Category: Truth

BLM Has Killed More Blacks Than Lynching Has

“It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is our plan.” – The Dark Knight Rises

What’s the difference between protestors in Hong Kong and Minneapolis?  In Hong Kong they protested against censorship.

I have written before about the Marxist origin of Black Lives Matter®.  That doesn’t appear to bother the news media, Leftists, or the corporations that shovel money into it like they’re feeding a machine.  Yes, Black Lives Matter™ is a machine, but it’s not quite the machine that the liberal wine-aunts that listen to NPR© think it is.

But challenge Black Lives Matter© while working for a major corporation, even in good faith?  That’s going to shorten your career.

Zac Kriegman worked for Thompson/Reuters®.  “Worked for” is the proper tense.  Kriegman had a bachelor’s in economics topped with a law degree from Harvard® and was working for Thompson/Reuters© leading their efforts in artificial intelligence.  His pronoun is:  “Was.”

A friend go fired from a keyboard factory for not putting in enough shifts.

Then he posted an essay on the internal servers.  You can read it here (LINK).  What was the sin he got fired for?  Objecting to the bias he saw at Thompson/Reuters™ and then, worst of all, proving via statistics that Black Lives Matter© and the Thompson/Reuters© narrative was . . . a lie.  A longer version of Kriegman’s story can be found here (LINK).  Thanks to Ricky for both of those links.

The results are clear.  According to the Tuskegee Institute (who apparently are the official counters of such things) a total of 3, 446 black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968.  Based on Kriegman’s data, it’s entirely likely that Black Lives Matter’s™ focus on “defunding the police” along with the Ferguson and Minneapolis Effects, that Black Lives Matter© killed more blacks in three years than lynching ever did in 86 years.

It is clear that facts like these have to be suppressed.  That’s why Zac Kriegman was fired.  At Thompson/Reuters™, the Truth doesn’t matter – just adherence to the Narrative.

But . . . why?

The answer is that the real goal (regardless of the stated goal) of Black Lives Matter© has nothing to with making the lives of black people better.  This is obvious from one initiative alone:  defunding the police.

No, no I really don’t.

I am skeptical of all police.  I tend to think that many police officers will do as they’re told, no matter who tells them, and no matter what they tell them.  History has proven that most cops will go collect guns from lawful owners or round up people for the “vaxx” camps if they’re told to.  Don’t believe me?  Check out Australia.

But if I were a cop in the liberal utopias where Leftists have put a target on my back, I’d do the bare minimum, while looking for a job anywhere outside places where arrests are irrelevant because the Soros-funded DA has installed a revolving door on the jail.  Oddly, this is exactly the desired result.  Soros wants chaos on the streets, and has found that cops won’t arrest people that won’t go to prison.  Those people are then left on the street, where they keep committing crimes until they get bored enough to kill someone.

Combine the following ingredients:

  • inflamed rhetoric noting that no problem in the black community is the responsibility of blacks,
  • occasional “martyr” victims that are selected not because of their innocence, but because the story (Ferguson) or video (Minneapolis) of the incident makes people really mad,
  • aggressive ignoring of the reality documented in FBI statistics that black neighborhoods are amazingly violent places – 58% of all people murdered in 2020 in the U.S. were black, and 54% of people arrested for murder in 2020 in the U.S. . . . were black, and
  • a news media, Thompson/Reutersâ„¢ included, that is all-in on the propaganda and what do you get?

More death.

Arguing that having fewer cops in the areas where most of the murders are taking place will make things better isn’t magical thinking – it’s intentional murder.  Regardless of the reasons that black people are killing themselves – having fewer cops around won’t help the situation.

According to BLM™, that’s okay.  The goal of Black Lives Matter© obviously has nothing to do with helping actual black people.  What is it, then, that they’re up to?

The real goal of Black Lives Matter® is to create enough discontent and pain in the black community so that they’ll accept any solution.  Of course, the solution that the Left proposes is based on increased discipline, improving morality, focusing on keeping families intact, creating a culture of personal responsibility, and rigorous academic performance.

Ha!  Just kidding!  It’s literally the opposite of all of those things.  The current Leftist solution is like trying to help Charlie Sheen via giving him more porn stars and cocaine.

Charlie’s tested positive for everything except the ‘rona . . . .

And companies that support BLM© are complicit.  In the case of Thompson/Reuters© they reported uncritically on false claim that BLM™ made.  This, of course, provided oxygen for the fire.  Large companies then threw on bushels of cash, which provided more fuel.  The result?

Thousands of people, most of them black, who would now be alive except for Black Lives Matter™ are now dead.   These people had been utterly abandoned by their local politicians, media, and the large companies that earn Social Justice® points by pandering to those same NPR© liberal wine aunts.

The goal is simple:   to create an army of discontent people to increase violence and chaos.  It’s always easier to destroy than to build – and this idea is to destroy everything, leaving an America that’s hollowed out – a place with no center.  That’s what Leftists are good at.

Building and creating?  Not so much.

But at least black people don’t have to worry about lynching now.  They can just worry about how Black Lives Matter™ is going to “help” them next instead.

Currently Reading:  The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

How I’m Doing My Resolutions, Complete With Rocky II

“Well, you should have had him!  Now don’t let up on this man.  This man is dangerous!” – Rocky II

After he got the “Eye of the Tiger” he got a lifetime ban from the zoo.

It’s the new year, so, I have to buy a new calendar.  Objective achieved!

When I was a young kid, say eight or nine, there were several things that I never quite understood.  The first was the impact of foreign debt flow on monetary policy.  The second was why people got so excited about changing from one year to another.

At best, New Year’s Eve seemed a useless waste of an evening.  My parents would occasionally go to see friends, occasionally they’d host the party at our house.  They’d talk, and drink, and generally have a good time.  My interest in hanging out with them approached zero.  Oh, sure, they were all nice, but the “got your nose” game loses its luster past the age of, oh, one.

What’s the sentence for shoplifting a calendar?  12 months.

Honestly, I really thought the concept was overblown until 2020 – I couldn’t wait to see that year in the rearview mirror.  2021?  Potentially worse than 2020, and I’m glad it’s gone, too.  I’m (honestly) not very optimistic about 2022.

But one thing I have learned is that I can use the concept of a new year, as stupid as it is, for me.

The nice thing about most Christmas/New Year holidays is that I have time off – time to think, time to get back with the family, and time to reassess:

who I am,

Am I following the virtues that I value?  Am I being honest and truthful?  Am I doing the things that provide the most value?  Is my driver’s license data correct, I mean, with the exception of the weight because everybody lies about that?

what I am, and

Am I doing the things out in the world that add the most value?  Am I changing the world for the better?  What are the things I need to stop doing?  What am I intentionally avoiding?  Did I leave the waffle iron on?

where I’m going.

