Valhalla – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Why The Cheering For The Woman Who Killed Her Children Was Aimed At You

“The accounts are confused, but they refer to an inverse exorcism.” – Vampire$

I think Dexter is a killer name. (All memes as-found)

On her first outing Lindsay Clancy scored a hat trick: she viciously killed her three children. This is, I am told, admitted to by her and uncontested.

Clancy had a tremendous outpouring of support from deranged women everywhere. Several of these women took to media to show themselves behaving in a deranged manner: throwing ice at their bathtub while grunting like an animal was common. The one that set The Mrs. off was the video of a mother splashing cold water into the face of a baby that was, perhaps, nine months old, and the child reacting in a startle.

Based on her reaction to the video, I do believe that had The Mrs. witnessed that behavior in person she would need my assistance. What assistance? Bailing her out of jail after she physically corrected the “mother”.

I have also heard that Ms. Clancy has never apologized or asked forgiveness for her brutality.

This then, is the ultimate sacrifice to Moloch. Innocent children painfully murdered. It goes hand in hand with the other sacrament of the GloboLeft and GloboLeftElite: abortion.

This is why feminists celebrate Clancy. They demand in every respect full autonomy for women. What autonomy? All of it. Want to kill a child that irritates you after you’ve shopped doctors to put your mind on numerous drugs?

Why, that’s perfectly allowed.

Want to have sex with two, three, heck, seven guys in public on the floor? Why not! If she regrets it later, she can just call it rape. And if she and the guy, or guys, are both equally drunk?

It’s still rape by the guy.

And if she is a teacher and rapes a minor, gets pregnant and opts not to sacrifice her child to Moloch? Yeah, the kid will have to pay his rapist for his rape-baby. Oh, and she’ll probably get probation, because rape is only icky if a guy does it.

The reason the Clancy case got such attention is demoralization. It’s theater. It is the idea that putting a horrific crime in front of the world and then lauding it is meant to show us all that every single value that we hold dear can be twisted and inverted.

Celebrate the woman who slays her child! Shower her with money!

Pity the tramp who openly slept with a hockey team and, on video, said she was sober and good with it before she took a stick to the slot. That’s just what rape looks like in this day and age, I guess.

And it’s not women that is the reason for this, it’s that this should be one of the most sacred bonds that could be shared by two people on this planet, a mother and child. Think of all of the pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus . . . and realize that this is just an Evil inversion of that love that a mother should feel for her child.

My instinct tells me that, laws be damned, if a mother is so insane that she kills her children, the death penalty is okay for insane people in this instance. It’s not cruel and inhuman.

Step back, though. This is a theater aimed at us. It is aimed to make us feel that in the face of this monstrous Evil, that we can do nothing. It’s aimed at women to push them further away from accountability and to demonize one of the most basic bonds in existence.

And none of this, absolutely none of this, has made the world better for women. They are unhappier as a group now than at any time since the 1970s and the real upturn in “women’s liberation”.

This is, of course, because the atom of civilization is not the individual, it’s the family. Even though they may revel in their youth, women know that in the end that’s why they exist. It’s no mistake that the first institution the materialist communists struck was at marriage, to abolish it, and abolish the family.

We are in a time now when the forces of Evil have captured the politicians, the universities, the courts, the regulatory bodies, the media, and most businesses.

We’re surrounded.

Good. We can attack in any direction.

Despite all of this, I remain certain that we will win. The forces of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good will prevail. As I’ve also said, this will be one of the most titanic struggles in the history of the world, and will end bloodlines and, perhaps scar continents.

What comes after will not be what came before. We won’t re-create the 1950s.

This is also good, because what came before led to this, and we should be inspired to make something better than the world we have lost. For those that would give up in the face of these odds, fine. Give up.

No. Not me. And I’m not alone, not even close. There are millions of us. We could have stopped all of this by telling women “no” and refusing to remake society on a whim.

But here we are, backs to the river, the orcs to our front, and watching lights going out all over Europe, perhaps to be extinguished for a generation or more.

I refuse to be demoralized. I refuse to give up, and I refuse to stop. It’s my idea that the seeds we plant today in twenty or forty years will be the basis for what will come.

And I’m okay with that. I’m good with planting trees under whose shade I’ll never sit. And I’ll have to keep going. Someone needs to stick around to bail The Mrs. out of jail.

Diversity + Proximity Still Equals War

“Release the river!” – The Two Towers

I was thinking about rivers the other day, and realized the reason the Mississippi runs through St. Louis is that if it walked, it would get stabbed.

I kid. But I was thinking about rivers as a metaphor. If I dump a gallon of water on the ground in Modern Mayberry, and it hits the stream, I’m not sure about what path it will take, exactly.

Tributaries wander. The location of each little creek and drainage ditch may change. Hell, the Mighty Mississippi even wanders from time to time, but if my gallon of water hits it, regardless of the path, the destination of that water is the ocean.

Some things are like that: near certainties, it’s just the “how we get there” changes.

Today, let’s take the big Kahuna, population.

The highest fertility peoples in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa and to a lesser extent Pakistan and Afghanistan. India was above replacement but is slightly below right now using 2024 data. However, India is leading the people numbers, so we’ll keep them in.

These are also some of the least intellectually gifted people on the planet, coming from many countries where the average IQ is so low that half or more of the population would be considered “borderline impaired”. Given the relatively low IQ, it’s not surprising that these areas are also the least educated, least well-governed, and poorest countries in the world, often starving themselves through nearly comical mismanagement of the local resources which could give them amazing wealth and prosperity if managed with just a modicum of thought.

Decolonizing these areas was not a kindness, but sometimes you get what you asked for, and they certainly did, good and hard. Soon enough, there will be billions of Sub-Saharan Africans.

Where is this surplus of people going to go?

Unlike my metaphorical gallon of water, they’re not going to line up two-by-two and march into the ocean. The choices then, are simple. They either stay in the same country and kill and eat each other, or they migrate by the hundreds of millions to places where they can descend like locusts and turn that location into a Mad Max wasteland as well.

Where? They really have only one logical destination.

Europe. And, America a little, but more on that below.

Graph: Steve Sailer

This, of course, will destroy Western Civilization in Europe. From the outward appearances right now, it looks like there are about sixty people on the whole continent that are opposed to this invasion enough to do something to stop it, and they’re mainly Irish.

