Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

“We really shook the pillars of Heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess Kurt and Flint, Michigan both ended up with a lead problem.

My high school freshman science teacher would, like many teachers, wander from the topic at hand.  There was some political situation or another going on.  Honestly, I don’t remember what it was, but the news was all atwitter:  “It’s a crisis!”

Yeah, we’ve seen that before.  It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good way to bring in viewers.  So, my teacher made the comment:  “A crisis isn’t an ongoing situation.  A crisis is a moment in time when it all falls apart.  It’s an instant, not a month-long process.”

He is correct – that’s the historical meaning.  It was the turning point, not the turning week.  Now the most commonly used meaning is “a tough, lingering, situation”, which was what he was railing against.  If everything is a crisis, nothing is.

History tells us there are two things Gandhi never had for dinner:  breakfast and lunch.

I guess he had a point.  But, words really do change meanings over time.  “Awesome” used to describe the wrath of God.  Now?  It’s a teenage girl describing a photo filter on InstaTHOT®.

Marcus Aurelius, who is still dead, wrote the following:  “You get what you deserve.  Instead of being a good man today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

Hint:  rinse and repeat that a few times, and we all find out that tomorrow is a graveyard.

Tomorrow, really, is the enemy.  It takes that crisis as a point in time, and moves it to a tough situation.

The difference is big.  A tough situation is something you don’t like, but have to live with, like a hangover or being Kamala Harris’ husband.  A crisis is a here and now moment, where I’m staring myself in the mirror, and saying, “This has to change.  Not next week.  Not tomorrow.  Now.”

Every single change I was going to do “tomorrow” died on the vine.  They were failures.

The reason is that I wasn’t ready to change.

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

What separates anyone from being a world class, well, anything?

The first is talent.  To be world class, you have to have talent.  So, if we’re talking about me being a world-class high jumper, well, I’m probably not going to do that because I can’t control gravity, at least as far as you know.  But if I do have the talent?

The next thing I need is dedication.  I need to work at it.  I need to push myself again and again.  I need to learn the 20% that gives me 80% competence, and then push to give the other 80% of the effort that makes me better.  A study done on world-class musicians, for instance, showed that they didn’t practice less than their less able counterparts because of their talent.

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

That dedication, though, starts with a moment in time, a decision.  A crisis, if you will.

What do you get when you cross a cow with a trout?  A suspension and an ethics investigation.

The decision to be world-class starts well before one gets to be world class.  It starts with the single-minded focus and dedication of a fanatical beginner, like a four-year-old who just found a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry.

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

The beginner starts at the moment in time they decide that they’re going to devote themselves to becoming the best that they can be.  Then comes the hard work.  The sore muscles.  The aching brain.  The long plateau where even though there’s a lot of effort going on, there just doesn’t seem to be measurable progress.

But one foot still goes out in front of the other.  The long walk continues.

If Waldo® tries to bench press, will anyone spot him?

Eventually, those who follow this path fall into two camps.  The first are those who look to a moment in time.  Winning gold at the Olympics®.  Winning the Super Bowl©.  Achieving that goal.

Those people often fall apart.  They worked towards a goal.  And then made the goal.

And then what?

That’s the tough question.  Often, those people end up with a single question in their minds:  “Is that all there is?”

For those people, those focused on the goal, the answer is, “Yes, that’s all there is.  You can be forever known as the guy who scored four touchdowns for Polk High in the 1966 city championship game against Andrew Johnson High School.”  And then you can get married to Peg and sell shoes.

Sigmund Freud and Bill Cosby had one thing in common:  they both explored the unconscious.

The other choice, however, is to realize that the goal isn’t the goal.  The goal is the struggle.  The real payoff is the process of remaking yourself into something new and better.  The goal is to recreate yourself continually.  Chase the grind.

Another dead Roman, this time Seneca, wrote:  “I don’t complain about the lack of time.  What little I have will go far enough.  Today, this day, I will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about.  I will lay siege to the gods, and shake up the world.”

Huh.  Didn’t know that Seneca needed a co-writing credit on Big Trouble in Little China.

None of this, though starts tomorrow.  It starts now.  I can give the effort of someone who is world class right now, even though my performance isn’t yet world class.