Am I on a path, or am I just wandering?  What is keeping me off the path?  Do I really have to wear clothes outside like the court order says?

Drinking alcohol doesn’t solve my problems.  On the other hand, neither does drinking milk . . . .

I do this annually now.  I find that one of the best places to think about these things is in the hypnagogic state where I’m not awake or asleep.  I’ve had some very good insights during those moments.  It’s (for me) a great place to find uncomfortable truth – things I really already knew, but that I was hiding from myself.  Those insights can be utterly lost in the clutter of everyday life and the constant actions and demands.

Some of the past successes from these New Year reviews have been amazing for me, lost weight, and bad habits quit among them.  I’ve used those times to understand me better.

I used to be a taxi driver, but the riders were boring.  About all they said was, “Hey, I don’t live in the woods . . .”

I’d give you a list of what I’m doing/changing/quitting this year, but I’m not sure it’s at all interesting.  My life is mainly a fairly boring one and except for the “acquire a chimpanzee named Bear and ride around the United States having wacky adventures” most of the items on the list are probably all items on millions of lists belonging to other people.

What happens next, though, is action.  Thinking is one part, but once the decisions have been made, life comes down to taking action and making sure that I have sufficient discipline to do what I’m looking to do.

With small goals, discipline is easy.  It’s not changing habits and patterns that I have built into my life over the course of decades.  Changing habits that have been around since I was 18?  Those are far harder.  For those levels of issues, the only real solution is fanatical discipline, repeated and sustained.  Muscle isn’t built on one good day at the gym.  Muscle is built on hours of effort and pain.

And if the unvaxxed are a danger to the vaxxed, aren’t I putting myself in danger from the unvaxxed if I get the vaxx?

For me, the best goals are based on real, hard data.  When lifting weights, the iron never lies.  Choosing those things that I can describe with absolutes is crucial.  “I will not ever . . .” is much better than “I’ll try not to . . .”  When I combine “I will not ever” with a value?  I have a goal that is stark and sleek, and one I can’t fudge.

I want this to be about the change I want versus me.  I want it to be measured, clearly, in absolutes.  I want the absolutes to be in my control.  If I say, “I will never kill a zebra with a Ronco® Pocket Fisherman™, that’s something that’s absolute, even if that stupid zebra had it coming.

One example of a hard goal is dealing with The Mrs.  When we met and dating got serious, I told her simply, “I will never lie to you.”  I haven’t.  It’s simple.

It’s absolute.

I also don’t have to revisit that every year.  Since we’ve been married, that’s been a promise I’ve kept.

I think these absolutes scare the Left.  They like to deal in degrees and shades of grey.  A fudge here.  A cheat there.  A value subverted, and then (in many cases) a value inverted.

The last part is about failure.

Just because I start a change, doesn’t mean I have to follow through.  I’m allowed to change my goal, especially as my knowledge changes.  Heck, I could even be getting the opposite effects from a change that I anticipated.  Time to reassess.

The last part is failure.  Just because I decided to do something and failed doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try again.  It doesn’t mean that I should be afraid of trying again.  In many cases, (like Rocky II, for instance) the difference between failure and victory is just getting up one more time.

Also, with the Biden administration, failure is not an option.  It comes with the basic package.

Finally, I’ve learned to not fear success.  What happens if I succeed with all of my goals?  That has happened, and more than once.

Add more goals.  I’m breathing.  I’m not done.  And I’m not perfect.  More discipline, and getting up one more time?  That’s the key.

I still think celebrating a new year is silly, but I’m going to use it this time.  With enough discipline, 2022?  That could be, for me, the best year ever.  Heck, might as well put the new calendar to good use . . . .

Penultimate Day: The View From 2021

“Well, I simply observed, sir, that I’m felicitous since during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

I invented a time machine so I can view the Resurrection on TV – it’s amazing resolution: ADHD.

Penultimate Day.

This is the only unique Wilder Holiday that I know of. New Year’s Eve? That’s for tourists. It happens every year. It’s the last day of the year. But what about the next-to-last day of the year?

That’s Penultimate Day.

Penultimate Day started as a lark, maybe a decade ago.

The Mrs. decided that she didn’t like her Blackberry™ phone, and wanted to shop for a new phone. We did. The deals were all bad, so we didn’t buy a new phone. What then? We’d driven nearly 100 miles (the closest place to Modern Mayberry that sold phones then) and decided to . . . eat Italian food.

Driving 100 miles home, we made jokes about it, and Christened the day, Penultimate Day. The three tenets:

  1. Shop for a new cell phone (at Best Buy® is best),
  2. Don’t buy a new cell phone (you can decide to not purchase a cell phone nearly anywhere),
  3. Eat Italian food, namely at Olive Garden® (it’s close to Best Buy™). Since, when “You’re Here, You’re Family™” is their motto, I still wonder why they look weird at me when I take off my shoes and put on pajamas to eat with my shirt off.

Where did I go after eating all of those breadsticks? The hospitialiano.

Ta-da! You can celebrate, too! Well, at least you can celebrate next year, since my math shows that December 30, 2021, has (thankfully) perished from the annals of history.

Last year was lame. We were in the midst of (yet another) ‘Rona lockdown – 40 weeks to stop the spread, or something, so we stayed home. This year, though, it was time for a full and hearty observance of Penultimate Day. I arrived from home, ready to not purchase a cell phone.

Sadly, only Pugsley was ready to go. The Mrs. and The Boy claimed that they were deep in the clutches of some evil virus. Since Pugsley was patient zero, and I was in the midst of recovery, well, we let the weak decide the day. Here’s our scorecard:

  1. We didn’t shop for a new cell phone.
  2. We didn’t buy a new cell phone. Win!
  3. We ate Italian food. Win!

We ate Italian food because I made (with assistance) chicken Alfredo for dinner. Since everyone else old enough to drink was sick, it was up to me to drink the wine. I threw myself on that grenade for the family.

I had a real problem when I used a collie for gathering my sheep. I had 48, but he always brought back 50. He was bad about rounding up.

I’m a giver that way.

But what happened this year?