Matt Bracken notes that just a few shipping containers of AK-47s and there are divisions of these “migrants” ready to take over country after country in Europe, far outnumbering the police, army, and armed citizenry. These men are all over, being paid to be there so Germans and English men and women can have the opportunity to work long hours to support the invaders. The irony is that often the invaders have better food and lodging than the actual workers that support them.

The GloboLeftElite is thrilled about this, because, hey, quarterly profits will go through the roof AND we’ll get rid of the Germans, French, English, and Irish in a couple of generations.

To the GloboLeftElite, these invaders are the real Europeans, or at least the “Europeans” they want.

I cannot tell you exactly which European capital will fall first, or if the Indians and Pakistanis will have to partition London so they don’t end up fighting each other. But I can say that this collapse into a balkanized group of tribal fiefdoms from the Atlantic to the Danube is all but assured.

I said I’d get back to America, so let’s pick up that tributary.

Tens of millions, at minimum, will try to make it to the United States. The Democrats, Chamber of Commerce Republicans, and the Libertarian (capital L) types will want to let them in as fast as they can get here. Why? In order: reliable votes for a route to permanent power, cheap labor, and . . . “Am I being detained?” I guess.

It is much tougher physically to get to the United States directly. So, they’ll use Canada, which is helpfully importing infinity Indians right now, and is trying to become an associate member of the EU because, well, Trump. If they join the EU as an associate member, can anyone in Europe can wander on over any time, just like those “refugees in fear for their lives” who regularly vacation in the countries that they’re so afraid of? Time will tell, but you know the answer.

Getting to North America is also more expensive, but that seems to only be a moderate impediment with NGO after NGO (funded by US government payments) bringing them here, and often funding their transport into the United States. Many of these groups hate the United States, so certainly their intent in giving us blessing of diversity is benign, right?

While less certain than the fate of Europe, I fully expect the next Democratic administration, if not the next Republican administration, to invite in millions like Biden did, and work to get them either citizenship or on the voting rolls as soon as possible. This is inevitable.

The balkanization of the United States, absent a significant change, likewise seems to be inevitable. The major difference to Europe is that Americans are armed in impressive numbers with my guess being that there are two guns for every person in the country, at minimum. I suspect there are many, many more since official estimates are based on weapons produced for private use since 1990. A few containers of AK-47s dropped to illegal aliens would cause havoc in the United States, but wouldn’t result in the nearly immediate surrender you’d see in, say, France or England.

Whereas the final end of the conflict in Europe seems to be certain, the certainty of what will happen in the United States is not the ultimate outcome, but that there will be massive civil unrest.

Why?

As the great Chateau Heartiste put forward, “Diversity + Proximity = War” and the millions of diversity imported into the country make widespread armed conflict inevitable. Think the moslems in Dearborn, Michigan are going to try to become Americans, or keep pelting peaceful Christians with stones and trying to kill them?

Yeah, they’re going to keep trying to kill them as they take over city after city. Diversity, I guess, is a stabbing.

I get the sense, though, that Americans are going to fight back at some point, and unlike Europeans, have the means to do so.

I had intended to tackle a whole host of trends, but here we are. Just one.

I’ll toss in this St. Thomas Aquinas quote on immigration. A saint outranks a pope, right?

For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher Aristotle says. The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners, not yet having the common good firmly at heart, might attempt something hurtful to the people.

We can wish all we want, but the water will find the ocean. At least in the United States, there is still some ability to plot its course.

Cheap Prosperity Or A Logistics Trick? Time Will Tell.

“They’re expecting transports, not gunships.” – Die Hard

Meat is murder. And cake is battery.

I was sitting around Stately Wilder Mansion the other night thinking about beer and steak. I like both beer and steak, so it was a pleasant thought. Then I remembered that a ribeye was technically more valuable on a per-pound basis than my liver, especially with the number of miles I have on it, and began to think about just how important energy is to, well, all of it.

Let’s go back to the steak. Chances are, this steak was raised in Texas. Or Nebraska. Or Colorado. I bought my last steak at Wal-Mart™, so chances are really good that it came out of one of the 11 beef packing plants in the country that produce half of the beef for consumption. Four are in Nebraska, three each in Kansas and Texas, and two in Colorado.

I still can’t believe they use that land to raise cattle rather than put in data centers.

Since Meat Loaf died, is he now Ground Beef?

Regardless, my steak probably came from one of those places. It was raised on a ranch, probably in one of those states, since, if you add in Iowa, and who wouldn’t, those states produce 77% of the beef in the nation. Then the beef is flung across the nation, as if from a merry-go-round whipping along at 37,000 rpm (40,000 kiloPascals).

This requires a lot of energy after the steak has so kindly and peacefully disassembled itself into its tasty parts and its leathery bits. Almost all of the cow is used and sold in some fashion, so there’s not a lot of waste. But it has to be cooled or frozen, otherwise by the time the beautiful steak reaches the counter, it won’t be very tasty at all and will smell like, well, not good.

The fact that steak could be shipped from Nebraska to New York for about $0.10 to $0.15 per pound is astonishing. And it requires fuel and coordination on a continental scale. Any disruption and the price of my steak goes . . . oh, my.

It’s already disrupted.

I once buried someone in the wrong hole. What a grave mistake!

The same thing occurs with that fish I bought at Wal-Mart©, except now we’ve moved up the chain to a global scale. It was caught off the coast of Chile, shipped to (checks notes) Vietnam for packaging, frozen, shipped to the United States for distribution, and then The Mrs. buys it because you’d never catch me eating fish while there are cows, chickens, and pigs still hoofing it around.

All in, this costs only $0.50 a pound or so. Oh, and 60-90 days. The fish has now moved thousands of miles.

Then, the Big Kahuna, oil. Let’s take a barrel of oil and transport it from Saudi Arabia to the United States, and then take it (as a gallon of finished gasoline) to Iowa. That can be done in good times for the astonishingly low price of about a quarter. Nowadays when the transport market is whacked because of Iran?

Still less than $0.40 a gallon. And that price whips that gallon of hydrocarbon halfway around the world.

We determined that the leading cause of dry skin in our house was towels.

Cool story. What does it mean? I mean, I know I’m not planning on eating fish, but cool story bro, but who cares? The world is a web in 2026, interconnected in amazing ways to create supply lines that no human could manage, and yet that are brutally efficient.