We are either remaking ourselves better than we were, or we are dying.

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

Failing Justice: Vigilante In Indiana . . .

“Five hundred and twenty-seven counts of obstruction of justice.” – The Dark Knight

Behold, the American justice system!  (All memes as-found today)

One of the most important requirements to have a functional society is the law.  This is backed by historical evidence.  One of the earliest known fragments of a legal system is the Code of Ur-Nammu.  Ur-Nammu is the name of the king who wrote the laws, and the name of the country he ruled was Ur, which must have been quite a happy coincidence for King Ur-Nammu.

The kingdom of Ur was bordered on the north by Um, on the south by Uh, and on the west by Like.  On the east was the kingdom of Carpetia, who, from their capital of Deepshag, specialized in creating high-quality fabric floor coverings.  But that is another story.

This, though, was at least 4100 years ago.  It illustrates a very simple truth:  when people live together, they have to have laws and punishment or there will be chaos.  Anyone who ever had a roommate or an ex-spouse can vouch for me on that one.

Thankfully, federal judges have jurisdiction in interstellar space.

The law is a very simple premise:  in exchange for the promise of fairness, the individual gives up the natural rights of vengeance and retribution.  This is crucial.  Without law, if Britney Spears borrows $20 to buy a McChicken™ sandwich at 3am and then doesn’t pay me back, I could drive to her house and kidnap her pet ocelot until she repaid me.  I know, I know, that sounds oddly specific, but there are some stories I just won’t get into.

Instead, I can sue Britney Spears in court, and if all of the facts are properly judged, that McChicken®-eating soulless tart will give me back that $20.  Or, maybe, I lost that IOU she signed on the back of my travel copy of the Magna Carta and the judge says, “Insufficient evidence” and frog marches us both out of court.

As long as everyone feels the system is fair, life is good.  But when people sense that fairness is gone, they’ll take matters into their own hands.  This is scary, because it leads to a series of endless reciprocal atrocities.  Another word for this is Chicago.  Or Mogadishu.  Or El Salvador.

Still waiting, Pam.

The people in those locations don’t believe in the law.  Those wandering around killing don’t want cops, obviously.  But most of the people that they kill don’t want cops, either, since they’re killing as well.  The bystanders and clueless non-violent civilians who wander into the games would like law, but it often doesn’t matter.

The punishments are rare, and when they finally hit, aren’t a sufficient deterrent to others going out to break yet more crimes.  Part of the reason is that most of these criminals are really stupid.  I don’t mean that euphemistically – they’re stupid.  Low IQ correlates with high crime.  The stupider they are, the more likely they are to kill.

There are many reasons for that, from inability to plan, to the inability to understand a conditional hypothetical (“How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast, Jamal?”  “But I did have breakfast.”), to the inability to think that their actions might have consequences.

Amazing how opposition to Trump will make the GloboLeft contort themselves.

No, for the law to work on stupid people, the punishment must be swift, severe, and certain.  Our current justice system is none of these.  Cases last for years, most crimes are dealt with by being dismissed or through a plea to a far lesser offences, and Soros D.A.s frequently drop the charges on rapists and murderers.

If that isn’t bad enough – juries are tribal.  The first big case I saw that confirmed this was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

It’s pretty obvious that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife.  This is a non-ideological question.  But it is not a non-racial question.  Why was he found not guilty?  It was because he was black and killed a white woman.  The black jurors certainly weren’t going to convict him.

Do we think a black juror will vote to convict Karmello Anthony?  Or that a pliable D.A. won’t give him a sweetheart plea deal so he can do two years in the slam and then be out?  That leads to a loss of faith in the system.

What happens when we lose faith in the justice system?  Well, in Indiana, one great-grandfather lost faith in the system.  65-year-old Mark Vawter was waiting, likely, to shoot and kill one S’Doni Pettis.

Why would a great-grandfather want to do that?  Because Mr. Pettis had, while (allegedly) with drugs and while being chased by police, Mr. Pettis had driven a car at great speed into an innocent bystander’s car causing it to burst into flame.  Inside?  Mr. Vawter’s 3-year-old and 2-month-old great-grandchildren.  Mr. Vawter probably had seen that Mr. Pettis was charged with 3 counts of a level 3 felony.  In Indiana, that could put him out on the streets again in less than three years.