  1. Everybody was sick. Last year? Everywhere was closed. As simple as our task was, we failed it twice in a row.
  2. When we sent Pugsley to buy food for dinner, he reported that one supermarket was entirely out of pasta. Pasta is, well, one of the easiest things to make and distribute. Why is a national grocery store chain out of pasta?
  3. They had chicken. I cooked that, and The Mrs. pronounced it “dry.” She wasn’t being mean – she was being honest. Dry chicken isn’t due to a lack of moisture – dry chicken is due to a lack of fat. My bad. More butter next time. I thought that putting a stick under each of my armpits was enough. I’ll add more in 2022, though I’m unsure of which crevices to put it in.
  4. Pugsley said they were out of Alfredo sauce. Since that’s easier to make than adding water to ice, I gave him the ingredients to make it from scratch. Oops! They had Alfredo sauce. Just the wrong aisle.

The most disturbing thing Pugsley said was this: “It’s weird. It was like there was nothing in the store. Most of the shelves were bare.” Since The Mrs. had just complained, “Why do you tell them to buy more things, our pantry is so full we can hardly buy anything at all,” I smiled. When she said, “And you’ve infected them. When I ask them to buy one, of anything, they buy three.”

I smiled so hard my face ached.

Being a skeleton is nice – nothing gets under his skin.

I will probably go to the store in the next few days. That will be the first time in months. Not because of the ‘Rona, mind you, but because I really hate going to the store because there are people there. I’ll give a look to see what is missing, or what has gone up in price.

But it’s been two years since we’ve properly celebrated Penultimate Day. Before The Boy graduates from college, we have only one more. I’m not thinking that he’ll often decide to come home so we can travel and not purchase cell phones and then eat Italian food. So, we have just one more year where it’s the four of us.

The only hobbit I met was a jerk, a real douchebaggins.

This is the last post I’ll make this year, and even in the 10 years that we’ve been celebrating Penultimate Day I’ve seen very big differences to our lives – Penultimate Day used to be a lark, but now it’s a time to look back. In the failure of this Penultimate Day, I’m wondering – what does it mean? How have we as a nation changed in the last decade? Do we even still like Italian food?

  • Our nation has split apart farther than I ever thought it could go. There is rarely anything either side can agree on, except that they find the other side awful poopy heads.
  • The economy is even more poised for collapse. As it is, I think we’re riding a razor’s edge, where on either side is a collapse in prosperity that will last generations.
  • Alec Baldwin has finally made good on his promise to kill again.
  • The punchline to a joke since at least 1988 (really, look it up) inhabits the Oval Office despite a (legitimate) doubt that he was elected legally. The Left responds as they always do – by doubling down and declaring him the “most” legitimate President in our history.
  • We went from energy dependent to energy independent to energy dependent (and in crisis) in four years.
  • As far as I can tell, yes, everyone still likes Italian food.

We face a very unique crisis – one of cohesion, one of leadership, one of economic collapse. All at the same time. What will happen?

When I was a little kid, my dad made pasta when I was scared – to show me there was nothing to be Alfredo.

Who can know. All I know is that the Alfredo was pretty good tonight. And each day that my family spends together is special, and I cherish each one of those days. I have right now, so I will enjoy it.

As Marcus Aurelius said: “The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

Today I’ll focus and value those things I can control. And when I look at that? Penultimate Day 2021 wasn’t so bad after all. Happy New Year to all.

Joe Biden’s Early Christmas Gift To The Right

“Well, you know, anything could happen. You could get run over, pickpocketed, . . . fall down a manhole, bump into people, murdered . . . imagine that. Or even just ridiculed.” – Flight of the Conchords

Bruce Lee had a son other than Brandon.  This son was a famous vegetarian:  Brock.

I’m betting that most of you saw the vidya of Alzheimer in Chief Brandon Biden taking a call from a parent about the tracking of Santa by NORAD.  At the end of the call, the parent says “Merry Christmas, and let’s go Brandon.”  You can watch it here (LINK).

Biden responds with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go Brandon!  I agree!”  The look on Jill’s face is priceless, like she had just eaten a tuna fish sandwich that had been fermenting under Joe’s butt for six days.  I know that Jill told the Secret Service to not let Joe sit on them that long, but to quote Joe, “They’re just so creamy and feel so good and cool on my buttocks and make my skin so supple.”

Immediately, the Leftist Twittersphere™ erupted with all of the impotent rage of a six-year-old that’s not allowed to sit at the grownup table during Christmas dinner.  A classic response is from the harpy known as Sarah Reese Jones.  Here is her Tweet™, which I have not seen on her Twitter© feed, and may have been deleted because it was so insipidly stupid.  I’ve seen it elsewhere, but if Sarah asks me to pull it down because it’s fake, I will.  She made plenty of other comments that are still up there that I can pull from.

Sarah would make her Tweets® longer, but she ran out of character.

The salt to be mined from Leftist tears could make anyone a millionaire, and it looks like Sarah needs it.  Whereas I have no idea if she’s had “work” done on her face, it looks like it has a higher composite chemical content than the re-entry surfaces on an Elon Musk spacecraft.

Yes, it’s a personal attack.  I sort of feel bad because I think my readership is higher than hers.  I know I look a lot less like Steven Tyler’s illegitimate child.

Why did the Leftists react so strongly to these bad jokes?  I know that my readers react to my bad jokes like Hawaiians:  A low ha.

I know that there are several things that drove instant hate to this exchange:

  1. It exposed the media’s attempt to cover up the way people felt. Let’s remember where “Let’s go Brandon” started – with a television host attempting to cover up a crowd of thousands of people saying “f**k Joe Biden.”  The clumsy cover-up caught fire, precisely because it was one of the most blatant lies of the year, outside of “Biden won the election.”
  2. It exposed that this never happened to Trump. The media routinely had him under a microscope, looking for every single thing that could be used against them.  In one instance, hundreds of stories showed up in the mainstream media that . . . Trump got one more scoop of ice cream than everyone else got.
  3. It exposed that Biden is either so insulated or so mentally lost in the fog of someone who probably could no longer qualify for a driver’s license that he would actually repeat a phrase that meant, “f**k me.” Either of these things is figurative poison for a politician.

NBC© did a pilot for a sitcom about Abe Lincoln, shot before a live audience.

  1. It exposed Biden to yet more mockery. This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  It’s Item 5:  “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
  2. The Left hates it when their playbook is used against them. They have to defuse it at any cost.  So, they either bury it (this segment is, I hear, already cut out of the transcript and official video) or attack it because it’s (according to them) inappropriate.
  3. The Left doesn’t actually even like Biden. He’s just the only guy that they could keep hidden until the 2020 general election, drawing crowds of dozens to Trump’s crowds of thousands.  He was the gluten-free, peanut-free, bread of the Left.  It may be made from sawdust, but at least it doesn’t offend anyone.