Efficient, as I’ve mentioned again and again, means vulnerable.

Purchasing is done at the margin. That’s economic nerd speak for, “Yeah, sure, but how much does it cost?”

If I look at taking a shower and water is $0.01 a gallon, I might sit there for half an hour until every part of my skin wrinkles up like Hillary Clinton’s face. If water is $10.00 a gallon, that means I’ll likely have an entirely different relationship with showering and start rubbing myself with small fur-bearing animals to dry-scrub the stink off.

The ducks at the park keep biting my dog. Shouldn’t have gotten one that was pure bread.

Right now, gasoline and diesel demand are dropping because their costs are going up in a painful way. This is impacting the cost of every physical good, from water to steak, and not in the good way. There are only two results from this situation:

Recession, or,
Inflation.

We have gone far beyond the time when politicians will allow a recession. At any sign of those, the money printer goes brrrrrrrrr. The result? Huge inflation in things like wheat in poor countries, which leads to revolutions and uprisings. People can’t eat, governments can’t govern.

Building a grain processing facility can be profitable. I’m hoping to make a mill by the end of the year.

The time, though, when other countries can soak up the money-printing recession plot armor seems to be passing, at least based on everything that I can see. This year? Maybe. Next year? Possibly. Six years from now? Almost certainly.

The webs that brought us cheap prosperity and ludicrous supply lines seem to be under stress. I’m thinking that opening up more data centers might help, just like a second dishwasher might stop a drought.

Oil, Oil, Toil And Trouble, Plus? Raccoons.

“No long, slow sleep of death embalmed. We shall burn, like the heathen kings of old. Bring wood and oil.” – Return of the King

AOC is introducing legislation to make him climate friendly and change his name to Vin Solar.

Arguably, the biggest machine humanity ever built is the hydrocarbon industry. Annually over half of a trillion dollars are spent exploring for it. Oh, sure, that’s what a Big Mac© will cost in 2036, but right now I wouldn’t turn it down. That’s just finding and getting it out of the ground. All in, with pipelines, ships, rail cars, and refineries, it costs about $1.2 trillion a year. Well, that was last year.

This year it will be more.

The killer is supply and demand. Less oil is getting on a boat and going to Rotterdam, so that takes it off the market. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is nearing levels that some have said risk damaging the storage infrastructure itself, but it’s in Louisiana and Texas, so they’re used to the smell of oil in the morning. Smells like . . . money.

But what people miss is that it’s a finely tuned industry. It’s not like there are extra wells sitting around, waiting to produce. And, after Ukraine sent all those flying lawnmowers covered in C4 into refineries in Russia, that stung. It ended up taking out millions of barrels of capacity versus their peak refining capacity. That’s less bubbling crude being turned into diesel.

What would Jed Clampett do?

Thankfully, we also have Gulf War VII, Part 58, so that the oil produced is actually even lower than the capacity of the refineries. The IEA© (That stands for International House of Pancakes®, but in French, I think?) is guessing that things are rapidly falling apart when it comes to the amount of oil available and the fuel we can make out of it.

We have an oil tank. And its level is dropping.

Even when the oil comes back, we still need to figure out how to mash it into diesel, which won’t happen overnight.

What does that leave?

Demand destruction. Those are fancy words, but the short version is that the solution to high oil prices is high oil prices. Yes, I used to drink gasoline like it was milk back in the day, because despite trillions of dollars being spent to find it, drill it, pump it, pipeline it, smash the dead dinosaur molecules around so the T. Rex bones don’t get stuck in the bottom of my gas tank, gas was cheaper than bottled water.

Was.

Now it’s expensive, so people will stop drinking gasoline and diesel. And they’ll stop driving. And they’ll stop idling their cars so they use less of that wonderful fuel.

If you lock your girlfriend and your dog in the trunk for an hour, generally only one of them is happy to see you when you open it back up.

As we’ve discussed before, the poorer nations will be hit first, and hit hardest. For me, it means, well, nothing as far as my fuel purchases. I drive about four miles a day on the average day, so add the three and carry the two . . . that’s about 120 miles a month. At $4.50 a gallon and 20 miles per gallon, that’s, dang, complicated. It’s too complicated to figure out. You’d have to use multiplication or some other tool of the Devil.

As gas. Not as the economy, and it’s an isolated view.

But the cost of fuel is a tax that hits every physical object that is moved in space to be bought and sold. I know that now that if I want steak, because it’s steak and who doesn’t want steak, it will now cost more. It costs more to get food to the cattle, move the cattle, convince the cattle politely to disassemble themselves into Wilder-sized portions, and move their soon-to-be-grilled-ribeyes to my house.

What’s more Irish than potatoes? No potatoes.

If that gets too expensive, maybe I’ll have chicken. But for the person who can already only afford chicken, I think they have to move to something like mouse.

The short version is that demand destruction means people don’t buy as much of whatever demand is being destroyed because they can’t afford it. Demand destruction is just a fancy way of saying, “you’re all getting poorer, so learn to catch raccoon”.

There’s other positive news!

10 of 11 postwar (World War II, not the Franco-Prussian War) recessions were produced by . . . oil price highs that exceeded the three-year high. Which is right where we are. This didn’t happen in 2022, because everyone just decided to print money so we could build all the data centers we can eat instead of having a recession, so in my mind we just kicked the can down the road a bit.

Money printing is magic! Do you think they’ll stop now?

No. But what about oil. We make and export oil now. Surely, John Wilder, that will save us!

No, it won’t.

Surely that will never happen with the dollar, right?

I mean, sure, it’s nice that roughnecks will be getting some more hours in down in Texas, but that doesn’t help much when you’re a farmer trying to harvest the crop with diesel that’s now twice as expensive as you planned on. On balance, my money is still on this increase in oil prices resulting in not only demand destruction but salary deconstruction.

Salary deconstruction? Oh, nevermind that. It’s just a fancy name for people getting fired, or not getting hired. Raises will be down right at the time that people will be feeling more costs, and it will be harder to get a job. In the 1970s we had stagflation.

I wish this would be Epsteinflation, because at least then we’d never see it.

No, this will be Zendayaflation, because even though no one wants Zendaya, Zendaya is everywhere and in everything. Like the inflation we’re starting to see, small, mean looking, but you know that it’s going to grow and resemble a linebacker.

