Category: TEOTWAWKI

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity.  Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros.  Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”.  Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once.  It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream.  Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source.  The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it.  So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane.  I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol.  These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote.  Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could make furniture out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could heat houses with it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario.  45%!  The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years.  I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years.  That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles.  I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist.  Die.  Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon.  Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered.  Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier.  It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car.  The question is, where do those materials come from?  If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn.  Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today.  Cobalt increases would be 2,000%.  The increase in availability alone is questionable.  Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is.  And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious.  China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO2, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO2.  Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second?  The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever.  The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity.  That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy.  Me?  I have my own plans.

Après Trump, qui? (Plus? A Picture of a Stripper)

“Hey, is that Donald Trump’s car?” – American Psycho

Biden likes all-mail voting, Trump prefers all-male voting.

The battle of the Left against Trump continues, as it will for every day of his life.  There isn’t really an end to how much he’s rustled the collective jimmies of the Left.  It’s especially fun to watch it play out in the Twitter™ X® feeds of Leftist celebrities like John Cusack, Ron Perlman, Steven King or Rob Reiner.

It’s actually amazing to watch the chemicals soak their brain as their amygdala gets hijacked by someone not even in the room (great example here:  LINK).  And I’m glad that I’ve never been in a small room on a hot day with Cusack, Perlman, King and Reiner – imagine the smell.

Why is that?  Trump is a focus.  If you go back in time, the Left was similarly fixated on Bush I, Bush II, and Reek, er Mittens Romney.  As noted by the commentor El B on last Wednesday’s post Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com),

I imagine the next article will be titled, “There’s no good reason you should have to be alive to vote” so at last Pa Wilder can vote Democrat.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a promiscuous habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, where the quote above originates.  It was written as if from a demon to his nephew, showing how Evil might best subvert society.  In 2023, I think it could simply be a text from Soros to his kid.  Lewis absolutely nails this concept, and does it in a simple, cogent, readable paragraph.  Sadly for humanity, Leftists live this way, and thrive on it.

All of the hate of the Left has a concrete and local focus, and all of their compassion is spread in such a diffuse manner that it becomes meaningless.  This is why these monsters pretend that handouts from the government (from money coerced from actually productive people) to those who meet some nearly arbitrary criteria is the same as actual charity.

I just donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see the money.

But back to Trump.  After he first said “Build the Wall®” the Left went into overdrive with hate towards Trump, pulling out all of the stops.  “Europeans won’t think nice things about us!” they said.  My response to that one is actually very, very simple, “So what?  My ancestors left there for a reason and we have better steak here and don’t have to share a continent with the French.”

Trump’s presidency wasn’t a failure, but it was close, and it showed off his biggest weaknesses:  the chose people based on how much the complimented him, and not based on either actual competence or actual loyalty.  His personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was a prime example.  He hired a corrupt caricature of a sleezy lawyer to do business for him, and was shocked when the guy actually turned out to be sleezy.

Who knew???

Trump didn’t build the wall, didn’t stand up to Congress, and blinked when he had the chance to cross the Rubicon and stand for actual election integrity since, yeah, we know that the Left stole the election, and the receipts to back that statement up are starting to pile up.  He did add some okay Supreme Court justices, but I think he should have added the Zodiac Killer, Ted Cruz.

I’m telling you, it would have sucked to have been killed just because I’m a Sagittarius.

Had Trump said, “I’m staying here, not because I demand the power, but I will stay here until a President can be rightfully elected to replace me.  I declare that elections will take place in November 2021.  I will not be a candidate, and will in no way serve past January 20, 2022 regardless of the circumstances.  This is necessary to ensure that the legitimacy of the Presidency of the United States remains unsullied.”  Oh, sure, he’d have said, “I, your greatest President, will stay in office because you deserve a system that is excellent in a way only I can give you.”

Then, he could have done that, and retired a hero to the middle and the Right and it would have been talked about for 500 years.  The Left would have grumbled, and might have lost their demon and the coming inevitable crisis might (stress, might) have been pushed down the road a decade or more.

After Caesar crossed the Rubicon, I believe his first words were, “Can someone get me some dry socks?”

One thing Trump did was completely transform the face of politics.  Just as the Left didn’t vote for Biden, instead voting against Trump, Trump unmasked the utter weakness and complicity of the Republican politicians (not the Right) in creating the landscape we have today.  It was especially instructive watching Trump eviscerate ¡JEB!  ¡JEB! had been the consensus candidate for the establishment, but Trump sucked all the air (and ¡JEB!’s soul, it looked like) out the room.