The irony was palpable:  the same people that had made a (not so) huge balloon made of Trump in a diaper were all twisted up about a phrase that no child would understand.  Of course, the tombstone for the Right (in the very unlikely chance we lose) will say “Imagine if it were reversed.”

To make this clear:  we don’t care because they don’t care.  The games that they play are just that, games.  The rules for civility are long gone.

To be fair, the biggest inflection point is either hot pants Clinton’s impeachment for perjury (which you could squarely blame on the GOP©) or George W’s election victory.  Both of those enraged the Left in a way that they’re not over today.   – they felt they had been robbed of their glorious forever lock on the halls of power, despite the fact that W had more in common with the Left than JFK ever did.  Me?  I think Alinsky killed them – and the Left has been playing for keeps.

Looks like someone made a measurement error when ordering the balloon that would “ToTaLLy oWn TrUmPz!”

“Let’s go, Brandon” had probably run its course.  It had gone on for months, and eventually, every joke (like Joe) gets old.  This probably gave it another month or three.  But it doesn’t end here.  There is more to come, and that’s what we must never, ever give up on.  We must mercilessly ridicule the Left at every chance.

Why?

  • First, they hate it, they cannot stand it, it makes them stupid with rage.
  • Second, it’s fun.
  • Third? The Left has to react.  And when they do, regardless of what they’ve taken over in society, the mass of the people will understand the foolishness we face.  They are power.  Speak Truth to them.  Ridicule them.  Have fun with it.

Sometimes, they do all the work for you.

Oh, and one more thing:

Let’s go, Brandon.

Christmas – It’s Not About The Money

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

What do Musk and Edison have in common? They both got rich off of Tesla.

Wednesday is normally a day where we talk about wealth, economics, money, currency, and the state of the economy. But, it’s nearly Christmas, so I thought I’d take this time to give a different take on wealth. And no, it’s not Joe Biden appearing in a Marvel® movie where his superpower is to make vast amounts of wealth disappear, because he can do that on, oh, every Tuesday.

Don’t get me wrong. I love prices. Prices are a great way to allocate things in such a way that the most people win. I have my pile of cash and get to buy (within that limit) the things that make me the most happy. Does everyone want a really cool sports car? No, some people don’t want them at all.

Personally, I’d love to have a cool sports car, but I’d much rather not have a mortgage. So, I make choices. And then cry silently in my pillow at night because I’m dead inside because I decided I didn’t get that Mustang®.

Othello always would visit Sauron through the Moor Door.

Regardless, choices mean that I’m in control. I mean, if I chose to study theology and then move to Colorado after I graduated? My choices mean I could become a high priest. I am free to choose and try to optimize my life based on my resources, talents, and luck.

Combine that with a system of (more or less) private property, and the system allows for the sum of millions of individual actions as people try to maximize their happiness. This provides incentives to work to buy steak. Or starve. But owning property provides incentives to create wealth. So, in striving to get enough money to buy a Lambo® and a vapid trophy wife in a functional economy, a businessman works to create the most joy for his customers.

Boom. People who have never met, and will never meet, work together to create a complex economy. This economy translates information based on prices, and is fueled by incentives, and private property.

And yet . . .

What’s the fastest thing in the universe? Nic Cage accepting a movie role.

As much as I love this system, I have to mention again, this system exists to serve men. It does not exist for men to serve it. There is a richer experience of life than only the pursuit of profit.

Also, this system is one that optimizes without regard to morality or virtue. On more than one occasion I have heard a Wall Street billionaire exclaim, “this isn’t Boy (or Boy-Girl, or Trans, in 2021, I guess) Scouts®.”

That was a direct rejection of morality and virtue.

The result of that type of thinking?

If it’s legal and can pull money out of someone’s pocket, Wall Street will do it. If heroin were legal for sale, Wall Street would be looking to invest in the e-Heroin® mobile App. They’d sell underage . . . well, you get the picture. Heck, Wall Street would sell ghosts as supernatural slaves if they thought it wouldn’t come back to haunt them.

When money is their god, they will do anything to get it. Wall Street will do anything legal. The black market, we know, will do anything illegal, as long as they get paid. Wall Street and the black market have essentially the same morals. And, like Satan, Wall Street just has better lawyers and lobbyists.

If there is a fault in the system, that is it.

I hear Charlie Brown was suspended from school. Some kid was allergic to Peanuts™.

And Christmas is one of the best times to point that out. Christmas is a holiday that has been morphed over time into one that, if we were to go by commercials alone, was based only on the mass consumption of stuff.

I won’t go into the deep history of Christmas. It’s long and more complicated than the math that Nancy Pelosi uses to charge her vodka back to taxpayers. But the short version is that the Winter Solstice was a great place to put a festival if you were going to convince the Germans and the Vikings that this new Christianity thing would work out okay for them. To make it work, Christmas had to be a party.

And it was. And it is. Over time, though, the party aspect of Christmas changed to a focus on family and generosity, which seems to be well matched to the holiday’s stated purpose. The meaning of Christmas then, is giving, not getting.

Certainly, there’s a certain magic in the eyes of a young child being surprised when the gifts under the tree far exceed anything she could imagine. The delight in a boy’s eyes when he sees the BB gun that will probably shoot his eye out?

Priceless.

I pitched a movie to Alec. He shot it down.

That’s the magic of the giving. The Mrs. and I, however, are old enough that we like the peace and family aspect of Christmas far more than the “stuff” aspect. I’ve given her the same gift for Christmas for the last five years (hint: it’s expensive scotch). She enjoys it. The Mrs. generally gets me something small. I like the keychain fob that she got me a year ago, “Be careful, handsome, I love you” better than something large, or an expensive scotch I won’t drink because it’s too expensive.

This year, The Boy and Pugsley have also (I think!) surpassed the greed aspect of Christmas. It’s not so much about the gifts they get. Heck, it’s not so much about the gifts they give, either. It’s about waking up on Christmas Eve, getting together and sharing the few gifts we have for each other, having a nice dinner, and then . . . relaxing together.

Together. And for me, that’s the biggest gift.

It’s that spirit that makes me look forward to Christmas. We’ve long been a “Christmas Eve” gift giving family, because it defuses the emotions associated with gift giving and leads to a very quiet and family-based Christmas Day. Plus no one wants to get up early if the presents are all already opened.

That’s the opposite, really, of the advertising that pelts us on a regular basis. The ads are all based on more and bigger. Time to give your loved one a $75,473 car with a big red bow, because nothing says love more than massive consumption.

Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. It’s a Christmas Eve movie.

Just like in most of our lives, we have choices. We can live the choice and have the Christmas that the media wants to sell us which is a holiday based almost entirely on creating the most economic activity possible.