I bet when Zendaya starts counting carbs, she’ll go for a high score.

How do you get $1.2 trillion?

Just jam up the world’s biggest machine, and then create ones and zeros so we can spend them faster. The downside of that Big Mac© that costs only $1.2 trillion?

You don’t get any fries. And the burger isn’t exactly made of beef.

Ceasing To Be America

“I am truly sensible of the high honor the Congress has done me. But I tell you now, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” – John Adams (2008)

George Washington.

What a dude.

Washington was called up to lead the Continental Army. Why? Everyone knew him, and most people liked him, and if they didn’t, they trusted him. He had also killed a lot of French, so that was another plus. George took up the sword.

Then, after winning, and being the most popular guy in the 13 colonies?

He put the sword down. This wasn’t totally unprecedented in history, but the numbers of men with enough strength to put down power after having wielded it is a pretty small club. There is Washington, there is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, and you could make the case for Sulla and Diocletian, but it’s still a pretty small club.

He attended the Constitutional Convention and served as the leader. As the delegates wrote the Constitution, they looked to Washington and wrote the job with the questions WWGWD? firmly in mind.

Why did Washington not take power? He believed more in being American than being the boss. Washington was later elected the first president, and that was after not campaigning, saying he’d rather someone else do the job, and wrote to a friend that his feelings on being elected were, “not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”

He didn’t like the job, and had to be convinced to not take his name out of contention for his second term. But when it was the third time to elect a president, he made it clear that he was done. It wasn’t a prize Washington sought, it was a duty he wasn’t keen on.

Someone will mention the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington personally took the field during the rebellion, and did so to protect the country: without rules, there would be no future for the country. Of the two people sentenced to death, Washington pardoned both, and in fact pardoned every American who requested a pardon.

Two terms became a precedent, and George Washington became the model for an American.

The next real crisis the Republic hit was Civil War 1.0. In this case, I’ll argue that both sides fought out of a shared conviction regarding what it meant to be an American. Robert E. Lee, for instance, was Revolutionary War Lt. Col. “Light Horse” Harry Lee’s son. Light Horse Harry was friends with Washington and idolized him.

What was clear, though, is that once Civil War 1.0 was over, it was over. The North and South reknitted the relationship. Was it sometimes ugly? Yes. But Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III was killed when his bomber crashed in 1943, and Stonewall Jackson’s great-grandson’s fighter was shot down in 1944. Oh, and Patton’s grandfather was a colonel in the 22^nd Virginia.

We got over it. We were still Americans. We shared the same civic virtues, the same blood as the founding stock, and would pick up Washington’s sword when called.

So American that when it came time for World War I mobilization, Americans signed up. World War I was an entirely unnecessary conflict from a strategic American standpoint, yet they learned to bayonet for a foreign king against a kaiser.

How American were Americans? Until Germany declared war on the United States, Charles Lindbergh had argued that entering the war in Europe was not in the interests of the United States. After declaration of war, however, he was turned down when he tried to sign up.

Regardless, Lindbergh flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific. As a civilian. Because? Charles Lindbergh. Duh.

The whole thing started to fall apart in Vietnam. It was a war fought poorly by leadership that didn’t want to win on behalf of foreign governments that were only notable when they weren’t being amazingly corrupt. Lots of brave men bled there.

Still, we could have “won”. But the media shifted away from national solidarity towards blatant GloboLeftism.

American idealism evaporated and was replaced by a constant drumbeat of American villainy started in the 1970s and continued through the 1990s. American soldiers being awful were shown in countless movies like Platoon. The “grab a beer and a chick and let’s party” music of the 1980s was replaced by the “I need a new antidepressant because someone was mean” music of the 1990s and the “I’ma gonna killa white man” rap.

The scene was set for the final betrayal.

9/11. The September 11 attacks and their aftermath represented the final era “American” enlistment. Former NFL player Pat Tillman quit his NFL® job to enlist following 9/11, but ultimately grew disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. Despite a good start, it soon became clear that we weren’t serious about the war, at all.

A far lesser George, George W. Bush, said that “They hate us for our freedoms”, “Islam is peace” and “Acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith”.

Did he ever hear about the stories actually in the Koran where their prophet ordered dozens of people assassinated? And also ordered the “peaceful beheading” of 600-900 men in Medina in one shot? Acts of violence are the fundamental tenets of that faith.

In a real nation, they would have been rounded up, and every non-European whose first language wasn’t English who was in America would have been shipped out on September 12. But no. We get W. telling everyone that if a person in the world will buy a Coke© then they’re just as American as you, bigot.

That was when we could see, finally, that America was no longer serious. We sent our troops out for a war on an abstract mass noun, terror. A twenty-year war that cost trillions and has (checks chart) only resulted in bringing in more foreigners who hate the horribly oppressive country that they fought to get in to.

Washington put the sword down to forge the identity of what an American was. At some point, someone has to pick it up to protect America.

California, A Revolt Against Physics, And The Victor Davis Hanson Cycle

“In California, they’ll have warm weather tomorrow, gang wars, and some overpriced real estate.” – Groundhog Day

My friend cut an artery, and the first aid book said to apply pressure, so I yelled at him, “If you don’t stop bleeding right now, you’ll die!”

The State of California has, in its infinite wisdom, decided to change physics to what they would like it to be and picked a fight with friction. The new law creates the first rolling resistance efficiency standards for replacement tires. Yes. That. I know, I know, they said, “Join the GloboLeft, it’ll be cool baby, you’ll have all the weed you want.”

But, let them in to absolute power, and soon enough their inner Papa Stalin pops out.

The idea is a simple one: have California create the Tire Immigration and Control Enforcement Division (TrICE) and set them to regulating. Those will apply to nearly everyone. Oh, if you have a Lambo®? Yeah, you can still get grippy treads. Same if you have the bucks for an extreme SUV that actually goes to places other than the grocery store and Pilates and the wine bar.

What would you call a horror movie in California after they outlawed gasoline cars? “The Silence of the Lambos.”

The good intention is that it will force allow California consumers the ability to avoid pesky choices and to spend an extra $200 to $400 per set of tires in 2033. Now, that’s an “industry estimate”, which is suspect, but the “regulator estimate” is laughable of . . . $1.50 to $6.50 a tire. $1.50 a tire? Obviously, a lie.

Here, I’m for the consumer being able to choose what kind of tire they want.