And Mr. Vawter had probably learned that Mr. Pettis had already been charged with an attempted murder, but the case was plea-bargained down to an aggravated battery.  He went to jail, and . . .

Pettis was likely let out early.

Mr. Vawter calculated that the system would probably fail again, and decided to take matters into his own hands.  Vawter waited with a pistol, and drew it when the prison van doors opened.  What Vawter didn’t know was that Pettis wasn’t on the van – his hearing had been postponed.

Vawter was shot by the police.

Vigilantism is something that has been feared by governments for more than 4,000 years.  When individuals feel that they have no choice but to enforce justice themselves, you have the chaos of gang warfare.

But thankfully in the UK, you know the justice system is working, and people will get longer sentences than Mr. Pettis for speaking their minds . . .

The justice system is important, and it’s failing.  There will be consequences.

Misplaced Empathy: It’s Killing Us

“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner

An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.

Empathy.

I first heard that word when I was five.  I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes.  Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”

That’s supposed to be good, right?  We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.

Empathy really is part of what makes us human.  Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling.  And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel.  Like asleep.  Or perspiring.  Or sticky.  You know, emotions.

Empathy is important.

If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?

But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world.  One example are the transgender people.  I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019.  He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.

Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited.  He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir.  Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe.  He called the dude, “sir.”

I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.

While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself.  Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long.  Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.

You want to play pretend?  Fine.  Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade.  And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.

We also show empathy for the wrong things.  Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?

You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.

Rose.  She was the villain.  She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean.   This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren.  But no.

Everything is about her.

The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her?  Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him.  No.  She’s awful.  But she’s not alone.  Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.

And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.

The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher.  But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.

Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.

Kirk couldn’t sing, though.  He had trouble with trebles.

You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.

And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.

We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.

There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting.  Who cares what other people think of your lunch?  Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?

As found.

This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels.  Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.

It’s misplaced empathy.

This also has implications with race.  People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination.  Now?  Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.

This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare.  Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms.  The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.

Enough is enough.  Empathy is not a blank check.

The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.

That’s good.  After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.

The Next Big Barriers

“Two guys wanted to build a thing called an airplane.  People go up in it and fly like birds.  Ridiculous, right?  What about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the Moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars?  Science fiction, right?” – Contact

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma?  A cat has claws at the end of paws and a comma is a pause at the end of a clause.

(Note:  No podcast tomorrow (busy) and we’ll see about Friday’s post.)

Last week (link below) I wrote about the barriers that mankind has crashed through, and how each one has had a significant impact that was transformative on what humanity was – we are certainly not the same people that we were before fire, agriculture, or even the Industrial Revolution.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

We’ve changed immensely based on pushing through these barriers.  I mean, if hot women had more babies and humanity is always getting sexier, at some point will we reach a barrier where we’re just too sexy?

Seriously, though, what other barriers remain?

Reality

What about . . . reality?

Already a good portion of the world spends some part of each day in an alternative reality, some where they fight demons, or fight post-apocalyptic mutants, or pretend to be a gay black man in feudal Japan.  These games are quite stunning today, complete with large, sprawling maps, realistic graphics, and a storyline even though they assume that feudal Japan had the same DEI quotas as Ubisoft®.  Regardless, many of these virtual worlds take weeks or even months to finish.

The woman pictured is an attorney, though.  Tarara Boom, D.A.

And that’s what exists now.  Imagine not far into the future where, when A.I. is added in with a touch of VR, the entire experience becomes so immersive that it becomes hard to distinguish it from reality, and with 50% of adults feeling disconnected from others, this gives a hollow but attainable replacement.

Imagine a sandbox universe where you form a startup company like Apple™ and run it until it’s the biggest company on Earth.  Or live as a Viking.  Or relive whatever fantasy you can imagine, or even live different branches of your own life, making a different choice each time.

For many, video games and InstaFace© are already addictive.  Forming them so that they spike and manipulate your endorphins in a manner to maximize your engagement would be infinitely more addictive that SnapGram™.

