Wealth – Page 13 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part II

“You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.” – Serenity

What do you call a two dead parrots? Pollygons.

This is part two of the series on social structures and control.

Most (stress on “most”) Western Nations adopted a modified version of a new social order between 1776 and 1920. It looked like this:

Absent or Figurehead Monarch: The idea of absolute rule by King melted away, and was essentially done in the first world by 1920. I mean, we dudes all still dream about it, but it’s gone.
Government Bureaucrats: The core of government power now flowed into an unelected bureaucracy that was, more or less, immune to election. When governed by a Constitution, this was good. When governed by avarice, not so much. Thankfully, most of the bureaucrats in the twentieth century were governed by bad eyesight and a to close the window for lunch, if the DMV is any clue.
Elected Leadership: The idea that elected leaders subject to the will of the people would be the ones to run the government was a noble one. Sadly, we started electing at least some dirtbags from the start.
Military Leaders: A professional military, generally subservient to the civilian leaders but still with cool uniforms.
Clergy: A strong church presence, though unofficial, was still the backbone of the country’s morality. Some priests even became lawyers, or what we would call a father-in-law.
Constitution: At least in the United States, the Constitution was the basis of civic religion for the majority of the people. In other countries, there were other things, like Great Britain and the King or Queen or Meghan Markle. It was a basis for the foundation of the nation (or, country).
Big Business: In the twentieth century, big business (including big banking) finally grew to the point that it was able to be a primary force in society, providing products and jobs for the voters, donations for the leadership class, and, apparently, lots of fedoras.
Middle Class: This was the engine of prosperity – working to build the economy. For a large part of the twentieth century government policy was focused on increasing this segment, since they were the spark plugs that both worked the line for GM® as well as ran the plants.
Lower Class: The big goal of most first world nations was to shrink this class, through education and sometimes direct payments. Making them productive, it was felt, would be a win for civilization as a whole.

Although not optimum, this version of civilization was built on a solid structure that focused on the atom: the family. It tried to take feedback from voters, protect their rights, and create wealth and happiness for most. It was an example of what happens when the people and the economy and the government more or less agree on virtue as the basis of society.

If honesty is a virtue, why doesn’t anyone want to hear the truth?

Yes, there were flaws. But compared to today?

The flaws were miniscule. It actually worked very, very well. For a while. But what was happening when the Left was in charge? Well, you got a very, very different structure.

That’s not the power structure of most modern-day dictatorships. That power structure assumes a Dear Leader, secret police, no church, a frightened military, and everyone else shoved into the frightened peasant class. The culture there has nothing to do with any traditions, has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with trust (trust no one is the motto in lands with a secret police) and has nothing to do with Truth, Virtue or Beauty, since those are viciously stamped down if they conflict with the will of Dear Leader.

Dear Leader: The top was an individual. Certainly, there were committees, but the basis was an individual. Lenin. Mao. Kim. The government didn’t revolve around them: they were the government.
Secret Police: Dear Leader can’t be everywhere, all the time, so the next best thing was a hated and feared secret police. Is it better to be hated or feared? If you are Dear Leader, you want both. You want the people to fear the secret police, but you also want the people to hate the secret police so that they could never govern.
Scared, Weak Military: Dear Leader needs a military, but they need to be scared of being replaced or killed.
Scared, Weak Bureaucrats: If the guys with tanks are scared, what hope do they have?
Scared, Weak Everyone Else: If the guys who assign Boris his Commieflat are scared, what hope does Boris have?

What size soda does Kim order? A supreme liter.

The atom of a dictatorship isn’t a family, it’s an individual. The goal of a dictatorship is weak families and no middle class. The goal is to create distrust and to have parents not trust their children, nor spouses trust each other. One of the first actions of the commie Spanish Republic was to make abortion legal, and eliminate marriages because they wanted to “make women equal”.

The reality was the Spanish commies wanted to destroy family ties so that the state was the unquestioned leader. This creates a different kind of stability – one based on constant fear and no trust. I wonder if that sounds familiar to anyone?

