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“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 2^nd 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.

That’s in less than 30 minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/videos

(LINK)

OR!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/streams

(LINK)

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

If a Higgs boson kills someone, does that make it a mass murderer?

Problem-Reaction-Solution has been the playbook of the Left for a long time.  What’s that?  First, there’s a problem.  It may be a real problem, or it may be entirely invented, like my résumé.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, was famous for saying “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  In his own words, Rahm explained, “ . . . what I said was, never allow a good crisis to go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn’t think were possible.”

Yes.  He said that.  It is probably not true that he stood next to a South American quadruped and a doorbell for his senior picture, because that would leave us with Rahm, a llama, ding-dong.

Rahm’s crisis is really just a way to restate the Problem-Reaction-Solution paradigm.  It’s a way to make people do things that were otherwise unthinkable.  Why?

Because some leaders want their people to accept what would otherwise be unthinkable.  This has long been the playbook of the Left.

It has been used by the Left since, well, forever.  The problem-reaction-solution is often called a Hegelian Dialectic, but that has too many syllables for 1:43AM.  And Hegel died in 1831, so I’ll just leave it that this sort of crisis-seeking isn’t a new thing.

Apparently, Hegel didn’t have a side that flattered him.

The Left turns out to be pretty good at this stuff.  Examples?  Well, in Australia, all it took was one mass shooting and the politicians convinced the Aussies to turn in their guns.  The problem was that single shooting.  The reaction?  A well-formed media manufactured panic.  The solution was to turn in all the guns.  The Australian Leftists certainly didn’t let that problem go to waste.

The end result?  Australia had some of the most oppressive COVID-19 restrictions on the planet including concentration camps.  Which is just what government wanted – to turn citizens into subjects.  Taking guns away is a good way to do just that.  The joke is that everything in Australia can kill you easily.  Now that includes the police.

The same attempts were made in the 1990s with the assault weapons ban in the United States.  It went into effect.  Without the Internet, I imagine it would still be in place.  But, luckily, there was a way to bypass the media, and people got together to push back.  I’m not sure that George W. Bush was in favor of rolling it back, but every Republican that had a job and wanted to keep it knew that making it go away in the next election was in their best interest.

People say that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together to accomplish anything, but I’ll remind you, Jeffrey Epstein is dead.

So the problem wasn’t big enough, and (at least so far) hasn’t been big enough because events like Uvalde proved one thing:  waiting for the police to come and save you isn’t a good strategy.  In a way, using the Australia example just isn’t going to work in America.

But what about other things, like money?

It has worked before.  One of the first things that Franklin Roosevelt did after becoming president was to confiscate almost all the gold of American citizens and then make the dollar worth less.  It was the same formula.  The problem was the economy had cratered.  The reaction was that people were panicking.  The solution?  Almost anything Roosevelt wanted to try, he could try, up to and including taking the country (eventually) into a World War.

Whereas Americans seem to have a strong distrust of government taking their guns, the distrust with politicians destroying our money doesn’t seem nearly so strong.  Which brings us right back to today.

The economy has been a mess, for quite a long time.  I could delve back into history even more than I’ve done so far, but I don’t want to write a 20,000 word post.

Moses went to Mount Olive.  Popeye was furious.

But where we are today is precarious.  It is certainly the problem unfolding.  In 2008, when inflation was “tolerably” low, the Federal Reserve® could print money at will.  This allowed bankers to keep the profits that they had made, while the financial system used the Bounty™ Currency Quicker Printer Upper® to socialize the losses.

This wasn’t without creating ripple issues, but it kicked the can down the road for more than a decade.  Then, COVID.  Same playbook:  print all the cash!!!

This time, however, the cash didn’t just go to cover paper losses at banks.  People got the cash, and did what people do:  they spent it.  Another part of the idea was to inject as much money as is possible into infrastructure projects.