Scott Adams predicted if we could ever meld Star Trek’s™ holodeck with a sex doll, the human race would be extinct in one generation, and this would be the killer app.

Literally.  And it looks like he is right:

Overheard Zoomer conversation:  “You can live out your craziest fantasies on video games.  The other day on The Sims™ I had a family, a house, and a job!” (as found)

Biological Limitations

What if, in real time, you could have an A.I. jacked into your brain, while having various implants or tools that cover for whatever frailty we squishy meat sacks exhibit.  We do have many tools already, to a certain extent:  spacesuits allow us to survive the vacuum of space, while submarines can protect us at the bottom of the ocean.  Well, some submarines.

But now add in A.I.  What if instead of learning arduously over the span of months or years that you could learn it instantly, so you could read Shakespeare in the original Klingon?  Or what if you never forgot anything you didn’t want to forget, and could replay the sights, sounds, and sensations of any event in your life?  What if you were gene-edited to be nearly immortal, with the possible exception of a random supernova or nuclear war?

A frog did a DNA test and found it was a tad Polish.

What if your consciousness were just uploaded to the ‘net?

What would you do?  More importantly, at what point would modifications create something the no longer was something we’d even identify as human, and imagine that the current crop of leaders would be the best we’d ever, ever have?

Uncertainty

What will happen next year is always a crapshoot, right?

Well, no.  In large brushstrokes the future is very predictable.  If I drop a glass, when it hits the ceramic floor of my kitchen, it’s going to break.  That’s not very far into the future, but it’s extremely accurate.

There are things very far into the future that are predictable as well to a high degree of accuracy.  We can predict exactly where the Moon will be on April 17, 7265 A.D. at 9:31:30 A.M. GMT.

The movie (and story) Minority Report used psychics to predict the future, but what if there was an algorithm that knew who was most likely to commit crimes?  What if the stock market could be gamed to the point where investing was no longer gambling?  A.I. can already predict consumer behavior with an 85% accuracy according to an MIT study.

What would that do to economies?

ChatGPT did my taxes in the style of Ernest Hemingway:  “For Free:  Four quarterly tax payment vouchers, never used. (meme as found)

The Tyranny of the Speed of Light

Okay, let’s assume that there’s no physical way to beat it.  The gulf between stars is enormous, and no one can cross it in a dozen lifetimes.  But what if we just sent A.I.?  To an A.I., being powered down for thousands or even millions of years wouldn’t necessarily be relevant.  As long as the core state of being were retrievable after a cosmic voyage, time is meaningless.

Perhaps, just perhaps, A.I. might seed a star in a distant part of the Milky Way with programmed biological package, a Genesis Device™, if you will, designed to recreate biological life far away.  Or drop a machine that turns entire solar systems into tasty floating PEZ™ artifacts?

Or it just might go full Berserker™ and destroy anything it can, because, Tuesday.

I guess that’s why the Vikings called English villages chopping malls.

Breaking through these barriers has taken us from small bands of hunter-gatherers to what we are today.  But it isn’t technology alone – we are not the same people that wandered the steppe, and the current tech trends are weakening the bonds of the societal atom:  the family, and without that, humanity can no longer exist.  Just as we used technology to change the world, that same technology has changed us as well.

What will we be in the future?  I mean, besides incredibly sexy.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting.  (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits.  How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff.  Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will.  Does Grug want warm cave?  Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat.  Good.  Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2.  Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub.  It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together.  Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint.  Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3.  Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts.  These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t.  Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4.  Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™.  It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5.  Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming:  it loves to jam.

6.  Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science?  Mastered energy.  Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger.  Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7.  Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner.  They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8.  Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice?  From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9.  The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken:  Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you.  Until the Internet.  Ever want to go to the library to get a book?  Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch.  I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990:  immediately.  And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result:  Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians.  I have three half-sisters.

10.  AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10.  Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity.   The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.

Knowing The Face Of Your Father, or, The Best Post I’ve Ever Written About Bronze Age Europe

(Inspired by a comment on Monday’s post)

“It is indeed a pleasure to introduce to you a gentleman we picked up in medieval Mongolia, please welcome the very excellent barbarian Mr. Genghis Khan!” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I wonder if the most common sandwich in Rome was a plebian J?

The rooster crowed. 