Or? We can enjoy our family, and choose to place emphasis on giving, and choose to understand that the Nativity itself was the greatest gift that could be given. Even if you aren’t a Christian, understanding the promise of redemption in that gift of a child to mankind is one of supreme optimism.

That optimism is based firmly not in economics, since it promises exactly zero economic prosperity. No, this gift is not money – it was a gift based on virtue and morality.

I love prices, and incentives, and the creation of wealth. But there are things that are more important than money. You know, things like all the stuff . . . .

Dead Romans Agree: Don’t Let The Small Stuff Bother You

“Happy premise number three:  even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

I hear that Marcus’ wife was a perfect X.

Mike, the proprietor over at Cold Fury (LINK), is going through a very difficult time.  Big Country has set up a gofundme for him here (LINK).  Much more information at the gofundme site.

Now to the post . . .

I woke up this morning just irritated.  No particular reason.  In all fairness, it was entirely an internal feeling, and I imagine most people never noticed.  I was nice and polite to nearly everyone I interacted with.  And why not?  None of them were my ex-wife.

I wasn’t irritated with them, I was just irritated.  There were no issues.  I wasn’t in pain.  No one around me was in particular trouble.  Thankfully I’m not an electrician – people might dislike me not being positive at work.

As I thought about it, what was irritating me?  I couldn’t quite put a finger on it.  There was no rational reason at all.  During a conversation tonight, though, I had a reason to quote Marcus Aurelius:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Not mine, but I couldn’t resist.

Sure, Marcus Aurelius’ kid was an utter tool, but when you become Caesar at 18, well, it might tend to go to your head – think of Commodus as Miley Cyrus, 180 A.D.  Back to Marcus, though.  Marcus genuinely did his best for the Roman Empire.  As near as I can tell, Marcus was a pretty good leader.

And that little quote above wasn’t written for you and me.  It was written for Marcus, by Marcus.  He was reminding himself that the external things in the world had only the power he gave them.  He was giving himself a pep talk.

Marcus Aurelius was right.  In the conversation I was having tonight, the person was very upset (most of you don’t know the person, though specific readers in California and Indiana do – hi guys!).  The reason she was upset?  Nothing rational at all.  So I quoted a dead Roman emperor.

Who says that Stoics aren’t compassionate?

Did it help?  I don’t know.  I’m beginning to see a pattern where crying people don’t stop crying when I quote dead Roman emperors.  I’m beginning to see why the kids call The Mrs. when they want actual human sympathy.

My irritation (I think) came from the same place.  Nowhere.  I felt fine (except for my right knee which is much better now) and the day generally went fairly well.  I realized that the advice I gave was meant just as much for me as for the person I was talking to.  I was just being irritated because I let myself be irritated.

Once I was done and realized I didn’t have to be irritated?

My hands disappeared today, but I can’t really point my finger at what caused it.

My irritation disappeared.  I know that the way I feel is (generally) my choice.  I can choose how I feel:  salty, Wednesday, or even drunk.  The only reason that I’m not happy every morning is if I choose not to be happy on some particular morning.

Are there actual reasons why I might have different feelings?  Sure.  If I had mental problems (other than an unseemly affection for awful jokes and a desire to consciously be able to make my fingernails grow absurdly fast) that might be a reason to have a feeling other than what I choose.

Don’t know.  I do know that there are people with actual mental problems.  There’s proof:  some people actually voted for Biden.  But, going back to Marcus, that’s not external.  Being sick or goofy enough to vote for Biden isn’t external.

Marcus Aurelius might have voted for Biden – Marcus is dead, after all.

Physical pain also is an internal source that can destroy moods.  I once (for a few months) had sciatica.  I was irritable enough every morning to chew nails and spit bullets.  Then I discovered that I could work out for a few hours on an elliptical trainer to make the pain go away.  A week later?

I was fine.  My irritation vanished along with my sciatica, never (hopefully) to return.

That was nearly 15 years ago.  Sure, I’ve felt pain since then, but most of it was the good pain from a hard workout.  Heck, most days the worst thing that happened was the crisp morning breeze running through my back hair.

My mood depends on me.  My attitude depends on me.

Does that mean that I can’t see the actual situation we’re in?  Of course not.  I see a nation tearing itself apart.  It’s worse:  it’s not just a nation, Western Civilization seems to be happily thrashing about as it marches down a path to extinction.

Is that good?

Of course not.

Does it mean that I should walk around every day being sad?

Of course not.  I am doing, I assure you, everything I can think of to stave off that darkness.  I mean, those memes won’t make themselves.

Never buy a sculpture of Bonnie Tyler.  Every now and then it falls apart.

And I am doing it cheerfully.  I laugh every day.  I smile because I know that most of the things that I worry about can have no power over me unless I give them that power.

Make your choices, and understand that while you might wake up irritated – it’s your choice if you wish to stay in that mood for a minute or an hour.

Me?  I like being happy, so I choose that, even in moments where it might not be appropriate.  I might even need to stop high-fiving people at funerals.

So, I got started late typing this after a day I chose to just be irritated.  And, I’m going to choose to end now.

With a smile on my face.  Go and have a great day.  Most of the time, having a great day is just a choice.

Choose wisely.

Why Leftists Hate You

“Well, I don’t care if he’s a Liberal or an ax murderer, I want you two boys to stay clear of him, understood? – Eerie, Indiana

I hear that Greta loves this blog – she knows most of my jokes are recycled.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.  To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” – Aldous Huxley

Regardless of whether or not you like Huxley, he certainly hit the mark with this comment.  This has certainly been the case with the reaction of the “vaxxed” crowd to those that have chosen to avoid having themselves subjected to more-or-less experimental-level mRNA manipulation.  I hear the lead scientist was Gene Hackman.

If you’re a coward, the FDA has just approved a new drug.  Ask your doctor if Growacet® is right for you.

Though Huxley tapped into a universal weakness, this is a reaction that is far more common on the Left than on the Right.  Leftism is built on weakness.  If people can take care of themselves, if they are confident, if they respect themselves, it is much less likely that they will become Leftists.

Leftists, at the core of their being, feel inferior.  This is observable in the ways that they protest – they constantly put themselves in danger.  They lie down in front of cars.  They block highways.

The reason is that, due to their feelings of inferiority, they actually long to be either punished or to have their existence ended.  And the data shows that Leftists are much more likely to suffer from a mental issue.  Much more likely.  Here’s a thread where data scientist Zach Goldberg breaks down a Pew® study (LINK).