Given that, it sounds like I’m a free-trader. Mostly? I’d prefer those tires be made in the United States, so I’m okay with a tariff if we decide it’s worth it for that industry.

I’m complicated.

Anyway, it’s not illegal to own these cheaper “non-eco” tires. A Californian in 2031 can buy them in, say, Nevada and drive back to California. The bet is that people will be too lazy to do that or gas will be so expensive that they’ll be out fighting to save their rebel refinery from BDSM-clad bikers so they can escape the desert.

My take?

None of that will happen.

What will happen?

We’ll have groups of illegal aliens opening up illegal car tire bodegas. Sure, it’s illegal, but they’re already illegal. They already skirt every law that they can.

Later Speedy© got a job installing carpet, you could hear him for miles, “Underlay, underlay!”

These might be fly-by-night places where a vacant lot turns into Speedy’s ¡Ándele, Arriba! Tire Stop® for a weekend. Speedy will drive to Nevada, buy a truckload of illegal tires, and then sell them to you! This is not unrealistic, because illegals already do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, so sales tax would probably be optional.

Then, the hard-working illegal aliens would take the used tires and dump them. Probably at Victor Davis Hanson’s house. Then, Victor Davis Hanson would get a citation for illegally operating a landfill. Victor Davis Hanson would then go to court and plead innocent and maybe use the word “illegal alien” accidentally and then get charged with the Hate Crime of Illegally Discriminating Against Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants by objecting to them using his farm for a landfill. Then, they’d send Victor Davis Hanson to prison, and give the land to the Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants because it was land that was stolen by colonialists anyway.

Sure, sounds like satire, but it’s a reality already that California has a three-tiered justice system:

A carte blanche for the media/techno sect of the GloboLeftElite,
Actual arrests and jail and taxes for the Average Joe,
Another hall pass anyone else who isn’t white or Asian.

Victor Davis Hanson is clearly inside the Average Joe classification, especially since in California because he’s white and not a movie star, so he’s stuck inside the only classification where laws are actually enforced in California.

I’m not trying to pick on VDH, he’s just the one that’s written most extensively about the abject failure to apply the law to illegals in California. But he still lives there, so in the end the state may eat him.

Don’t let California know about the car that runs on dead leaves, if they find out they’ll mandate the autumn-mobile.

It is clear that California is headed down the road to a dystopian hellscape. Sure, this is just tires, but California seems to think that they are capable of repealing the laws of physics. Take, for example, that by 2035 California intends to ban the sale of gasoline powered passenger cars. This was an executive order by Governor Zoolander Newsom, the Plastic Man with the Reptile Smile.

Did he ignore the fact that Pacific Gas and Electric, (NYSE Symbol “GRASSFIRE”) can’t produce enough electricity for Californians now without causing the place to blaze up like a Cheech & Chong® fan convention? No, because they’re not allowed to actually build power plants, because that could cause carbon to go into the air.

Bad mayor, worse firefighter.

Instead, Californians just buy it from across state lines so carbon goes up into the air in a different state, so they can export carbon production and import smug virtue. And higher prices.

But to Californians, the disconnect between the cause and the effect doesn’t matter. “Something that’s been in motion for a decade makes my life miserable now?” is a thought that cannot occur in the mind of a California leftist because they are so inundated with the dopamine they get from their good intentions.

And the state gets crappier. But, hey, no one wants to defund TrICE, right?

There are many variations on this theme that we could continue with, from the state’s affinity for illegal aliens to their declaring playground sand a carcinogen (yes, they did) to not building a train but spending billions to not do it to letting tens of thousands of criminals out of jail just as violent crime is increasing in California cities.

What do you call a group of deaf people? I don’t know, but it’s definitely not a herd.

I’d blame it on incompetence, but the GloboLeftElite seem to have found a winning ticket in California with a modified Cloward-Piven plan to just make everything awful and blame it on someone else, say capitalism or Donald Trump or colonialism.

Each failure seems to bind voters tighter to them, while the Average Joes, to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year, are flooding to anyplace but California.

But, hey, at least they’ll have decent tires thanks to the only functioning institution left in the state: Speedy.

Liberty Without a People, a Border, or a Moral Center Is Just a Corridor

“I’m definitely a libertarian. Consenting adults want what they want, and if I’m not supplying it, they will get it somewhere else.” – Breaking Bad

So, I checked out an Ayn Rand book at a public library . . .

To give context to what follows, I was a Libertarian. Yes, a capital “L” version, which is what this post is about. I had the card and everything, and this was back when I had to use MS-DOS® to get anything done. C:/DOS. C:/DOS run. Run DOS Run!

It was also before Libertarianism became rabidly open border and I was always more of a nationalist than a libertarian, so there’s that. I have since realized that libertarianism is a road only to globalism, socialism, and gay communism in 2026. Honestly, libertarianism in the United States doesn’t work for any date past, say the 1880s or so.

Let me elaborate. I’ll start by being fair and noting that not every libertarian believes the same exact things, because the difference between a libertarian wedding and a libertarian funeral is one less opinion.

First, let’s explore the concept of the basic unit of society. As I’ve mentioned before, the basic unit, the atom of society is the family, not the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce unless they’re lower forms of life like paramecium, which only accounts for bankers and Hollywood© executives, and most politicians. Last I checked, only a man and a woman can reproduce.

A friend ordered a bride from Eastern Europe. Sadly for him, the Czech is still in the mail.

Libertarianism, like communism, is based on freedom and the removal of constraints. What constraints? Well, family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy. The first thing the reds did when they took over Spain was burn the churches, kill the nuns, and abolish marriage.

Let me assure you, Francisco Franco was far too kind to these people when he won.

Libertarianism, like communism and globalism, depends on Homo Economicus.

What’s a person? Well, one Homo Economicus is very much like another. So much so, that they have the same desires, the same wants, the same potential, the same value. In extremes of this viewpoint, they even have the same intellectual potential. Don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but smart kids very, very rarely come from dumb parents. Idiocracy was right in that respect.

I knew one person who was so dumb they tried to drown themselves on a pool table.

Is it any wonder that rabid Libertarians and Communists both want open borders and free trade?

The problem is that ripping out family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy removes all of the intermediate steps that prevent communism or GloboLeftism from even existing. If you view your nation as something given to you on loan by your ancestors to bequeath to your kids, well, that’s an entirely different mindset than “Let’s go shopping at Wal-Mart© or let in infinity foreigners for cheap strawberries”.