Tark opened one eye, peering through the heavy hide covering him.  He could see light.

Motion was already starting in the longhouse, and he could see the oak beams above him dimly in the firelight.  He could smell the barley and mutton stew that would be his breakfast.  Always in a hurry, he jumped up and dressed into his pleasantly cool tunic and pants and bolted down a bowl of the stew.  It was warm.  It was good.

Tark was eight.

Tark hummed a song to the sky father, the one who had spoken the world into existence, according to the stories the men told around the fire.  Tark’s first job was to feed the chickens so mother could get the eggs for tomorrow.

His father, Wulfric, was already up, as usual.  Tark had seen that his father was up later and up earlier.  Tark noticed that Wulfric always had a wary look in his eye, as if he was never relaxing, always assessing.  When other men talked after too much drink, Wulfric listened.  Wulfric was tending the tribe’s cattle, their major stock of wealth and the way that they would be sure that they would make it through the winter, even if it was a long one. 

Tark’s older brother Branoc, now 16, was already up and practicing with a battle axe – sweat already dripping from him despite the cool air.  Branoc was a man, and to be a man, one fought.  And to be a man, one married.  Branoc would soon be bonded to Lunara.  A man protects his woman, a man protects his family.  All is right with the world.

Tark and Branoc go through the forest, intermittent sunlight flashing in Tark’s light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes lit up as they caught deer sign.  Maybe a hunt soon.  That would be good. 

Later, after a day of work and mock combat with wooden weapons and a laughing Branoc, Tark and the family gathered by the fire.  Wulfric speaks slowly, telling the stories of their Yamnaya ancestors who rode the steppe and died valiantly.  Those tales are the last thing that Tark heard as he drifted off to sleep – dreaming of becoming worthy enough to have a final burial place, a kurgan, worthy of a man of honor.  The last thing he saw in the flickering firelight was the face of his father.

Okay, enough of Tark’s life.

Tark was a member of the Corded Ware people, a successor to the Yamnaya.  This culture (and its associated genetics) first show up on the steppe in what is today Russia and the Ukraine thousands of years ago and then spread throughout Europe during the thousands of years that followed.

Blockbuster™ franchises followed the Corded Ware people wherever they went, but were ultimately unsuccessful because the VCR had not yet been invented. 

This land was harsh, and not only in climate – some writers have referred to it as the bloodlands.  Steppe warriors.  These were the first humans to effectively use the horse as transport, and were fierce warriors.  Most of the skeletons that we’ve found of these people have evidence of combat injuries.  This isn’t uncommon.

In roughly 1250 BC, a band of warriors descended on a settlement in the Tollense Valley.  The Tollense Valley is in present day Germany.  On the day of the battle, current estimates are that perhaps 2,000 warriors fought during the battle – an immense battle for that time in Europe.

Who won?  Civilization won.

Steppe warriors have been a sort-of periodic vaccination against societal complacency.  Urban areas exist, and the steppe warriors, be they Mongol, Hun, Turk, Scythian, or Yamnaya, have been a cleansing fire that keeps those urban and settled areas vital.  I mean, would you build a giant great wall to protect you from cosplay LARPers or furries?

No, not from LARPers. But I would build a fiery moat to keep furries out.

The Corded Ware people were also known to avoid video games. (meme as found)

This crashing wave of martial prowess was built on a selection process that favored honor, planning, and daring.  Genghis Khan is related to something like one out of eight east Asians, so I think his strategy paid off.  It also forced societies out of their complacence, and kept them invigorated.  Stagnant empires in decline were exactly the sort of thing these steppe barbarians were looking for.

I mean, don’t threaten them with a good time.

Wave after wave of first Yamnaya and then Corded Ware people replaced almost all of the neolithic farmers in the region from the Volga to the Rhine on the east and west, and from the Arctic in the north to the Alps in the south, a huge range.

But they also pushed into places like Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Italy.  In the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, many villages consist only of the offspring from the Y chromosome of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware people.  They invaded, killed all the men and male children, and took over.  The men from those places are erased from genetic history.