We are watching most of the Western World morphing from their old structure into the structures that Dear Leader would love.

Uniparty: Most of the Democrat mainstream and Republican mainstream have the same “values”, with only a variation or two. The Republicans acted like the neighborhood dog that finally caught the car when the Supreme Court revoked the absolute right of women to kill babies “because it’s Tuesday” and had no real plans. Abortion was a fundraiser, not a real issue to them.
Converged Bureaucrats: Bureaucrats in the FedGov are now out only for themselves and the bureaucracy they serve. The ATF doesn’t care if you have guns, really. The ATF just wants to have funding and to be able to shoot the family dog on Tuesdays.
Incipient Police State: Don’t think we have a police state that hands out unfair punishments? Type “January 6” into a search engine sometime . . .
A Vanishing Clergy: Church used to be an important touchstone – in the 1950s some banks wouldn’t give a mortgage if the pastor of your church didn’t speak favorably about your character. Extreme? Probably not – it kept a place in the community for virtue. The goal of the Left is that they have the monopoly on defining virtue. Hey, Live, Laugh, Love, right?
A Captive Press: When was the last time anyone in the Mainstream Media actually tried to challenge The Narrative? Oh, yeah, Tucker Carlson.
Twisted Constitution: The Constitution of the United States was written on plain language so the common citizen could understand it. Now? Emanations and penumbras and twisting of “thou shalt not” into “thou shalt” has made Constitutional law like a game of limbo – how low can you go? That the Civil Rights Act is now more important than actual Constitutional protections is all you need to know.
Subservient Military: Obama spent a lot of time and effort clearing out high-level officers in the military that weren’t on the Left. Notice that none of the top brass pushed back against the vaxx mandate?
Big Business: Big business has always had inordinate power due to their size and the amount of money they control (this includes big banks). During the last 40 years big business has dominated and destroyed most profitable small business niches. This results in a . . .
Much Smaller Middle Class: The middle class is smaller and poorer than at any time in my life. This is getting ready (over the next two years) to get much worse.
Everyone else: This is the goal – that 80% plus of the population are stuck, working paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate wealth, and having their saved money inflated away.

The values of this brave new world aren’t anchored by any sort of church. Values in 2023 move around every day at the whim of the Left. It’s all coordinated, too. Whatever value that they want is pushed through channels to the public, often with movies and television shows backing it up using emotionally laden content to transmit the message. Remember those “very special episodes”? Yup, all of them were propaganda.

But he was such a good boy. Never hurt anyone.

They had left the Internet and alternative media alone. Probably, it was left for a safety valve and because most Normies get their news and opinions from Mainstream sources. In reality, especially in the aftermath of Trump being meme’d into office in 2016, the hammer has started to come down. Information wants to be free, but the Left has taken the Dear Leader approach to information.

Ever notice that comment segments on news stories went from “nearly every news story has one” to “Comment section? What’s that?” in a span of just a few years? The problem was that people in the comment section were making too much sense. The people in the comment section were exposing the lies in the news stories. They had to be dealt with.

Websites like mine have been “detuned” from the search algorithms. This makes it harder for normies to find places that have unapproved ideas. YouTube® has veered into censorship, having kicked podcasts off the air for simply arguing against the vaxx or agreeing with the very real possibility that the 2020 elections were hijacked.

My computer started to cuss after the processor got too hot. I had to install a heat censor.

But not all is lost. Elon Musk has made “Community Notes” a thing. They’re a way to point out the Lies of the Left and those that hate Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families, and Nations.

This is how they’re targeting us, and how they have targeted us over decades. The wonderful part is that we have Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families and the power of Nations on our side. And people are waking up – 30% to 40% of all voters (not just those on the Right) believe the 2020 election was illegitimate. This is despite widespread censorship of this idea.

Keep spreading the Truth. Practice virtue and push your church (if you have one) to be more virtuous, rather than another Leftist conquest. Starve Big Business, when you can. Buying from local farmers gives them more money and keeps the money away from people who hate you.