These institutions and traditions, and, yes, collective beliefs that Libertarianism wants to remove are the real anti-communist and anti-globalist technology.

Where Libertarianism is strongest is against the state as a monopolist of violence and against price controls. To be clear, when the firearm was invented, the state monopoly of violence disappeared, and they knew it. The idea of how governments should be configured was in play.

And this occurred in Europe. Why Europe? Because European nations typically had a dominant state religion, a national people, a single language, borders, and some with ancestors going back thousands of years in the same plot of land. These people had all of that in common, and could therefore ask the question of, “how should we set up a government?”

Europe refuses to put caps on new immigrants. I thought the French had an excess of berets?

As an example, if the Founding Fathers had consisted of Somalians, Indians, and Nigerians, they would have just spent their time in tribal warfare against each other. No, the Founding Fathers were mainly Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English. Franklin was pretty sure the Germans were suspect. The United States wasn’t conceived for moslims. Nope. It was conceived for a predominantly white, Christian, moral people with low time-preference, trust, honesty, deferred gratification, and a shared sense of ownership of the nation as a whole.

And Libertarianism was okay for that group. Don’t like the rules in Pennsylvania? Move west to Ohio. Don’t like the rules in Ohio? Move west to Utah. I mean, move there if you’re Mormon.

This might have continued to work okay, but we ran out of land, and we started importing people from cultures that atomized the nation. And slavery. That was a stupid idea. Guys, always pick your own cotton. And your own strawberries. And write your own programs.

Soon enough, we had “the oppressed” and “the marginalized” which are fodder for a client class for socialists. Add in the Libertarian desire to remove every cultural constraint as an “illegitimate barrier to trade” and you get, well, chaos. Honestly, you get India after you’ve spent down the cultural inheritance of what was formerly a nation.

What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot.

Free trade doesn’t mean free to trade anything, it means trade free from coercion. Libertarians spend forever and a day criticizing closed borders, tariffs, vice laws, industrial policy, and cultural constraints that have made it into law.

But HR? The credentialization of every job? Payment processors excluding people based on politics? Universities spewing out carbon-copy socialists? Social media where people aren’t even allowed to utter the phrase “Great Replacement”? NGOs? Asset managers?

Everything a company does is fine. That’s free trade.

No!

Marxism 1.0 wanted the party to own everything. Now, GloboLeftism is fine with private ownership. The companies and the media do the heavy lifting and shift coercion into forms that don’t look exactly like the “State” that Libertarians love to hate.

Libertarianism fails because it calls collective self-defense “collectivism” when America is being assailed by collectives of Indians and Mexicans and moslems and other groups that all have a collective strategy to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society. If you try to get a job in certain sectors of the economy, if you don’t speak Spanish, aren’t a Brahmin, don’t bow to Allah, or don’t go to synagogue, well, you’re never going to get that job. They’ll pick people more like them.

When a strip club shuts down for the night does the sign say, “Sorry, we’re clothed”?

Markets really are the main engines of prosperity, but random, chaotic markets aren’t the predictor of economic success, it’s the people. In Sweden, all adopted (non-European) foreign children perform well below the norm on IQ tests. Except the Koreans.

Go figure. People make a difference. I’d rather live in socialist all-Dane Denmark than in multicultural Johannesburg.

Libertarianism fails because it cannot generate or defend the particular social order that limited government requires. Full stop. The Founding Fathers didn’t spring forth from a Libertarian Eden. Nope. They were forged in plain-old British values.

Liberty without a people, a border, and a moral center is a corridor, and corridors get occupied by whoever shows up, and whoever owns the institutions. Limited government isn’t a software package that works on any computer, it is very particular on what platforms it works.

So, don’t treat it like a software program and skip to the end and hit, “I agree.”

The Passing Of The American Empire?

“Our planet was once a powerful empire, peaceful and just.” – Transformers

One of the brothers fell down the stairs at the Empire State Building. I guess that’s Wong on so many levels.

The United States sits at the center of the largest empire the world has ever seen. Certainly, that empire is now slipping. But let’s review my first assertion.

Is the United States an empire? I mean, I was expecting more trumpets and purple robes.

Yes, it is. The definition of an empire is that it cuts across most fields of human life for vast groups of diverse people, having authority over them, economic control, and cultural influence.

Yes, we’ve got that. The United States is the inheritor of the mantle of the leading partner in Western Civilization. Before us was Great Britain, paving the way and making it easier for us.

How can we be sure that we’re still in an empire?

English is spoken everywhere. Sure, thank the Brits, but the reason they kept speaking it is because it is, by far, the most widely used language in the world. If I got off a plane in Lanzhou or Lillehammer, I could get by without knowing any local languages and rely entirely on English to get me by. Sadly, English is no longer spoken in London or Los Angeles, and my Arabic and Spanish could use some work, so I’d be out of luck there.

So, language.

Sign language can be very handy.

What about centralized authority and governance? Trump is certainly showing that, although the United States pretended to not be the big cheese because France hates that, it really was the big cheese all along. There’s nothing that Europe can do alone to remotely influence the United States. Nor can Japan. In fact, all those hundreds of United States military bases around the world? Yeah, if a country has one of those, it’s an American client. At one point we had more than 850 bases in 90 countries.

That’s an empire.

Also, economically. In Rome you could use the denarius (not Daenerys, who was a hot chick with dragons and not a coin, according to Google©) to buy almost anything you wanted anywhere in the empire. In the world today, you can use a dollar anywhere they take money and not shrunken heads, and also in some places you can trade dollars for shrunken heads.

I was really effective when I worked for the suicide hotline. 100% of my callers never needed to call back.

Finally, cultural and ideological leadership. Why did they have a “no kings” protest in Canada, where they have a king? Why did they have BLM® marches in places in Europe where there are no blacks? Why did Botswana legalize gayness in 2019? Why is every little tinpot dictator called a “President” instead of a “Prime Minister”? I mean, if I were a tinpot dictator I’d call myself, “Sovereign Lord and King John Wilder the First, Flayer of Men, Defender of the Faith, Scourge of India, and Former Costco™ Member”.

You always have to throw in something silly. I mean, I’ve never even been to Costco®.