This was also inevitable.  The system has stopped serving the interests of the heritage American middle class for decades.  Vox Day put it very well the other day when he noted that the Republican debate featured two Indians arguing about who could give more money to Israel.

I think there are a lot of people who would vote GOP for $20.  Heck, vote twice and you can afford a Big Mac®

Will Trump survive the trials?  I think not.  The original charges are (mainly, as far as I can tell – IANAL) to be farcical.  Trump’s later attempts at covering crap up?  Not so much.  There are legitimate charges that could bring him down if Trump did really try to have records or videos erased.

Regardless, the RINOs are doing everything they can to hide the only candidate that they have that has national impact, the only candidate who is leading in the battleground states, the only candidate who stands a chance against the corrupt vote harvesting system set up by the Left.

Then what?  Après moi, le deluge (After me, the flood) is attributed to Louis XV, and is said to foreshadow the French Revolution.  Since we need more rain here, I’ll adapt the phrase for our current problem:

Après Trump, qui?  (After Trump, who?)

The only person on the Right who can even come close to Trump in charisma and poise is Tucker Carlson.  Tucker seems to have as much charisma, but can also add in an intelligence and poise lacking in Trump.  Could he manage being President?  I have no idea, but when compared with the rest of the candidates on the Right, he leaves them all in the dust.

Longer term who will emerge as a leader?  Some corporal that fought in Afghanistan and is fed up?

We’ll see.  The current crop of mainstream politicians on the Right and Left make ¡JEB!’s charisma vacuum look like Robert Downy, Jr.  Most of their policies are, at best, simple replays of politics that are 20 years into the past, with less of a likelihood of solving our problems than using a 4-year-olds fingerpainting to design a passenger jet, though that might be exactly what Boeing® does nowadays.

I’ll vote for Trump in November 2024 if he’s not in the slammer, obviously.  It amuses me to watch the Leftists get in a froth-ridden frenzy against Trump.  It’s almost like Leftists don’t believe Biden won the election.

Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All

“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz

Whoops, sorry!  Just a regular old death cult after all.

This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week.  This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.

What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post.  I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me.  I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left.  It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.

The graph is shown as a bullseye.  Why?  I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway.  They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.

I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim.  They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it.  Who put the electrodes up the fish butts?  Grad students.

The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:

  1. All of your immediate family.
  2. All of your extended family.
  3. All of your closest friends.
  4. All of your friends (including distant).
  5. All of your acquaintances.
  6. All people you have ever met.
  7. All people in your country.
  8. All people on your continent.
  9. All people on all continents (apparently, screw those guys on islands, they suck anyway).
  10. All mammals (finally got the people on the islands and astronauts covered).
  11. All amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds.
  12. All animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae.
  13. All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
  14. All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
  15. All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.
  16. All things in existence.

So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you?  For me, this is an easy answer.  I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.

Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?

In general, I like the people that are close to me more.  Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people.  I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®.  Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:

Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.

Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics.  What about the Left?

Why did they pick 45°? 

Whoa, that’s amazingly different!  Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them.  The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated.  They like these things best:

  1. All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
  2. All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
  3. All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.

Rocks are more important to them than their parents.  And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why.  They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them.  You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death.  “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!”  Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status.  “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”

I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?

To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning.  But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.

I’m not kidding.  I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans.  Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.

To be clear, I love the environment.  I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees.  The reason I love them is simple:  they exist to by enjoyed by Man.  If Man doesn’t exist?  None of these mean anything to me.  There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now.  Because we want to make cows happy?  No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust.  To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man.  But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.

The Moon?  Just rock without people.  And Soviet Russian ships that landed.  A crash is a landing, right?

Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country.  Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits?  Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends.  Why?  We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.

When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?

Thought so.

People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government.  I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest.  For today, let’s focus on government.

The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”.  Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.

Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?

The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control.  And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people).  And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy.  They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin.  Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains:  they hate humanity.

Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer.  None of these policies have humans in mind.

Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck.  I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do.  That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy.  I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.

Hmmm.

Mussolini was lucky.  On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.

Other examples of this are things like nuclear power.  The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner.  How can we drag them back down?  Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.