If your misery is caused by paranoia, I can tell you you’re not alone.

We can’t wait until plate tectonics splits California off into an island, and the good news is that we won’t have to. As I’ve said before, we will win.

We are inevitable.

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part I

“Looks like civilization finally caught up with us.” – Firefly

The invention of the shovel was groundbreaking, but everyone was blown away by the invention of the fan.

This is part one of a two-part series, it just got too big. Part two is written and I’ll post on Wednesday.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how and why the wheels are coming off of our civilization. Why? I don’t know – I’ve been worried about it since I was a wee Wilder and became concerned that plate tectonics wouldn’t split California off soon enough.

We see evidence of the collapse all the time but sometimes have a hard time putting our fingers on exactly what is driving it all from a structural standpoint. That’s why I’m here to help. Don’t worry. I’m a trained professional.

The social structure of stable societies isn’t an accident. When people were wandering around in nomadic tribes, I’m not sure exactly how things went down, but I do know that once civilization started taking root (so we could have beer, really, link below), the basic unit of civilization was set as the family in any sort of civilization that produces wealth, has reasonable freedoms, exhibits virtue (Truth, Beauty, Steak) and has any sort of stability.

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

Think of a mom, dad, and kids. In a stable society, that’s essentially the atom. Often in the West we’re inundated with the idea of individual rights, and those do exist, but the biggest failing of those rights (in my opinion, and I’m right) is where those rights contradict the stability of the family. Atoms are at their most stable when all of the parts are in place – an atom missing electrons is an ion, and I could explain using hydroxide ions, but that’s pretty basic. And let’s not even get started on isotopes.

Why was 6 afraid? Because she could be discovered by the crew of the Battlestar Galactica at any time. And you thought I was going to say, “because seven ate nine.”

Divorce, for instance, is bad for family stability. Duh. Making divorce easy is thus attacking the core of the structure of civilization. Those on the Left who hate society are always attacking the family, and what better way to shatter it than divorce. Oh, wait, there’s birth control and abortion.

While a man and a woman, married (to each other) constitutes a family, that family is truly completed by children. We’re humans, but we’re also animals – there is an innate drive to reproduce and have offspring and then yell inappropriately at little league games. There has to be something strong about the need to reproduce, because babies are so objectionable and worthless. Really. I mean, I’ve never even seen a toddler I couldn’t trounce in wrestling.

So, the atom of society isn’t the individual – it’s the family. Families, not video games or pantyhose, are why civilization exists – it exists because of us, and it also exists for us. If a civilization doesn’t have children, it ceases to exist.

Once I found out that my pizza was burnt, my beer was frozen, and my wife was pregnant. I guess I’m just not good at taking things out in time.

This has some pretty significant implications, since so much of policy (especially Leftist, but the Right is not clean in this, either) is now actively hostile to the family. Examples:

Housing Prices: Leftists import hordes of illegals to increase prices and demand, and also make so many rules that building a house is more expensive.
Taxes: Leftists want to punish high earners (but not wealthy folks, there’s a difference) to keep the wife in the workforce to keep her from having kids.
Divorce Law: Divorce should be as easy as possible, there should be no requirement for fault (which would make cheaters guilty), there should be no consequences to the woman (who initiate the vast majority of divorce) except for fun and prizes.
Custody Law: Children should be part of the fun and prizes for divorce, and used to incentivize divorce for women through child support.
Alimony: Let’s make the man pay, even if the woman initiated divorce.
Propaganda that Women Must Work: This is deep, and is put into the heads of women that they are somehow “less than” if they aren’t working making PowerPoints®.
Propaganda that Women Must Have It All®: This one is the YOLO tag, making women feel unsuccessful if they don’t party away their youth and fertility with many, many men.

There’s more, of course, and I could probably write another 10,000 words about how society is actively hostile to the family and the very concept of parental authority. But you see it every day. You’re swimming in it – starting all the way back to inept fathers being the butt of jokes in sitcoms, and the “single mom don’t need no man” trope that started back in the 1970s.