Rome proved at the Teutoberg Forest that you don’t need to win every battle to remain an empire. You can suffer astonishing defeats and go, “Well, that stung,” and keep on with the empire. I mean, Rome never really went after the Germans with the intent to subjugate them after that battle. The Germans, however . . .

I once won a large rock, paper, scissors bet. I made money hand over fist.

But, of course, Rome didn’t face the technological evolution of warfare to the extent we’ve seen in the last 20 years, which greatly levels the playing field between the United States and other countries. The great advantage the Romans had was their empire to draw men from, and their mastery of transport engineering and logistics which could quickly, as measured in 100A.D., put 10,000 men where their enemy wanted them least.

Spain, however, did experience technical obsolescence in its final humiliation of empire. In 1898, the United States was a rising power. The United States wasn’t quite ready to challenge Great Britain in 1898, but it did see Spain. What did Spain have? Oh, overseas colonies, colonies that could help the United States grow in the natural direction of the country: the Pacific. Sure, it came with a short-term rental of Cuba and a long-term lease on Puerto Rico, but the real prize for the United States was Guam and the Philippines, which still looks like it has one too many of the letter “p” in it.

This addition got the United States a leg up in the last part of aligning non-Western nations and established a firm gateway to Asia and military base for projection of force throughout the Pacific. We were, in fact, willing to fight an 11-year war against the Filipinos and develop the M1911 in .45ACP to kill drugged out Filipino guerrillas, because a .38 just wasn’t enough.

I digress.

The reason the United States utterly defeated Spain in less than four months was it had an intense technological and logistical lead in every facet of warfare. The numbers speak for themselves: 4,119 American casualties versus somewhere near 56,500 dead Spanish. Oh, and the Spanish ships were still sporting cannon over a century old.

My friend’s dad was in a union. Every story began, “Once upon a time and a half . . . “

Spain was dead as an empire, only waiting for someone to knock it over, take its stuff, and buy something nice for themselves. That was the United States. By the time of the Spanish-American War, the United States fighting Spain was the geopolitical version of a velociraptor taking on a kitten. The only way the kitten survives is if the velociraptor gets all the kibble.

Where are we now?

Are we Rome? Are we Spain?

Both analogies are suspect, since I don’t trust either Italians or Spaniards. Too much wine in both countries, and I know how I am after one too many bottles of pinot: I’m in a lot of economic trouble, personal danger, and I can’t remember my past.

Is the United States, like Rome, just taking another L that won’t matter because we’re still the empire? No, I think we’re not. I think we’re beyond the peak of American hegemony, which probably happened on August 15, 1987 while I was throwing a kegger. Woo!

I had a French duck, but you can’ardly tell.

Is the United States, like Spain, passing? Again, no, I don’t think so. We are seeing that some of our main weapons date to designs of nearly 70 years of age. I’m looking at you, B-52. The reason is that the bomber is dead to anyone who isn’t living in mud huts, and we realize that. The B-52 would have been awesome in 1945 but now is just a target.

And we realize that. I think we’ve realized that with our aircraft carriers as well, and now understand that wars in a time where satellites can provide real-time targeting make big ships filled with thousands of sailors liabilities rather than assets.

Remember this: no matter what happens, we still irritate the hell out of France. We’ll always have that.

Know Your Enemy

“I am not a number. I am a free man!” – The Prisoner

The GloboLeft and the GloboLeftElite are not tied to the countries they live in.

Instead, they are tied to their class. A professor from Boulder can glide into a conference in London or Paris or D.C. and feel exactly the same: the same polite applause, the same correct opinions, the same network of people who went to the same schools, read the same journals, and never once had to fix a carburetor.

The nice hotel room, the brandy, and the bacon-wrapped shrimp taste identical whether the view is of the Flatirons, the Thames, or Islamabad on the Seine. These people deal almost exclusively with other members of their class.

Our daughters have to be sacrificed.

That is who they are loyal to. They are largely unelected yet have an outsize impact on your life, like Anthony Fauci or the CEO of Disney®. And it’s also elites in virtually every facet of life.

An example: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In 2024 their financials showed $180.4 million, 81.8 percent of their operating revenue, came from government contracts and grants tied to illegals and refugees. Why are we inundated with illegals? You’re paying to be inundated with illegals. The illegals and refugees stream across the border in unending numbers because we paid for them to come here.

For the Catholic hierarchy the calculation is simple: mOaR Catholics, regardless of where they come from or what they believe outside of their first Holy Communion. Now, I don’t want to be a killjoy to the bishops, but St. Thomas Aquinas would beg to differ. Aquinas actually cared about the common good of a particular people in a particular place.

The modern bishops appear to care more about the grant pipeline.

When your funds allow hordes of illegals and other foreigners to finally show up, their very presence funds the GloboLeft again. More students who don’t speak English equals more jobs for predominantly GloboLeftist teachers and interpreters. More violence in schools from poorly adjusted foreigners equals more jobs for counselors, social workers, speech therapists, and cops.

The entire apparatus expands.

The GloboLeft does not merely tolerate the invasion; it metastasizes it into salaries, pensions, and moral superiority.

I remember a conversation with a perfectly credentialed GloboLeftist who looked me in the eye and said, with complete sincerity, “Well, if we don’t have them (illegals) here, the cost of strawberries will go up!”

Yes, yes they will. And the job of picking them will go to an American. Without the influx of illegals it could be one of those heavily-credentialed parasites who have burrowed into the system and now find actual labor beneath them. The strawberries will still get picked.

Let’s see the response . . . .

It is not only the obvious GloboLeftElite. Recently Senator John Curtis of Utah, “Republican” Senator John Curtis got body-slammed in the comments on X® because he wants to import more foreigners through a state-sponsored visa scheme complete with a quiet pathway for long-term illegals.

Republicans won’t vote to stop it. Many of them are already in the club, or they desperately want the membership card.

I guess no one in Utah is smart enough to run a hotel desk.

The bacon-wrapped shrimp is excellent, have you tried it? Do you really think John Curtis will ever vote to send them home?

This is the deliberate dismantling of the old labor market filled with independently minded people who can still remember a nation that was not an open-air hotel for the world’s surplus population. Those people sound dangerous, they sound like they may not support the government.

The people don’t support the government? Easy solution: import different people. To make it stick, let’s also pull heritage Americans out of the middle class. People in the middle class have pesky opinions, spare time, and haven’t been worn down so they still have enough energy to make trouble.