The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy.  Is an energy crisis coming?  It certainly is.  Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people?  Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.

To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.

Is Leftism a death cult?

Not if you’re a rock.  Otherwise, yeah.

Global Warming Is For Losers

“I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.” – The Red Green Show

Remember to always ask yourself what you can do to make Leonardo DiCaprio’s life better.

I remember one Twitter® exchange I had way back in the past.  It was with a Leftist, and I made the statement, “Don’t you see, the only ethical path is to be against illegal immigration, and immigration of any sort.  Since Americans emit nine times the greenhouse gases of countries like Mexico or Guatemala, the only thing we can do to protect the climate is to keep them there or send them back.”

There was a pause on the response.  “Not sure if you’re really concerned about the environment or just don’t like illegal immigrants.”

That was one of my favorite trolls, since they had to think about conflicting narratives in their programming.  In many cases, the Left ignores this, but my major message is never to the Left, since they are not on a rational mission, but on a religious one since Leftism isn’t a political system at heart, it is a religious one.  Look at it when a Leftist talks about Trump – it’s like someone on the Right being forced to think of Satan in the Oval Office – it’s religious, not ideological.

The Sun never went to college because it has thousands of degrees.

One of the sacraments of this religion is abortion.  The other?  Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

This summer has been hotter than the last few here in Upper Lower Midwestia.  I’ve seen stories where it was hot in lots of other places, mostly places that you’d expect, like Phoenix.  Some of the hottest places this year are the places where people are only there because there’s oil there, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the place they make French fries at McDonald’s®.

But that’s why we always see Global Warming, er, Climate Change stories trotted out in the summer and never when it’s -20°F (-273.16°C in metric units) in winter.  How bad is it?  The propaganda of the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change is trotted out on weather forecasts to nail down the idea that things are getting worse when in reality, they’re not a whole lot different.  Want an example?  Here’s Sweden:

Are illegals in Sweden known as “artificial Swedeners”?

Yup, 36 years later, the biggest change has been that they changed the color of the map to a scary color.  Why?  To celebrate the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

How bad is it?  I’ve pointed out again and again how the people in charge of defending our country are fundamentally not serious people.  They want, well, I’ll let them tell you:

If she succeeds, everyone will know how to stop an American tank:  shoot the soldiers pushing it.

It has even become a death cult, of sorts.  The doom that has hit country after country across the world has been staggering.  The big part is propaganda – starting at the schools where teachers, predominantly taught Left-leaning curriculum by Left-leaning professors at Left-leaning colleges are the ones in charge of the indoctrination.  What does that lead to?  Students that don’t want to have children because they believe that they’re part of some sort of Original Sin just by breathing.  Notice that China is utterly ignoring the nonsense.

Looks like the Germans and the French are finally equal at something.

The other part of this equation is that people are ignoring the elephant in the room:  a volcano last year put an additional 13% water vapor into the Earth’s atmosphere.  13%.  And water is a very, very potent greenhouse gas.  That’s huge, but I don’t see Greta wanting to sacrifice virgins to the volcano god to stop those from going off, or Joe Biden wanting to make water illegal.

Soon enough the water will drop out of the atmosphere, but Joe Biden will still have to live with being Hunter Biden’s dad.

And I will say, again and again, that this has nothing to do with Global Warming, er, Climate Change.  It has everything to do with Leftist ideology and nothing to do with the temperature or the weather or any sort of solution.  Again, listen to them when they talk:

What’s the scariest word in nuclear physics?  Oops.

The Left is adamantly against nuclear power, because, properly implemented it solves a whatever Global Warming, er, Climate Change problems there are.  To be fair, the plants need to be idiot proof, because idiots have a really great track record of screwing everything up, and hiring anyone but actually competent people to design and run the things is an absolute must.

Never let a cat run your nuclear power plant.

Nuclear power is clearly a part of the plan, but keep in mind that the plan is created by people whose idea of nature is a strip of lawn in a park a half a mile from their house.  The people crafting the plans to create the “new world” have no more real appreciation of nature than Mark Zuckerbot.

Remember, these are people that get scared when they’re more than 20’ from asphalt.

I think we need to move away from fossil fuels, and quickly.  Not at all because I hate them, no, but because we need to save them for the really useful things they do.  It will take decades and trillions of dollars of investment to move the world to a new power source.  And we only have so much time to do it before that opportunity expires.