In the 1980s lots of kids had single moms. Now some even have two.

So, that’s one part of the attack. But society isn’t made up of just random families wandering around – instead, there’s a structure to civilization, just like there’s a structure to, say, a beer bottle or the underwire in a bra. One such structure is kinship. Japanese people are all, on a basic level, related to each other and share the same culture.

This basic “being related to each other” is what distinguishes a nation (nation having the Latin root of natio, meaning “birth, origin, race of people, tribe) from a country. A country is just some random folks living in the same place, like New York City. A nation is a group of people who are all much more closely related, like Modern Mayberry, where if you moved here 15 years ago, you’re still one of those newcomers.

Since The Mrs. has kin here going back into the 1880s, she’s covered, but they’re always going to think I’m a bit sketchy.

Why was the mushroom the life of the party? Because he was giving away cocaine.

But kinship should not be underrated. When you look at the happiest country surveys, at the top are nations that have a disproportionate amount of people that are closely related, genetically. You trust your family more, and you’re less likely to cheat them, except at Thanksgiving while playing Monopoly®. Because of that, countries that are all of one nationality can be higher trust with lower corruption, if they aren’t tribal (looking at you, India and Pakistan and all of Africa).

Want to break up a country? After you’re done with the family, aim for disruption of the nation by introducing unlike people that have virtually nothing in common with the native stock in huge numbers. There’s a reason that nations of generally related people exist: it’s more stable.

If you wake up being chased by a lion while on a horse, and next to you is a giraffe and a hippo, what do you do? Get off the carousel and check into rehab.

Beyond the general nature of the family, there is an importance to the structure of society itself. One of the more stable structures of society in history was the feudal model. It consisted of several different classes of people:

Monarchy: Generally, the overall boss (when strong), who kept the whole thing in check. Needed: strong neck muscles to hold a big crown.
Lesser Nobles: Lieutenants, who administered smaller areas of varying size to keep those running. Needed: ability to bow.
Clergy: Served as an overall legitimacy, and also a diplomatic corps between nations. Needed:
Merchants: Made sure people had fish. Needed:
Professionals: I’m tossing artisan and guild member in here who had mad skills making stuff that society needed. And bankers. Needed: fluffy shirts.
Peasants: Someone has to milk the bull. Needed:

Each of these units played a part, and the power varied from place to place, and time to time. One of the most amusing things is when there were too many nobles, so kings would have to come up with wars to kill them off, because no one likes tons of bored yappy nobles around. Just ask Meghan Markle when King Charles ships her off to fight Argentina. Singlehandedly.

Sometimes the nobles were stronger than the king, thus the Magna Carta. Sometimes the clergy was stronger than the king, thus Cromwell. Sometimes the king was stronger than the clergy, thus the Avignon papacy. Even peasants got into the mix, with Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in England making King Richard II put on his brown pants.

Why do dairy cattle have hooves? Because they lactose.

Each part of the society could (and did) cause difficulty if the power that they shared got too far out of control. The Merchants and Professional classes were mainly in a support role, but they provided administrative and logistical support for everyone, and the bankers especially definitely led to many, many shenanigans.

Thus endeth ye olde parte the first.

Bikinis, Garbage Loans, And Fishy Finance

“A 30-year mortgage at Michael’s age essentially means that he’s buying a coffin. Now, if I were buying my coffin, I would get one with thicker walls.” – The Office

Most garbage workers don’t get official training. They pick it up as they go along.

The Big Solution to the Great Recession was printing lots of money. I would have (back then) thought that it would have hit the economy all at once. In reality, what the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury did was send all that money they printed off to the banks.

The banks didn’t lend it. They kept it on the books, and in fact many of them redeposited their free money with the Fed™. In reality, the Fed© was scared about was the entire system locking up. It was pretty bad in 2009 – basic chemicals that were necessary (say, sulfuric acid) for a basic, functioning economy just stopped production.