Is this how you retrace your steppes? (meme as found)

To a lesser extent, this happened in both Greece and Italy.  The early emperors were blonde or sandy brown in hair color, with eyes that were light grey or blue – the Steppe Chads like Tark had found a home, and their genes lived on in emperors.  And in people like Alexander the Great, who had heterochromia.

What’s heterochromia?  One blue eye, one brown.  Steppe Chad’s blood flowed in Alexander’s veins, and probably made up 30% of the genome of some populations of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians.

In Italy, it was also pronounced, with early Latin DNA being 30% or more of Corded Ware origin.  Nero was blonde and had blue eyes.

I guess that makes the Yamnaya steppe daddies?

The Italians and Greeks of today are, of course still related to the Italians and Greeks of 2,000 years ago, but there has been a huge admixture of the peoples of the Mediterranean because these were the capital cities of empire.  Think New York of 2025 is genetically even remotely close to New York of 1825?

Nope, not at all.  And neither was Rome of 200 AD genetically similar to Rome of 100 BC, except, perhaps, in the royal families.

I hear that Nero hid when they went to find him to execute him, covering himself in a cloak.  I guess that makes that coat the first chicken Caesar wrap.

The genetics of three to five thousand years of brutal struggle in the bloodlands were flowing in the veins of Octavian, even until the years just before his death . . .

A rooster, somewhere, crowed.  Augustus (who had been Octavian) opened one eye.  A servant was already there. 

One of the joys of youth was solitude, one of the banes of being Caesar was never being really alone.  After Julius was murdered, Octavian never let a single man guard him.  That would be folly.  Besides, Augustus was 74, and when he woke, everything hurt.  He remembered bounding up as a boy, but now everything was slow.

Even his waking was an event that set in motion a cascade of events.  Three men entered the room.  His bath was ready, and, as usual, already at perfect temperature.  One had deeply absorbent towels.  One had a chalice of wine.  The third had brought in a fresh toga, trimmed in the Tyrian murex that was the amazingly expensive purple coloring of the Caesar.

The gardens of his palace by the Tiber were a place of quiet contemplation.  He walked them slowly, in silence, his formerly blonde and now grey hair catching the morning Sun, reflecting off of his blue-gray eyes.

A soft echo of the sounds of his guard, training, bring Actium back to his mind, where he finally ended Mark Antony’s planned usurpation of his power.  Such glory.  The entire world in the balance!

In the afternoon, Senators.  Roads.  Gaul.  Plans of Empire, details for lesser men.

That night, Augustus sits by the fire.  Alone.  In an unguarded moment, he allows himself to think about what he already knows awaits him: a marble tomb. 

He pondered:  was he a man of honor?  He thought, briefly, of a memory from when he was a child of perhaps four, of the face of his father in dim light, illuminated by the flickering light of a lamp.

The blood of Tark had made a very long journey, indeed.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit.  The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything.  Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

  • Ukraine versus Russia.
  • Palestine versus Israel.
  • Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
  • Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant.   I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion:  I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me.  And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it.  News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion.  Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details.  I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy:  what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary:  if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away?  Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really.  And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them.  I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board.  It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe.  People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game.  But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares.  In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased.  Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral.  I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity.  Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders.  Just not our borders.  Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction?   Not a problem.

Oh, Europe.  I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians.  And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go.  If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about.  The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century.  Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin.  Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic.  I guess I can see that.  Ma Wilder cared what I thought.  Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him.  Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador.  Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much.  Why?  The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right.  When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first.  And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

Trump’s Axe

“By this axe, I rule!” – Kull the Conqueror

My email password has been hacked.  This is the third time I had to rename my cat.

Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026.  Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment.  Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic.

But it might be necessary.

There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot.  Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there.

The impact of his efforts was minimal.  Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts.  He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.

If a Gnome is a pimp, does he manage the garden hoes?

Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out.  Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.

Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him.

That changes a guy.

Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe.  During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders.  The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.

The rot is deep:  it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left.

The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax.  The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.

Allergies around here are so bad in springtime that the tweakers turn their meth back into Sudafed™.

The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war.  Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began.  Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure.

And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently.  Before they fried differently.

But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War.  The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.

By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”.  Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost.  MKUltra?  It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program.  Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later?

Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?

Is a line of people waiting to buy that doll for girls a Barbiqueue ?

Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets.  But we should have about 12 of them.  Which 12?  I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function:  an enemy.  The rest of the secrets?  We put them where no one would look:  in the middle of a Disney® movie.

I can’t see that we have one.  Russia?  Putin asked to join NATO in 2000.  Are the Russians a bit skeevy?  Sure they are.  Are they a threat to us?  Only in a nuclear fashion.  After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations.  We didn’t.

Why?

The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.

The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state.  Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink.  Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.

“Let me tell you:  you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer.  Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?

Guess that makes me the pot.

The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks.  Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs.  When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively.

Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution?  Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit.  Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.

Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price.  The people who have all of the climate “solutions”?  They are the GloboLeftElite.

The axe is required.

Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift.  What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows.  GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.

Yet there’s a goal in here:  a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader.

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away.  There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole.

It’s ugly.  It’s necessary.  And it might just be enough.

All without building a single GULAG.  Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists.  They need REEEEEEEEE-education.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Don’t Make Me Tap The Sign Edition

“Everyone, please observe the fasten seat belt and no smoking signs are on.  Sit back and enjoy your flight.  We’re in.” – The Matrix

How do you heal wounds in The Matrix?  Neo-Sporin.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 7

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Don’t Make Me Tap The Sign – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Some White Pills – Links

Front Matter

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

Don’t Make Me Tap The Sign

I saw a sign that said, “Caution:  Watch for Children” and wondered just how dangerous those kids were that they needed a sign to be put up.

“The Sign” is from /pol/.  It was a meme made up from a post in February of 2023.  It’s a cautionary meme about where we are as a society.

The United States military has long had a core of soldiers with a similar background – white guys from patriotic families.  I know several kids (who were friends of The Boy and Pugsley) that were going to join the military.  In the end, none of them did.

I can only guess as to why, but looking at the way that young white guys are vilified in society, are often not even dating, and, well, it’s likely that many of them don’t see something worth fighting for.  And without young (white) men to join the military we really don’t have a military.  Why would illegal aliens who came here for free stuff and not freedom want to fight?  They wouldn’t.  The GloboLeft aren’t fit to fight.

And it is also clear that the GloboLeftElite have tried to push The Narrative too far.  Observationally, one of the sharp dividing lines is how children are treated.  The trans imperative to convert children, making use of the Munchausen by Proxy Mommies is the only way that trans people can reproduce.

It’s clear that society is clearly not okay with what’s happening to our kids.  The GloboLeftElite have done everything they can to destroy the traditional values that created the economic wealth we have around us.  They’ve done everything they can to replace the population that built a country so that they can have cheaper workers.

But they pushed too far.  People like Bill Mahr are pushing back against trans-nonsense, and on places like Elon Musk’s X®, much more free speech (not actual free speech, but much more) is in evidence.  Even in places as lost as Great Britain, the sense of pushing too far, too fast is obvious, and they’re speaking about reducing illegals.  They won’t do anything about it, mind you, but they’re pretending.

In Romania, they have weird election rules where they vote for president, and then the top candidates run again.  The top vote getter in Romania, someone not on the Left, got the most votes.  The result?  The courts threw out the election.  This is not unusual – at ever time the populace didn’t vote “right” they are made to vote again and again until they give the answer the GloboLeftElite want.

If the author of the /pol/ post is right, the only reason the pressure is being released is that they want something from you.  Do not ask who the sign is tapped for.  It is tapped for thee.

Violence and Censorship Update

Trump derangement syndrome is real.  Just a few days after feminists pretended that they have men who want to have sex with them so that they’d have a sex strike, they started pretending they had men at home to poison.

They also decided, for some reason, to yell at babies:

The Babylon Bee® found out that Bluesky® can’t take a joke:

The idea of defunding NPR™ gained traction after Musk reminded everyone that Katherine Maher, head of NPR© said in her TED™ talk:  “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

It was proven that FEMA was told to not help people who supported Trump after the recent hurricanes:

Don’t make me tap the sign:

In the, “Let’s pretend this doesn’t lead to a Civil War” department:

I wonder if we invaded Canada if they wouldn’t welcome us as liberators?  Also:  this is why we need to keep the Second Amendment:

And, Joe has a goal for the next 50 or so days:

Biden/Harris Misery Index

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

Flat?  What’s going on here?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is down slightly, and riots just didn’t happen.  Don’t make me tap the sign.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is up slightly.