Leftists oppose it:

“Environmentalists” don’t understand it:

But true Chads know that’s where we’re going:

And if we ignore it, the actual aliens (not the illegal ones) will never stop giving us crap:

The Great Rollover

“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.

Yellow Freight® shut down.  They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.

Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs.  What went on?  Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks.  When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million.  During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest.  They’d also paid down $230 in principle.

Not $230 million.  Not $230 thousand.  $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.

Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.

I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.

Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.

This isn’t the first.  Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%.  The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data.  It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.

I guess no one is making them account for their problems?

The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds.  Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.

As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”).  Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.

Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity.  Seems that someone made a payment.

That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency.  One competitor, of course, is precious metals.  Another is land.  My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.”  After the debt ceiling deal (translation:  spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months.  I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!

I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.

Eventually that has an effect on all assets.  Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%.  Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.

Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when.  That’s the goal.  Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?

Of course not.  In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem.  If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s?  The 1990s? The 2000s?  In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better.  I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.

Why do central bankers never travel together?  They’re a bunch of loan wolves.

I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.

But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough.  After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.

You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack.  Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

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That’s awake, not “woke.”

Repost from 2019 . . .

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan.  Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day.  For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking.  She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation. 

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon.  Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room.  She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor.  It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories.  I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work.  I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems.  I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure.  But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative.  My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle.  Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it.  And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle.  But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly.  The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article.  Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well.  The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world.  I started with the story about compassion.  When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher.  Well, some Leftists.

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Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties.  After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care?  Not at all.  The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care.  But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race.  One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference.  You like your family more than your brother’s family.  You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor.  You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.”  In-group bias is normal.  It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

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Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people.  It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh.  Nevermind.

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As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups. 

But this isn’t the norm.  And this isn’t how the Left has been for years.  Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea.  2018?  Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

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Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border.  Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

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Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010.  There is one thing that social networks want – your attention.  They best way to get that attention?  Show you content that creates an emotional response.  Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.”  But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

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I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand.  Social media is a particularly useful programming device.  These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left.  Why does this impact white Leftists in particular?  They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left.  But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate.  And they do have money.  And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced.  Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped.  As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse.  The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming.  An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons.  It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland.  It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left.  But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of.  Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all.  What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable.  Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage.  Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence.  Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there.  This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship.  In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019.  That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms.  Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right?  It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working.  So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny.  We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader.  But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them.  Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid.  I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting.  Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

  • We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
  • White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
  • We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
  • (Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
  • Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
  • Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
  • Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
  • Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes?  His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from?  Yup.

Everything.

Why?  Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger.  Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring.  She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.”  Me:  “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know.  It would make sense that it was.  The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching.  Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends.  There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

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

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

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

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

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

“What causes poverty?”

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

But why is that a stupid question?

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

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

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

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

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

The Wolf is always at the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if we change out our People?

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

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

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

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

FBI: Time To Break It Up And Put Them On Trial

“We’re gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess.” – Die Hard

The Mrs. is a lot like an FBI agent.  She never asks a question she doesn’t already know the answer to.

When I was just a wee Wilder, I began to doubt the government.

I was fairly young when I heard about the secret files that J. Edgar kept on powerful people in order so that he could maintain his perch atop the FBI® that he had created.  Hoover had spent decades developing not only a United States Police Force, but the aptly-named Hoover sucked up all the data on people that he could.  Hoover likely gave favors to hundreds of people by not sharing their dirty secrets so that he could maintain his perch.  It was so bad that I think Hoover even invented the Memory Foam® mattress so he could blackmail people.

Hoover also was a genius at self-promotion.  He made the “G-Men” a meme in the 1930s, trying to set up a propaganda campaign to convince the American public that the FBI®, instead of being an unnecessary internal police and propaganda forum, was instead just like Superman™ – the paragon of truth, justice, and the American way®.  Oddly, both of those ideas are fiction.

Superman® challenged Chuck Norris to a fight.  Loser had to wear their underwear on the outside.