No one knew who had money, or who would have money. As one friend of mine noted at the time, “When the tide goes out, you finally see who isn’t wearing swimming trunks.”

My office above a bank, my assets over tens of millions of dollars.

The inflation stayed “within target” for the Fed™, flipping up and down around 2% during the decade following. Again, with all of the money printed, I expected it to be more, and I still don’t trust the official government figures on inflation since that would be like trusting a used-car salesman on that gently used 1995 Ford Taurus© with only 350,000 miles on it.

COVID was the final straw, though. People produced less stuff, so there was a lower supply. The government printed a lot more money and then gave it to everyone, who most definitely didn’t save it, and in fact bid prices up on everything. Making nothing and buying everything?

Inflation. Or my ex-wife.

Inflation finally triggered interest rates to go up. That posed a problem for the banks. Let’s take me: I have a small mortgage left on Stately Wilder Manor. I’m in no hurry to pay it off because I can get a CD for 5.5%, but my mortgage is only 4%.

How did Metallica stop people from pirating their music? They started releasing garbage.

My mortgage is worth less to the banks now than I owe on it – if I were another bank, they’d sell it to me for less than I owe. That’s a problem for banks that have exposure to mortgages and didn’t sell them off or hedge them.

It’s not just mortgages – Silicon Valley Bank® decided to invest in lots of long-term bonds and such because inflation had been so low. Buy a corporate bond yielding 4%, pay depositors 1%, and profit!

But when interest rates started heading upward, the same sort of math as with the bank that owns my mortgage applies – what used to be worth $100 is now only worth, say, $80. Oops. When the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the bank, money that wasn’t insured, find out?

Bank funs. Er, bank runs.

And it’s gone . . .

How bad was it? Of the $172 billion deposited at the bank, only 11% was covered by deposit insurance. I imagine that there were quite a few tense billionaires like Oprah worried that she’d have to get a job at the McDonald’s® drive through, and how could she resist those perfectly salty fries?

Since billionaires were in danger, the FDIC immediately said, “Rules? Who needs those. All money is safe in Bartertown!”

My initial expectation is that we’d see more bank failures right around now as interest rates increased and the piles of garbage on the balance sheets of the banks started to rot. Instead? Banks are still (I believe) happily lending money borrowed by the Fed™.

How do they do it? They manage to do it by having the Fed© allow them to mark their assets to what they paid for them, not what they’re worth. So, they’re lying. I’m fairly certain the Fed™ is buying this stuff to get it off the balance sheets of the banks and lending them more money whenever they don’t have enough caviar.

Does the Sturgeon General recommend caviar?

The rot, though, is still there – it’s only a matter of who pays for the rot. Debt always gets paid, the old saying goes, either by the borrower or by the lender. I do know of two local businesses that are going bankrupt. Their debt is what drove the bankruptcy. My guess is that, combined, they have a debt of a million and a half dollars (or so). Who will pay it? In the end, the lender will.

I think that might be at least part of the big jump in debt that the United States owes. As interest rates go up, Uncle Sam is acting like a raccoon and jumping straight into the trash can to eat the garbage loans and bonds that the banks had to throw out because they were stinking up the fridge. Here’s proof:

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Eventually, printing lots and lots of money is like a magic trick the magician does one too many times and everyone sees how it works. Will it work this time?

Unrelated, frequent commenter Ray notes this Give Send Go. I’ll let him explain more. GiveSendGo – Loco Needs Divorce from Prostate: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

Globalism, Computer Chips, And Breast Implants

“Bart, the Internet is more than a global pornography network.” – The Simpsons

Biden shooting the Chinese Spy Balloon® is the only thing he’s done to fight inflation so far.

It’s all about the chain.

A global supply chain has some attributes. Just like money is freely (in most cases) able to cross borders, in a global system labor can cross borders as well, without ever having to leave home. People in (spins wheel) Bangladesh work for $0.0010 an hour sewing soccer balls? If they’re as productive (per dollar) as having a machine and skilled operator in the United States do it, the work went to Bangladesh.

