, watching The Prisoner (a reader suggestion, which also explains Iron Maiden’s© song Back in the Village).

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” –  Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie.  Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog).  In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them.  His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time.  I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years.  That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me.  From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl.  I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it.  Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years.  This caused several related things to happen:

  • The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
  • The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class.  Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
  • Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
  • Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination.  In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world.  I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too.  McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them.  I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish.  Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration.  Which one?  Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many.  Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do.  Keep this in mind:  McDonald’s is now a luxury food.  Are McDonald’s™ sales number up?  Sure!  Prices have doubled.  But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters:  P and A.

What’s the outcome?  Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail.  Examples abound:

  • Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
  • TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
  • Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
  • Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
  • Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains.  Period.  Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile?  He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West.  The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier.  Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet.  And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today.  That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities.  Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left.  Why?  Because being in a city is dependency.  If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally.  This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster?  A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific.  And where would they put all the street-poo?  Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them.  They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

  • Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
  • Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
  • Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
  • Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
  • Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
  • Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time.  People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower.  98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country.  Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads?  Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors.  Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it.  They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection?  God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols.  She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller.  It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are.  This is not a fluke:  John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this:  in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities.  Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not.  There’s one other missing factor:  religion.

Cities are more secular.  It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day.  Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man.  Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work.  I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff.  In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular.  However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular.  There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population:  they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from:  it certainly won’t be San Francisco.  And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it.  We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.