Instead, the agents have spent their time illegally wiretapping (over 7,000 times by 1985, who knows how many more now) American civilians.  The FBI© was more than happy to also jump in and get involved in:

  • the ATF© created quagmire in Waco,
  • entrapment of the innocent Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge and the murder of several people in his family,
  • failure to investigate the massive Chinese investments in financing Bill Clinton in 1996 (ever wonder how they got all that access??),
  • having an agent (Robert Hanssen) who was utterly in the pocket of the Soviets and, later, Russia,
  • editing Wikipedia® to make the FBI™ look better,
  • covering-up the Hillary Clinton® e-mail scandal,
  • warrants to tap Trump’s campaign,
  • Andrew McCabe,
  • Pete Strzok, who never should have gotten a clearance based on the number of consecutive consonants in his last name without a vowel,
  • using personal data (DMV photos) for a vast database,
  • “losing” Hunter Biden’s laptop,
  • despite having certainty that the Hunter Biden laptop data was 100% real, contained evidence of multiple crimes, and misled and intentionally tried to suppress laptop information by lying that it was hacked, despite knowing that it wasn’t.

Everything in italics above is from the last 10 years.  This is another reason not to trust Italians, I guess.  But in the last decade it’s almost all extremely partisan in nature, showing that the FBI™ could probably just be renamed the Grand Enforcement, Support, Tyranny and Police Organization (GESTaPO) of the Democratic Party.  As the Leftists keep whining, they want to safeguard “Our Democracy”.  Sounds very good until you being to understand that “Our” doesn’t include you or me.

In a moment of clarity, the FBI decided to dedicate themselves to the mission of fighting crime.  Just kidding.

I do know that FBI® has done some good things in the past, especially when it came to rooting out commies after World War II.  Say what you want about Hoover, but he did hate commies.  But as it stands here in 2023, the FBI© has become a liability for anyone who is actually interested in freedom.

The problem comes from breaking the Constitution.  The idea of Federalism is that we don’t have parallel laws, we have a single set of laws.  If the state regulates insurance or regulates mustache length, why should the Feds do it, too?  Well, what about kidnapping?  That’s one that can cross state lines, right?

The Lindbergh kidnapping case led to a law that let the FBI® look into kidnappings.

Did you know you can fit 34 bananas in a kangaroo pouch?  Also?  I have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

The big idea was to look at crimes and figure out how to get involved.  It turns out, the Federal government which was intentionally small because the Founding Fathers mainly just wanted to be left alone to mostly do what they wanted, as long as it didn’t violate state, county or city law.  Federal law?  There were a few back in the day (see:  Whiskey Rebellion) but most laws were local.  Murder someone and have it be a Federal issue?

Not going to happen.

Well, back in 1787 it wasn’t going to happen.  But after decades of creeping laws encouraged by propaganda, the FBI™ only strengthened with time.  Like a camel with a nose under the tent, the FBI© now looks into (spins wheel) things they don’t like (not illegal things, mind you, just things the FBI© didn’t like) said on the Internet.

My puns aren’t listed as a war crime.  Yet.

The last example is real – the FBI worked with social networks and Internet companies to stop the spread of information that would be damaging to the Democratic party.

The FBI® is now a fully partisan appendage of state power.  It always existed to support itself, but now it explicitly exists to support parties and politicians instead of the American people.

The fact that this doesn’t surprise anyone is perhaps the most telling thing about where we are as a people.  The FBI™ is shown to be institutionally corrupt at the highest and lowest levels and (probably) irretrievably partisan for the Left and . . . no one is surprised.

Hmm, wonder why I’m getting all these hits from Washington and Langley?

How Feminism Is Destroying The West, One Virgin At A Time

“Wait a minute. Connie Swail? Don’t you mean The Virgin Connie Swail?” – Dragnet (1987)

I slept with a rich girl who was a bit of a tramp once.  Got lobsters.

I’ve had several posts about how sex and economics are intertwined more tightly than a bachelor weekend at Bill Clinton’s place.  It is one of the more misunderstood parts of what is slowly destroying the family in the West.  This, in turn, will gradually destroy the economics of the West.  Without the culture of the West, the West effectively disappears.

This post will be pretty heavy on pictures and memes, almost all of which are as-found.

Let’s take a step back to 1776.  I would love to do that in reality, and (in future posts) we’ll look to see how close we are to that.  But back to the people that were there the first time.  They were, mostly, pretty young.  Sure, there were old dogs like Ben Franklin, but Jefferson was only 33.  Madison, who would steer the Constitution to completion just over a decade later, was only 25.

Man, John Marshall must have had a hard 20 years on him.

Men were young (even though, yes, the paintings above weren’t done in 1776), yet doing amazing and important things.  George Washington was 57 years old at his inauguration, which is astonishing since our likely presidential candidates in 2024 will be a combined 741 years old.