Economic:

The economy took a huge jump.  Not sure this is real?

Illegal Aliens:

The latest numbers are simply lies, and I’m interested to see what happens in February.

Keep in mind, all immigrants are not the same:

But the goal is still to replace you:

Some White Pills

We are not even close to winning.  And we are not even close to the offramp from Civil War 2.0 (although Civil War 2.0 can be bypassed entirely by Global War 3.0) I know that I’ve smiled more than my fair share this month.

While Civil War 2.0 or Global War 3.0 is on the menu still, there is no reason that every issue of the Weather Report has to be gloomy.  We can take a few minutes to smile, while also realizing we need to not let up, and not stop until the rubble bounces.  Enjoy.

But I have to tap the sign:

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/i/status/1862664369470922782
https://x.com/i/status/1854660577727037819
https://mol.im/a/13975249
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/11/25/illegal_migrants_less_likely_to_commit_crime_guess_again_1074276.html
https://dnyuz.com/2024/11/03/america-has-a-shoplifting-epidemic-the-thieves-arent-who-you-think/

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/i/status/1854289976264937740
https://x.com/i/status/1854581870199292335
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1856086465429594165
https://x.com/i/status/1854578088186986854
https://exitgroup.us/

ONE GUY
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-prosecutor-judge-make-mockery-justice-trial-subway-hero-daniel-penny

BODY COUNT
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/How-U.-Households-Have-Changed-1.jpg?itok=avf5e0ql
https://www.statista.com/chart/27458/lgbtqi–identification-united-states-by-generation-gcs/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14074021/Americas-STD-explosion-laid-bare-shocking-number-people-catching-one-minute.html
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/slideshows/10-states-with-the-highest-std-rates
https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1853839796441067520
https://x.com/TruthHammer4EVA/status/1854185151334691054/photo/1

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1855650251077722130
https://x.com/ChrisLeeAlways/status/1854861324783960474/photo/1
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5198616/2024-presidential-election-results-republican-shift
https://x.com/america/status/1854662087668048137/photo/1
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
https://x.com/whobedannyd/status/1854555635909537968

CIVIL WAR
https://www.escondidograpevine.com/2024/11/19/prospects-of-a-second-american-civil-war/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/among-the-civil-war-preppers
https://www.wired.com/story/oath-keeper-civil-war-election-day/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/after-trumps-reelection-how-can-americans-rebuild-a-common-life
https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/07/after-trumps-victory-there-can-be-no-unity-without-a-reckoning/
https://www.latintimes.com/pro-trump-counties-vote-secede-illinois-form-new-red-state-565172
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-secessionists-declare-revolution-after-election-results-1982559
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/11/23/the-dangerous-narrative-of-the-war-on-cartels/

Is Struggling The Goal?

“He’s talented.  Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas

Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin?  The first one didn’t seem to mind.

Gifts can be a curse.  No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift.  I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.

Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve:  height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like.  These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality.  Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence.  I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.

I always was comfortable dating that blind woman.  I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

The flip side is what we do with those talents.  Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies:  diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example.  These are different than talent.  While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.

We call them, collectively, character.

Back to the idea of a curse.  I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence.  That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.

Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.

Why?

Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long.  At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is.  Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now?  Hiro is average.

It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview.  When am I supposed to bribe them?

But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?

Protagonist is toast.  He will fail, and fail spectacularly.  In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character.  Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.

This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does.  Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash?  There’s a record for it.

On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?

Of course not.  There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.

Zero.

To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life.  Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.

These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.

Those who fail?  Well, it tells us a lot about them, too.  I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase:  “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body.  Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually.  I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.

It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point.  Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it.  Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.

I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken:  Out of Context.

I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:

“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife?  Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment.  Temperature a perfect 98.6K.  Life was good, right?  Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known.  And then?  Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air.  Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”

I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right.  Life isn’t about being comfortable.  Life isn’t about being safe.  Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.

Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?

Without the challenge, our character suffers.  Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.

Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level.  Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.

Honk!  You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.