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Christmas Is A Puzzle?

“Now I have a machine gun.  Ho ho ho.” – Die Hard

And AOC couldn’t return it, because Kellogg’s® wouldn’t take it unless she found the cereal number.

I think, for a kid, the optimum age of Christmas is around 12 or 13.  That’s an amazingly powerful age:  the body is beginning to change into an adult, but hasn’t yet.  The full burn of testosterone (or estrogen) hasn’t yet kicked in.  In my case I was smart enough to know that there was a joke, and dimly aware that I wasn’t yet in on it.

Books were magical at that time, and for the same reason.  I could be reading away on a book from decades earlier, and be thrilled by new plots (to me) and new ideas (to me) as I sat in the school bus on the way to and from Wilder Mountain.  I still recall reading about Conan the Buccaneer fighting and leading men into battle for Crom, women, and glory.

Conan’s favorite cereal was Cimmerian Toast Crunch.

Christmas though, was magical.  It was a time when parents conspired to . . . make you happy.  To give you a gift that made your day.  While I never thought my parents were evil, exactly, they were never free with the cash.  Generally, if I wanted something (outside of food and clothing) that wasn’t a book, I had to work for it and earn it.

I’m glad for that lesson, which in itself was a gift.  Nothing is more empowering than the idea that you get what you earn.  Victims are at the mercy of life.  People who focus on earning tend to feel that each day of life is a gift and an opportunity, and not a present left by Santa.

Speaking of Santa, by 12 I was long past him.  Over a December dinner not long before Christmas, I announced at the table that Santa wasn’t real.  I was in kindergarten.  I don’t recall how I figured it out, but I do recall being very proud of the fact that I knew.

Santa’s workers aren’t required to have Obamacare.  Technically they’re elf-employed.

However, my brother, (also named John Wilder because my parents were horribly uncreative), was in seventh grade.  His response to my dinnertime revelation was to kick me in the shin.  Why?  First, he wasn’t particularly fond of me at that point.  Second, he knew that when I told Ma and Pa Wilder that there was no Santa, that the presents in the stockings would become a trickle.

He was wrong.

As we got older Christmas didn’t get worse, it got better.  I recall one Christmas when it peaked.  It was the best Christmas ever, and I was 12.  Honestly, I can only recall one gift I got – a Star Wars® jigsaw puzzle, back in the time back before Star Wars™ sucked.  I still recall the calmness of that Christmas afternoon – the Sun shining down on the pure white snow outside – a bright, cool day, no warmer than about 25°F (two megaliters).

Mark Hamill found that role Luke-rative. 

My brother and my Dad took Great-Grandma Wilder (age:  about a million) home.  When they got home, in a weird coincidence, everyone met at the same part of the room at the same time.  And?

The one and only spontaneous group hug I’ve ever been in.

Outside of the puzzle, I don’t really recall what present I got or what present I gave anyone.  Maybe there was a Nerf® football.  But it was all nice and perfect, from the day, the weather, the food, and the quiet.  This was a time before every movie was available at every moment in time, a time before cell phones, and a time when if you didn’t know something, it had to be important enough to walk over to the encyclopedia to look it up.  Everyone was happy, and it was the greatest amount of peace that I ever felt as a kid at Christmas.  Of course, the best present I ever got was still the BB gun (LINK).

Why can’t any tyrannosaurus rex catch a football?  They’re all dead.

Sometime after 13, my imagination was so big that it was impossible to surprise me.  It’s not that Christmas was disappointing, it’s just that my innocence was over.  As an adult, I found the same answer: the perfect age to have kids at Christmas was also 12 or 13.

Pugsley is our youngest, and he’s well past 13.  On Sunday, Christmas will be mellow.  I got The Mrs. the same gift I’ve gotten her for the last 10 years (a very, very nice bottle of scotch).  She’d be just as happy if she didn’t get anything, but I do know she likes it.  I’m thinking the element of surprise is gone.

Pugsley and The Boy?  Well, they just might be reading this, so I’ll not spoil anything.  I may not have a lot of surprises, but I think we’ll get a smile or two on Christmas morning.  Me?  I’d be just as happy putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a bright winter afternoon.

I guess getting older was a Sidious error.

But the sunlight of those days is long past, and my world has moved on.  And that’s as it should be.  Christmas will itself be the gift.  And an opportunity.  So I’ll treat it as such.