If you didn’t click on the link, here is just one fact that says it all:  56.3% of white female Leftists between the ages of 18-29 have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental health condition.  White “conservative” men in the same age group?  16.3%.  Leftist men in the same age group?  33.6%.

Do insane accountants hear strange and threatening invoices?

If you are talking to a young Leftist woman, it is more likely that she has a mental health issue than not.  If you are talking to a young Leftist man, you are talking with someone who has a greater chance of having been diagnosed with a mental health issue than any age/sex group on the Right.

So, Leftists feel inferior and lead the league in diagnosed mental issues.

What else?

This sense of inferiority coupled with mental illness makes Leftists especially brittle mentally.  They cannot even listen to ideas that they disagree with.  Ideas that they find distasteful, no matter how true, are psychologically devastating to them.  When they say that they are “literally shaking” it’s probable that’s correct.  Me?  I only “literally shake” when I make James Bond® a martini.

We know the true villains the Left wants to stop . . .

This leads to the Great Counterfactual Gambit of facts that Leftists have to ignore to live on a day to day basis:

  • Men (on average) will always be much stronger than women. When a high school boy beats a woman’s world record time in swimming practice, it’s normal.  Yet some people (weirdly) say there’s no physical difference between women and men.
  • This brings us to trans- people. Any suggestion that the latest mantra of “trans women are women” is against all manner of biological facts, well, is unacceptable.  If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to have a word for “trans women”.  Likewise, “trans women” wouldn’t be upset that they often can only get dates from other “trans” people.
  • We aren’t all born with equal abilities, temperaments, or physical characteristics. We are actually not even remotely the same in many respects.  Sure, we’re human, but some populations have extremely different DNA, with great degrees of differing abilities based solely on that.  Intelligence is (studies suggest) at least 60% heritable, and maybe higher.  The trend is that, in 2020, people segregate themselves by I.Q. before they marry – we’re mobile and smart people end up (mostly) marrying other smart people.  This increases the number of very smart people, and it’s not random.  (And, perhaps a reason that autism is on the rise.)

I could go on and on.  The difficulty is that Leftism requires that people ignore reality when reality gives them results they don’t like.  I read one article where a Leftist was writing a hand-wringing piece about how disappointed that he was that artificial intelligence could determine the race of the patient being x-rayed with a high degree of accuracy.  This bothered him because the researchers intentionally took the data and degraded it.

The A.I. could still easily determine accurately the races of most of the people being x-rayed.  This bothered the scientist because it violated his belief that race was just a social construct, yet here a robot was dismantling that very belief.

If you make a device that’s good at noticing patterns, you can either accept that patterns exist, or you can make the machine ignore reality and thus make it useless, and Congress can’t stand the competition.

If an A.I. takes a picture of itself, will that be considered selfie-aware?

This reflects outward in the art that Leftists love.  They hate the world, so they like art that is to a sane mind repugnant is what they seek.  They see themselves as afraid of any sort of competition, so they want to practice inversion:

  • Weakness is strength.
  • Cowardice is courage.
  • Ugliness is beauty.
  • Defeat is victory.

Oops, forgot!  Slavery is freedom.

The result of an inverted Leftist utopia is a burned world, cleansed of all that they despise.

The philosophy of the Left is similarly bankrupt.  The ideas are based on another rejection of reality:

  • All cultures are equal.
  • Scientific analysis is led by philosophy, and valid only when it backs Leftist talking points.
  • Classification of things – good and bad, smart and dumb, fat and thin is inherently wrong.

Remember, the best way to win an argument is to silence anyone who has a different opinion!

The granddaddy of all of these is this:

  • All truth is relative.

This one is especially insidious – it takes a True statement (we cannot know everything) and thus takes it to the idea of the general:  we can know nothing for certain.  Start with mathematics:  if you believe that 1+1=2, then you believe that there is Truth.  Gravity always pulls down.  Truth.

Do I see every event from every angle?  Can I know the position of every atom inside of every person in a play?  If I watch the play from a different seat, do I get a different meaning?

Sure, I’ll buy that I can’t know everything.  But if I jump in front of a semi that’s traveling down the highway at 120 miles per hour (4 liters per second) I will die and what’s left of me will look like someone dropped a bag of vegetable soup.  Unless the semi is made of Nerf® material, but that’s fairly unlikely since it absorbs vegetable soup.

Lastly, the Left feels they have no power.  Ever argue with someone in real life who has never had any real power?  Whatever they have, they will use until it’s nearly abuse – the average DMV will prove my case.  Power is the end product.  They feel that they are inferior, reject reality, and wish to have power so that they can have revenge against those that they feel have slighted them.

A Leftist won a contest – he would get $100,000, but $200,000 would go to the person he hated most.  I wonder what he’s going to do with $300,000?

Together, these ideas explain the absolute hatred that the Left feels for those who have refused to take “the jab.”  These are based on the idea that, at last, they are superior.  What would they do to get and keep that power?  Would they put people into camps?  Would they gladly watch them die?

Yes, yes they would.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Special Wednesday Edition: Are We There Yet, Part III

“Yes, I shall certainly choose revolutionary France for my holiday again next year.” – Blackadder the Third

There are two types of people:  those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.

Generally, I plan my posts in advance, sometimes weeks ahead of time.  I try to research the topics, and, quite often I’m surprised by the thing that I thought that were true that simply weren’t true.  Things that are “common knowledge” are often incorrect.  Who knew that telling an upset woman to “calm down” would have the opposite effect . . . every single time I’ve ever tried it?

That being said, the comments from the last Civil War 2.0 Weather Report pulled me off of my schedule.  As usual, the commenters at this site are generally at least one to two standard deviations of intelligence above the norm.  It’s a smart room, and a tough one.  When I make an error, even a grammatical error, I get called on it.  I hate to think that I make one grammatical error and then my post is urined.

Oddly, I really appreciate when people point out those errors.  Even though  I will eventually die.  My chances for a legacy on this planet are:

  • my children,
  • the things that I have done (think, work),
  • my PEZ® dispenser collection,
  • the lives that I have touched,
  • and the ideas I was able to share or spread.

Truth, with a capital T, is more important to than me “being right”.

By my reckoning, I’ve popped down in excess of 65,000 words on the conflict in American that is coming to be called Civil War 2.0 over the span of years.  I keep writing about it because it has hit a nerve:  these are some of the most viewed posts that I have written.  People are interested because, like me, they feel something big coming.

Does a nurse need to carry a red pen in case they want to draw blood?

The comments on the November edition of the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, though, are special.  There is a great division in what we even consider the ongoing conflict.  Is it even a war?  Will it ever be a war?