Back then, most men could find a woman and get married, sometimes once or twice (when wife 1.0 died in childbirth).  This led to a certain stability, combined with the family economic structure.  In this case, most families were Corporate Families – everybody worked, and everybody pitched in to keep things going.  The reason that schools had spring breaks wasn’t to go to drink tequila in Cancun and go “woo” but to help plant.  Summers were off to work the farm.  And fall breaks were necessary for the harvest.

Kids were small farm implements, which is why families had lots of them.  Divorces:  uncommon.  Religion:  common. 

Sadly, not a bikini graph.

In my lifetime, the Wilder Family has generally always existed in the tan area, including great-grandparents with a male breadwinner, though Great-grandpa and great-grandma McWilder ran an inn near a railroad where they only rarely killed and ate unsuspecting guests.

The golden age of the Male Breadwinner model was between 1900 and somewhere between 1960 and 1970.  I’d note that around 1920 when women got the right to vote that the decline in Male Bread started, though it really began in earnest at the Great Depression.

At least Canada knows the score.

During World War II, there was a need for female labor as many men were given multi-year European and Pacific Island vacations. When the war was over, the decline continued at the same pace as the dual income model became the norm.

Until feminism and Leftism infected society at large leading to the steepest decline in stable family economic structures.  This predated the economic decline of the United States, which I date to 1970-1973.  Gee, I wonder if they could be related?

Now, Dual-Earner is the predominant economic model, with Female Breadwinner starting to make itself known.

New York Times Headline, 2025:  Fathers’ Day:  Women and Minorities Most Impacted.

Are there any economic or societal consequences to this change in the economic composition of the family?  Why, yes.  It’s killing society.  It’s killing the kids.

The kids even have a name for it:  No Girlfriend, No Work.  There are other names, such as No Heir, No Work.  It seems that young men have become utterly uninvested in society because they don’t have a girlfriend, nor the prospects of one.  Things like Tinder® haven’t helped.  As noted below, one young man was on Tinder® 3 and a half years.  Nearly 40,000 swipes.  2 matches.  Zero dates.

What?  What’s going on?

In their youth, women are all fighting over the smallest number of men, the 9’s and 10’s.  Since on a slow night, a 9 man will hook up with a 5, the 5 now thinks she’s worthy of at least a 9.  Consider a 5 man?

No way.

This is not unique.  This is not cultural.  This is built into the innate preference of women to date up for offspring, and men to create as many offspring as they can.  Here’s an example out of China (LINK) where an (American) teacher gave varying treats to a mixed class of boys and girls.  On the first day, the girls got to pick first, and picked the best treats.  The girls shared only with the two most popular boys, ignoring all of the rest.  On the second day, the boys got to pick first, randomly.  The treats were randomly distributed among the boys, so the girls interacted with all of the boys and everyone was happier.

When women pick, the distribution is (at least) skewed like the graph below, if not more skewed.

Most 22-year-old girls can have an 8+, if it’s 2am and the 8+ is drunk enough.

What are the results?  Virginity in boys (not girls) is rising.  Dating is going down among people who should definitely be dating.

As difficult as that is for guys, women use it as a golden ticket (again, in their early 20s) for fun and prizes:

But when these same women hit their thirties, the game is over.  The 9s and 10s are either married to 9s and 10s, or they’re dating 22-year-olds.  Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo’s max age for dating is 25.  And he’ll get 25-year-old 9s and 10s until he’s 75.  Look at Al Pacino, who can barely walk:

I’m sure they’re super compatible, since she was born when he was only 53. 

The woman who was in dozens if not hundreds of relationships in her 20s with the hottest of men will only settle in her mid to late thirties with a man who meets her qualifications.  Those men who would have met those qualifications, being fit, making great money?

They’re married.  They have kids, and that 5 (or less than 5) would rather be a drunken wine aunt then settle.  Women use youth, beauty, and relative chastity to capture worthy men.  If those are wasted on huge numbers of Chads?  Off to the wine and cat farm with an empty womb.  And the military will fight for that “right”, too.

I’m old enough to remember when the military was supposed to kill foreign enemies, not American babies.

Just like most things, this has a very, very simple solution.  To be clear, the solution will be implemented when the circumstances require it.  Oddly, the women will be happier, too.  And we can finally stop listening to women complain about body shaming.