To all of you reading this:  Merry Christmas.  May it be filled with joy, love, and peace.

The Left Has Plenty Of Plans For This Crisis

“Welcome to my world crisis, Mr. Bond!” – Tomorrow Never Dies

That door handle looks like it’s from an 80’s Fiat©, which means it isn’t driving anywhere until it’s dropped all its oil on the garage floor.

This post is originally from April, 2021.  I would normally be having a new post, but I feel just awful tonight.  Tired.  The Mrs. had Influenza A, and now I have it, I think.  Or something.  Unlike when AIDS, the flu, and COVID walked into a bar, this isn’t some sort of sick joke.  See?  I’ve still got it.

I anticipate new content on Friday, and no matter how I feel I should be ready to go for tomorrow’s podcast at 9pm Eastern.  I’m skipping my normal run ’round the ‘net tonight, so I can get some sleep.  I would make another sleep joke, but those are so tiring.  Take care, all!

-JW

The last year has seen more change than the last twenty years, combined. This is to be expected, especially if you give Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning idea any credence. A short version of The Fourth Turning (also known as Kondratieff Wave Theory) is that there is a roughly 80-year cycle of human affairs. Let me use the life of my Dad, Pa Wilder, to describe it:

When Pa Wilder was young he spent most of his childhood in Winter, the first defining experience of his life was the Great Depression. Back then, they had printed versions of the Internet that they would get delivered to their house every day, called newspapers. They also had cell phones that never needed charging, and that you could never lose because they were in the living room and conveniently connected by a cord to the wall.

I’m sure all of the kids on the playground talked with Pa about how obvious it was that the Federal Reserve’s® monetary policy, combined with bankers lending to anyone with a pulse led to near financial collapse. Oh, and how their parents couldn’t afford shoes. Thankfully, Pa lived in a farming community, and every little house in town had a very large garden out back. Food from the grocery store?

Why would you spend money on food when you had to pay for the mortgage?

Al Capone set up this particular location during the Depression. Pa Wilder said I should never go camping with a gangster: he didn’t want me to have a criminal intent.

That’s the sort of lesson that bored itself into Pa Wilder’s mind. As a kid, he saw people lose houses, he saw people lose fortunes. He saw a nation nearing collapse.

Economic collapse led to the second thing that defined Pa Wilder’s youth: World War II. Not long after Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor he was in boot camp in Ft. Sill and before long was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army. The next four years he spent on an all-expenses-paid European vacation

The end of the war was the end of Kondratieff Winter. What followed was Spring.

In post-war United States, growth and unrivaled prosperity followed from 1945-1965. Pa Wilder, like the rest of the G.I. generation, came back and built families and factories and farms. They looked out at a world that was shattered, and they made fortunes rebuilding it. They even found Dean Martin’s favorite eel. Don’t remember that? It’s a moray.

Spring was characterized by extreme faith in government institutions – sure the government had fumbled the ball in the Great Depression, but it had unified the country for World War II. It stayed back enough to allow growth, and Eisenhower’s America got out of North Korea and planted the seeds for the Super Science® projects that would provide unmatched weapons systems and the seeds of space exploration.

I wanted to have another space pun, but I didn’t have time to planet.

Spring gives over to Summer. Around 1965, the spiritual awakening was followed in 1975 by the “Me” decade. In Summer, the economy is humming along, the weather is great, and the first questioning of the previous ideas that led to the success of the country begins. It’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965, the arguably unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Lyndon Johnson’s voter-plantation Great Society acts (1964 and 1965) took place at the start of Summer when Americans were questioning their values, questioning the things that made America great.

Pa Wilder was an established businessman, working as the president of a very conservative farm bank. You could get a loan, but only if you had collateral and a good income stream. Pa Wilder told more people “no” than “yes” for loans. That bothered him, with the exception of the fact that he told me, “I’ve never had to foreclose on a house, son.” To him, it was a moral duty. Thankfully Pa never served in the paratroopers, otherwise, they would have called him “debt from above.”

In society, however, the big splits had started in 1965. The subversion of colleges started and would be nearly complete by the 1980s. Religious decline started, and Nixon got tired of hiding the fiscal shenanigans of the country that gold was exposing. His solution? Get rid of gold.

But Summer was still a good time. Autumn, however, is harvest. Pa Wilder was pretty close to retirement at this point, and the real economic power had moved to the Boomers. Pa’s natural fiscal conservatism led to a strong and stable business. The people that took over from him, however, would “give a loan to anyone with a pickup and a backhoe.” They even loaned out money on haunted houses, places they were sure were going to be repossessed.