When I think about this I look to analogies from the past.  When Germany decided to take a fall vacation in Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on them.  And then, after Poland was gobbled up by the Germans and the Soviets in September 1939?

Nothing, or, mostly nothing.

For about eight months, the largest armies in Europe did (mostly) zilch.  Newspapers have to have something to write about, so they wrote about the war that just wasn’t happening.  This no-war version of war was called names like Sitzkreig, and the British started calling it the Bore War.  The name “Phoney War” finally stuck.

Well, at least the French won that war.

Then?  On May 10, 1940 the Germans attacked realized that the French were sitting on a lot of stuff that they wanted (mainly, France).  By the middle of June, Germans were having wine in Parisian cafés.  By the end of June, the jokes about French military, um, “prowess” started.

I bring this up because I wonder if we’re in a lull like that right now.

In an attempt to catalog the progress to a war, I tried to use existing international standards to codify the steps towards war.  On my ten-point scale, last six points were:

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

Point 5. is beyond dispute.  Point 6. is ongoing, right now.  I have had dozens of people in real life and on the site talking about moving away simply because they did not want to be in Leftist-controlled state.

I’d tell more jokes about the Civil War, but I keep getting Stonewalled.

Point 7. was very common.  Violence has, to a certain extent, dropped backwards due to rioting becoming “so 2020”, although societal violence levels are still increasing.

But Aesop had this gem in his comment:

“And those 1000 casualties? In a 12-month period? That rolling criteria is rolling backwards, not forward. We’re currently back at maybe 6½, not 10.

In the way I thought about my model, these were ratchets – point 6. supported point 7., and so on.

But Aesop is right.  Violence (especially of the riot-y kind) has decreased.  At least for now.  I’ll state that point 8. has happened and can’t be undone.  The structures are far better organized on the Left – Charles Péguy said it well:  “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  But when faced with real, proximate threats the Right has shown that it can organize thousands in a week.

Point 9.?  I would say that this level of terror continues in American cities, right now.  Leftist violence (though not always pointed against the Right) continues and isn’t punished.  Leftists can commit a huge variety of crimes and be walking the streets in the new “no bond” world the next morning.

Non-violent people who walked unopposed into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 are being held in conditions that approximate a Soviet GULAG.  Don’t take my word for it, you can read a letter from an inmate here (LINK).  So, is number 9. happening?  It clearly is.

Aesop continues:

But the most obvious reason it’s not midnight, nor anywhere close, is because you’re even asking the question.

No one had to tell the ship’s band on the Titanic that the sh*tfestivus had begun. They knew the minute they sat down to play that the performance would end with their shoes getting cold and wet, before they even sat down.

I don’t think we’re taking on water, and I don’t even think we’ve even hit the iceberg yet. I do think we’re barreling towards it blind in the night, at flank speed, in a fog.

But that’s a far cry from taking on water, and doomed to sink.
Yet.

Those are good points.  It’s sort of like the definition of drowning.  If have the breath to ask, you’re not drowning.  At least I told my kids that when I taught them how to swim.  You can’t have a Civil War if nobody comes.

And yet . . . we’ve been in a cultural war since long before most people ever realized we were.  And one thing we’re good at (as humans) is normalizing life.  We get complacent, and behavior that would have led to social ostracism becomes almost acceptable in a few years.  We can get used to that level of violence, too.  If you look at the Google® trend for the term “riot” it spikes with the first Floyd riot, but goes back to the same level of interest after only a few weeks, despite riots being prevalent all summer long.

We get used to things, even bad things, very quickly.

One or two people might get this one, but they’ll really enjoy it.

Various other comments –

McChuck:  “The cultural, political, economic, legal, and demographic war has been waged against US for generations, and we are losing badly. If we don’t fight now (or very soon), we lose by default.

When only one side shows up for a war, it’s called genocide. That’s where we are now, even if it’s being done slowly.”

The Docent:  “We have a fight between factions for control of the government. So I would suggest that the issue is whether it rises to more than “civil disturbance.” This is where the minimum yearly body count of 1,000 (with at least 100 per side) comes into play. If we are only looking at the BLM/Antifa riots, we are at a civil disturbance level. If we consider COVID jabs for the kill count, we get over the 1,000 minimum, but because it is unilateral it is a genocide rather than a civil war.”

jojo:  “Yup. Wilder – throw away your charts. Look at what’s going on. It’s on already. And has been for more than a little while. Add in political prisoners locked up in D.C. for trespassing with no bail – you got a chart for that?”

It’s clear that there is some feeling that we’re not seeing any sort of war – just flat-out genocide.  And that’s the reason for the charts.  People who are invested in the system, who feel that they have something to lose are generally willing to put their heads down and keep quiet.  I will keep the graphs going.  I’m plotting something.

Well, that’s one way to properly fill out a ballot in Georgia.

So, are we there yet?  Ask some folks, it’s clearly a yes.  Ask others, it’s clearly a no.  It’s also, clearly, likely to be the biggest event that we’ll see in our lifetimes.

And in places like Modern Mayberry, I imagine that there is a good possibility that we may never see any direct violence related to this, except on YouTube® reports.

But, I can see spending time to review the markers – these are two and a half years old now.  I might even stay with them, but recalibrate them with some objective markers.  We’ll see – I’ll give it some thought.

It is clear.  We will never be able to return to the nation that was, and what we will become will be born from the next few years.

Who will we become?  We all have a stake in that.

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note:  Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017.  It’s nice to be back.  Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road.  It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago.  There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road.  I was going to see my parents.  The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour.  There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles.  Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt.  One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape.  Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe?  I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box.  It slowed my car.  On one side.  Just a little.

The result wasn’t little.  A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth. 

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum.  I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator.  But you can think about it this way:  how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational.  As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything.  Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road.  Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal.  It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on.  The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do.  I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on.  It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear.  Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning?  Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch.  I was now pointing due south.  The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road.  I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette.  I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear.  The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous.  It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one.  When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something.  Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit.  It was (sort of) a prepping situation.  We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up.  And up.  Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill.  Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit?  Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean.  And we didn’t buy a single sheet.  We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t.  Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified.  It echoed down the system.  What kinds of shocks?