Now, I like roads and bridges as much as the next guy, but when all that money chases concrete, it pushes the price of concrete up – that’s supply and demand.  And whatever the government was buying went up in price.  Now, decent cigars haven’t gone up much in price, but eggs, bacon, and gasoline certainly have.

If I want to light a cigar but don’t have matches, I just cut the end off.  Then it’s a little lighter.

So the Fed© can’t print itself out of this one.  Heck, every time the Fed® tries to stop, the economy lurches like a Pelosi getting out of a Porsche™.

So, the problem is here.  The reaction is going to be significant as the economy continues to wobble and waver, and I believe is headed for even darker days.  Forget Netflix™ and avocado toast:  people get grumpy when they can’t afford to eat or buy gas.  The normal solution (printing cash and making it rain) can’t be used.

That leaves us with a crisis that would make Rahm Emanuel drool.  The idea from the government will be to create a solution that, right now, we’d consider unthinkable.

I hear that atheists own more cats than Christians.  Apparently, owning Christians is illegal.

Just like our pushback on the unthinkable banning of guns, it’s our job to push back on whatever nonsense is coming, because I can assure you that it will leave most of us poorer and with less freedom.

Why most of us?  Remember, there’s a reason why people like Rahm Emanuel look forward to things like this.  And it’s not because they lose power or money.

“Remember that time you tried to drill a hole in your head?” – Ghostbusters

Someone called me lazy today. I almost replied.

A quick peak behind the curtain – I normally try to get some rest, since I’m only mostly superhuman. I’m trying to evolve to the point where I don’t need sleep, and can subsist on a diet of nothing but memes, PEZ®, coffee, and fahrvergnügen, but tonight things went a little sideways.

First, I’ve been trying to salvage an hour or two a week by doing blog-related correspondence and making my rounds on the ‘net at lunch. I normally only get on for blogging-related three times a week, and if I can do it during a time I’m normally goofing off, so much the better. It’s still goofing off, but it’s blog-related. Result: two hours of extra weeknight sleep each week. I call that a win. Or, I would if I were conscious.

Whelp. Today I got sucked into listening to the vortex of oddity and Clown World™ that is the Darrell Brooks trial (Waukesha “alleged” murderer) with The Mrs. at lunch. The trial is so absurd that we couldn’t look away. Well, I thought, that’s fine. I’ll skip an hour’s worth of sleep tonight and do correspondence and blogging rounds then.

I got home about usual, but The Mrs. had some ideas on dinner that pushed it starting a bit late. That’s no biggie, either, and it was some extra fun with the family. Another hour? What’s living without two hours of sleep, anyway? I’ve done it before.

So, now it’s after dinner, and I discover a problem outside. It’s an utterly first-world problem (I’ll spare you the details) but working it out took about four hours to make sure everything was fine because it was gonna freeze tonight, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t end up doing a few thousand bucks worth of damage. I couldn’t really blog at that time, but I did have a nice cigar.

Crisis averted – everything is (fingers crossed) functional. Mainly, the fixing didn’t take too long, the rest was testing, making sure electric doo-dads were all working, and waiting to make sure that it was reliably working under all circumstances for a few hours. I was satisfied.

So, I sat down at my keyboard, and, lo and behold, it was midnight.

Ugh. I suppose that I could have done another Lame Repost from the past, but decided not to – I try to limit those to once a month or less. I had notes on several posts that would fit the bill tonight, but writing them and editing them takes time. So, I decided to clean out some proverbial closets and share some as-found memes. I make most (not all, but most) of my own memes from scratch using only the finest quality keks and chortles, but I also collect memes that others baked.

Why? They make me laugh, think, or, best of all, both. So, here’s a collection of more-or-less random memetic soup that I saved and probably won’t use in any future posts. I’ll be back on correspondence and web-rounds no later than Thursday/Friday.

I hope you enjoy!

Hint: it’s all better with a hot cup of fahrvergnügen.