An ultra-long radio wave walked into the bar. The bartender said, “Why the long phase?”

Inertia is important in an economic system. But in 1985 the financial systems of the United States began to be harvested. “Greed is good” became the motto, and systems were run entirely for near-term economic benefit. Everyone from Pa Wilder’s generation was dead or retired – the new people in charge had no living memory of the national crisis brought on by The Great Depression.

The end of Autumn is the first chill of Winter, and the end result was the Great Recession (right on time!) in 2007-2008.

In the Winter, things fall apart. I’ve been really quite amazed that things have held together so well since that first cold snap. Obama was, well, a disappointment. Trump seemed (in many ways) overwhelmed by the system and couldn’t figure out how to move the levers of power in any significant and lasting ways – which makes sense on a failing system.

That was the starter’s gun on the crisis, the date Winter began. We should have been a long way through it by now, but this Winter is different:

  • The United States had a uniquely dominant position at the start of Winter, having both complete military dominance as well as a strong economic dominance of the world.
  • The Federal Reserve© decided to just print all the money that it could to spend its way into continued prosperity.

Sure, sometimes government wants to stop a crisis so that the citizens can have a stable country. Sometimes.

But other times, governments are waiting for the crisis, looking forward to it. Planning on it. In one article titled Sometimes the world needs a crisis: Turning challenges into opportunities(LINK), the Brookings Institute lists the things they love about crises. I admit that some of them are positive, but here are a few that I think are a bit more ominous – these descriptions are directly from Brookings:

  • Systemic Change: Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms, especially extended, large-scale wars, can pave the way for new systems, structures, and values to emerge and take hold. Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules.
  • Dramatic Policy Shifts: Sometimes the fear generated from a crisis and corresponding public outcry enables and even forces leaders to make bold and often difficult policy moves, even in countries not involved in or affected by the crisis.

COVID-19 was the big crisis they were waiting for this Winter. As the economic systems unwind under the unsustainable debt the ‘Rona is the perfect opportunity. Imagine the tapestry of that you see was planned. What end is being sought?

What The Mrs. would have said in the same situation: “It’s over, John, I have the high ground.”

Well, they told us already. Systemic Change. Changes to virtually every system in the United States. Want to have a nice, neat, prosperous, and orderly community? Too bad. That’s not a thing that’s going to happen. The police will be neutered. How badly will communities suffer? Here’s how bad it is now:

  • Leftist controlled Chicago: arrests/stops are down 53 percent, murders are up 65 percent.
  • Leftist controlled New York City: arrests/stops are down 38 percent, murders are up 58 percent.
  • Leftist controlled Louisville: arrests/stops are down 35 percent, murders are up 87 (not a typo) percent.
  • Leftist controlled Minneapolis: arrests/stops are down 42 percent, murders are up 64 percent.
  • Leftist controlled Los Angeles: arrests/stops are down 33 percent, murders are up 51 percent.
  • Leftist controlled St. Louis: in 2020, the murder rate hit “a 50-year high, with 87 out of every 100,000 residents being murdered.”

When there is murder and mayhem there is control. This is their plan. This is the crisis. Remove police – replace with ideological commissars that aren’t bound by law. Now, if they see a “crime” that they feel is wrong, they can punish it however they see fit. Most commonly, this will just be by removing the protection of the law and letting the mob do the rest.

The biggest crimes? The crimes against the Left.

That’s just the first of the planned Systemic Changes. There are more planned.

  • Universal basic income.
  • Boards to approve hiring at private companies.
  • Equity everywhere.
  • More rules than you can imagine. All of them will be based on some fear – guns in rural areas will be restricted because people in the city can’t stop killing each other.
  • Climate change lunacy: to meet Joe Biden’s climate goals, Americans would be restricted to four pounds (344 milliliters) of meat a year. This will be walked back.
  • And your ideas: they probably won’t be as bad as the real plans.

Why do organizations hire female Chief Equity Officers? Because they’re cheaper.

To be clear: Winter is here. The Left has an endless list of Leftist goals to accomplish during the crisis to come. The Winter will be dark.

Where are our goals? The Right cannot just have the goals of “what the Left wants, but less,” or, “the opposite of what those guys want.”

After that? Organization. And leadership.

And longjohns. Winter is here.