  • Initial runs on supplies.
  • Federal stimulus.
  • Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Lower demand for office space.
  • More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
  • Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.  It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal.  If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst.  But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years.  The debt is right now at $29 trillion.  That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year.  That’s a lot of money.  Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House.  The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential.  The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

  • Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
  • Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
  • Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at.  Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons?  We need to have a great documentary about oil.  We can save it under non-friction.
  • Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint:  all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed.  I’m sure this time will be different.
  • The man is a potato.
  • Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day.  They were shocking!
  • China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
  • Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required.  Oh, wait, have a job?  Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy.  It is certain that they won’t.  The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways.  When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail.  No chips for new cars.  No drivers for trucks.  Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops.  The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse.  How can I tell that?  It already has.  The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard.  Really hard.  The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see:  The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time.  It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago.  It was moving down the road at full speed.  One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring.  Prepare.  Stay away from crowds.  And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Manufacturing Consent: Say No

“This is a consent form to stick a wire into your brain. It’s important for hospitals to get these signed for procedures that are completely unnecessary.” – House, M.D.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

The Mrs. and I were both leaders (once upon a time) in that Paramilitary Organization, Boy Scouts of America®.  We were leaders before the lifting on gay membership was removed.

During that time period, we were asked to participate in a (rather) lengthy survey of leaders.  One night over a bottle of wine we started and finished the survey, working together.  There was question after question, and there was scenario after scenario presented, as well as spots for written answers.  In the end, we were firmly against inclusion of LGBTQXYZ children into Scouting™.  We were also against LGBTQXYZ leadership.

And, we really, really thought about it, and tried to see the situation from different perspectives other than our own.  Regardless, in the end, our feeling was shared and simple:  Boy Scouts™ had been doing fine for a hundred years holding the same membership standards, and changing them for 1-2% of the population (that probably wouldn’t join anyway) didn’t make any sense.

One thing that I notice while taking the survey, was that it was quite biased.  In question after question, it presented “edge” cases.  “A boy, having completed everything required for his Eagle® rank, admits he is gay.  Should he become an Eagle™ Scout®?”

Well, how many cases like that would there be?  In reality, nearly zero.  But scenario after scenario was presented, showing gay Scouts in the most flattering light possible in carefully crafted questions that were designed to evoke positive emotions for poor gay kids who just wanted to hike and have fun, darn it.  We didn’t come down against gay Scouts® because we hated gay people.  We came down against gay Scouts™ because it violated a basic principle of the program.

Simple as.

Hmmm, another pattern?

It came out that the national Scouting® decision had already been made before the survey.  The entire survey was just an attempt to change the opinions of leaders and parents.  The purpose of the survey was not to legitimately understand what the adults involved in Scouting® wanted, it was to get them to consent to the preordained change.

The BSA™ was engaged in Manufacturing Consent.  The response from the Left after every retreat from principle by the Boy Scouts©?  “It’s not enough.”  It will never be enough.

Manufacturing Consent is a book by a communist named Edward Herman and the much more famous communist Noam Chomsky.  Their primary idea was that the news media was beholden to special interest groups, and would gang up with capitalists to make sure that True Communism© would never be tried.

Those poor communists couldn’t get an even break!  I mean, Chomsky and Herman had to get by working in coal mines in cushy professorships, while scoring book deal after book deal and getting fawning reviews from an admiring press.  Chomsky and Herman argued that “the man is keeping me down” while, indeed, they were pampered pets continually sucking blood like a parasite from the civilization they were intent on destroying.

That doesn’t mean that they were wrong – the media was quite busy Manufacturing Consent, but the consent they were manufacturing for was Global Leftist State Control, the same people who bribed the Boy Scouts™ into giving up long held positions based on morality in exchange for big bux from corporate sponsors.

We see that today, as well.  News is elevated when it serves the purpose of the Global Leftist State Capitalism.  News is depressed when it doesn’t.  Even news of a sensational nature becomes muted outside of local boundaries when it doesn’t serve the purpose of Global Leftist State Control.

The Mrs. did that.  The Mrs. used to be in radio.  She got to put together the news, sports, and weather for a regional network.  She had fun at the job, but one thing she did that made me laugh was that she wouldn’t cover NBA® scores.  Football?  Sure.  Baseball?  Of course.  But no the NBA™.  When it was winter, she only provided . . . hockey scores.   It wasn’t (particularly) a hockey region, but she didn’t like the NBA™.

So, for her news segments, the NBA© didn’t exist.

The news media does that on a national basis.  Sensational stories are elevated to cover news stories.  There was a missing toddler who apparently lived with wolves during the weekend in Houston and then was found alive and well.  Sure, that’s wonderful, but why on Earth was this a national story on the news?  A local story, sure.

But national?  What story did that take the space of?

It’s not just in news, although certainly you’ve noticed that in “mass shooting” events that the story is very, very quickly covered up if the shooter isn’t a white guy.  It has to be both – the reason is that is the group that the Left wants to disarm.  If there’s a problem with the shooter, the case quickly disappears from the narrative.

Beyond the news, it’s also on social media.  Twitter® and Facebook™ are used on a regular basis to amplify Leftist views.  The recent “whistleblower” to Facebook’s© free speech “problem”?  She was apparently involved in the decision to censor information from Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election.  Her complaint is that Facebook™ doesn’t censor enough viewpoints of the Right.

Bots and/or paid users are used to put up comments that are supportive of whatever narrative is being sold.  Of course, the jab is the big one, and the first one to attract those sorts of shills to this blog.  Again, the concept is to create a situation where any idea opposed to the narrative is ridiculed.

Where do you think the phrase “conspiracy theorist” came from?  It was created in the 1960s to discredit anyone who had a narrative that was counter to the mainstream narrative.  It has become especially apparent in the COVID era, since any opinion counter to the narrative as it is known on that day is ridiculed by politicians on the Left and the full might of the news media.

Likewise, Google™ actively suppresses opinions it doesn’t agree with.  Google™ used to give this blog about ten times the traffic of DuckDuckGo®.  Now?  They’re about the same.  That was about 10% of my traffic, and when it dropped, I noticed it, since it all happened at once.  I’ve since recovered (and then some!) from that suppression.

Additional narrative suppression comes from, surprise, academia.  MIT just canceled a speech by a pro-climate change geophysicist because (drumroll) he was against race-based affirmative action.  Now, he wasn’t going to talk about affirmative action, he was going to talk about climate change, and follow the Leftist line there.  But to allow people who challenged another part of the narrative to talk?

Nope.  To be on the Left, understand you’re all in, or you’re out.  Will that shut up the next academic with politically unpopular views?

This brings us back to the Scouts®.  They had made a choice, and agree or disagree, that was where they were going.  The collapse in membership from around 2.9 million when the decision was made to 760,000 or so today (despite adding kindergarteners and girls) is nothing short of catastrophic.

That, in the end, is the problem with manufacturing consent.  It isn’t real consent, and it ends up destroying the thing it was trying to influence.  The parents and kids voted with their absence – regardless of the attempt to influence them.

The first step in not being manipulated by Manufactured Consent?

Be aware.