If they were desperately poor, they’d complain less. Heck, why stop there? If you want a civilization to disappear, the easiest method is to pay their women more money. They will happily take the lazy-girl jobs, postpone children indefinitely, and die surrounded by boxes of Chardonnay and pristine, unused wombs, ending family lines.

(h/t Vox Day LINK)

They also, on purpose, fail to go after certain criminals. Those Flock© cameras blanketing the suburbs are not primarily aimed at inner-city gang members, cartel drug dealers, or illegals. Those crimes are useful to the GloboLeftElite. The cameras exist to track and punish the middle class.

Don’t believe me? In Great Britain, murderers routinely receive lighter sentences than people who publish mean tweets. When’s the last time a black murderer was charged with a “hate” crime?

This is policy.

The GloboLeftElite need the middle class to comply, and they need the anarchy from below to justify their own continued existence as managers of the chaos. The violent and the non-productive are their power base and their enforcers while the middle class represent the last pool of money they haven’t sucked up. After they’ve done that, they’re desperate to replace you.

How desperate are they? They will import people from countries whose average I.Q. would make a decent room temperature if you happened to be wearing a sweater. This is the root of the competency crisis you see every day: airplanes that crash, ships that smash bridges, and schools that don’t teach.

They do not care. It does not impact their lives one bit. The conference circuit continues. The brandy is still poured. The bacon-wrapped shrimp is still tasty.

The GloboLeftElite are not traitors to their countries in the old sense. They simply no longer have countries. They have a class, a set of hotels, and an endless supply of other people’s children to feed into the machine.

A machine that runs on shrimp, apparently.

The Only Freedom They Can Never Take

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” – Dune

Never forget Cole’s Law: “Shredded cabbage and carrot can make a decent salad.”

Frank Herbert wrote the opening quote for this post about a desert planet full of sand, giant worms, political backstabbing, and SpaceLSD®. He could have been describing a Tuesday on the Internet, or maybe even Elon’s plan to get SpaceX™ stop SpaceX®’s shares from crashing and carving a trillion-dollar crater into the S&P 500©.

But back to fear. Why is it used so often?

It’s because emotions are potent weapons, so they get weaponized.

Constantly.

Every advertisement, every mainstream media news segment, every political social media post is designed to make me feel something specific so I will do something specific.

When my dentist died, his family couldn’t find his tombstone. There was no plaque on it.

Outrage is easy to provoke, and it motivates. Fear moves product. Comfy feels gets votes. The people pushing the buttons understand this better than most philosophers ever did, I mean, have you ever read much about MK Ultra?

The O.G. ancient stoic philosophers wanted to believe that reason was what they used to make decisions. Marcus Aurelius sat in his tent writing notes to himself about virtue while his son grew up into the Roman version of Hunter Biden. Using reason as a source of virtue is timeless, but it’s almost completely ignored by actual humans with nervous systems and SnapGram© accounts.

Humans feel first. Only then do we invent reasons.

Five guys with booze will start a fight. Five guys with weed will start a band.

That is really the order of operations. But it also implies that if I guard my feelings then I can guard my decisions. If I let someone else set the temperature while I’m driving and I have already handed them the steering wheel and they say, “Ha! Driver gets to choose what’s on the radio!” have I twisted the metaphor too far to include peanut butter and PEZ®?

Absurdity aside, if I hand someone the ability to control me with emotion, I cease to be anything but that MK Ultra automaton. Thankfully, I tend to run anti-trend anyway.

If the herd is charging one direction, my first move is to imagine that they’re headed toward a cliff at a full gallop. That habit has kept me out of more than one mistake, like investing my 401K in Beanie Babies©. But even I, John Wilder, still have a pulse and a set of instincts.

The difference, though, is whether I treat those instincts as orders or as suggestions.

My decisions are my choice.

Any one practicing for a staring contest should take a good, hard look in the mirror.

Yes, emotions matter. They can be fuel. But I still get to choose how I feel about an issue. In the end, that very well may be the only freedom that cannot be taken from me: I can only give it away.

They can take my money, my job, and MySpace© page. They can take my reputation. They can take the flags and the stories I grew up believing. They can flood every screen with the approved feeling of the week from that high-fructose corn syrup of actresses, Zendaya.

Why high-fructose corn syrup? No one likes it, and it’s in absolutely everything.

Regardless of Zendaya, what they cannot do is reach into my skull and flip the switch.

Unless I hand them the key.

I used to eat at Applebee’s®. Then I saved up enough cash to buy my own microwave?

I have watched people hand over that key in real time. They scroll until the algorithm has told them exactly how angry to be, what to be angry about, and how to soothe that anger.

They outsourced their emotions to the loudest voice in the room and call it being informed . . . “tRUsTinG tHe scIENcE”.

The alternative is to be deliberate.

I notice the emotion when it shows up. Turn it around in my skull, and name it while avoiding the drama.

Then, and only then, do I decide whether it points toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness or whether it is just another current trying to pull me somewhere I never intended to go.

That pause is the whole game. In that pause I still own the tiller.

I can choose the things that flow from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I can choose honor and discipline instead of convenience and shortcuts. I can choose the hard path because, as the old proverb says, calm seas do not make good sailors. Smooth water teaches me almost nothing about flip flops, pop-tops, inexplicable tattoos, or using a mixer to blend iced alcoholic beverages. Oh, wait, that’s Jimmy Buffet talking about his rough time.

My bad. But the point of Margaritaville is that it shows how a life free from discipline leads to hard lessons in the end, anyway. I want storms. I want them early.

It’s rare that a defibrillator fails, but when it happens, no one is shocked.

Discipline looks boring from the outside. And I am boring. Honor looks stubborn. And I’m damned stubborn. Choosing not to feel what the crowd demands can look cold.

Fine.

I don’t control the storms. I do not control the media cycle, the markets, the next manufactured crisis, or the next fashionable cause.

I do control whether those things dictate my next move.

Everything else can be bargained, taxed, regulated, stolen, or canceled. The choice of how I feel about an issue stays mine until I surrender it.

So, I guard it.

I hear they have a new parking meteor at the International Space Station.

The sea will not stay calm, our lives are filled with storms. The only question is to whether I choose to hold the tiller, or if I’ve already given up for a free ride on the SpaceLSD© express.

At least they have Margaritas.