This is (if you’re in Bangladesh) probably a good thing since your alternative was farming spider webs or whatever it is that people in Bangladesh eat. In theory, it’s good for the company that sells soccer balls, since they can (not saying they will, but they can) price them lower, and still produce a profit. It also would appeal to the women who play soccer while their husbands are in the kitchen doing the dishes in Europe.

Why did the Italian join Tinder®? He was provalonely.

But what it doesn’t do is help the highly-skilled guy who used to make them in a non-spider web eating country. In fact, over time the knowledge of all the little tricks that are necessary to make soccer balls cheaply and effectively are lost as they’re transported to Bangladesh.

This might not be such a big deal when it comes to soccer balls, because you can (in a pinch) use the heads of your enemies for one, which would make soccer my favorite sport, ever. But when it comes to things like computer chips, well, that’s a different story. I believe it was the head of the Economic Advisors of George H.W. Bush’s White House who made the comment that he didn’t care if Americans were making potato chips or computer chips as long as they had a job. Oddly, G.H.W. Bush hadn’t had had a job for decades, so, why not?

The question even I don’t know the answer to: is this my last inflation joke?

Bush’s advisor was wrong. While Americans were making potato chips, places like Taiwan Semiconductor were making computer chips. Likewise, they were learning how to make them. Knowing what’s on a computer chip is nice, but it doesn’t tell me about all the of the steps required to make structures that are so very small that we’re near the limit of shrinking chips because the of the size of the silicon atom itself. Yeah. It’s that complicated. But, hey, we have Ruffles® instead of knowing how to do that.

Making chips of such precision took literally decades of investment, billions of dollars in research, and replicating it is very, very hard, unless you’re China and steal the secrets while putting “your people” in sensitive positions in corporations that do the work. Oh, did I just describe every industry?

No, there’s an absolute advantage to making computer chips over potato chips. Building computer chips takes knowledge but it also builds knowledge, some of which can result in additional, new businesses that make use of the technologies developed in building computer chips. Imagine, a PEZ® dispenser a billionth of an inch (40 Newtons) tall! This was what the Soviets dreamed of!

Speaking of names, because of inflation, Dollar Tree® will soon be calling itself Tree Dollar®.

It’s not just the high technology parts that go into nearly every appliance, car, and weapons system that is used in the United States, it also applies to commodities like sweet, sweet oil. It also applies to rare-earth minerals, which China (currently) leads the world in production.

But rare-earth minerals aren’t all that rare – we have them in the United States, but don’t have active mines and refining processes. Why? It’s expensive to mine here (labor costs) and it’s expensive to mine here (environmental compliance costs). So, it’s cheaper to ship the mining off to China and just let them do the dirty work since they (at least in the past) don’t seem to care about losing a few million people to escalators, building collapse, explosions, or whatever other dystopian nightmare you can imagine.

How does a mollusk hide from predators? Clamoflage.

The downside of this global civilization is that it’s pretty tightly wound. In most cases, companies don’t like to stockpile “stuff” so they have it delivered just when it’s needed and don’t have a big supply sitting in a warehouse. When writing for a post a few years ago, I wanted to know how much grain was sitting in the silos near Modern Mayberry (which is near the silos that produced the grain).

The answer surprised me – the silos were nearly always one-half to two-thirds full. Whoever is making the bread doesn’t want the wheat until they’re ready for it – they certainly don’t store it on site until it’s much closer to becoming a loaf.

COVID exposed the supply chain, and the panic response of the public. Toilet paper was in short supply not because there wasn’t enough toilet paper, but rather because there wasn’t enough toilet paper capacity to produce 1,000 roles for every person today.

If I had a $0.05 for every bread joke I’ve told, I’d have a pun per nickel.

As warfare hits Ukraine and Israel (and maybe the wider Middle East) and as tensions rachet with China over the status of Taiwan, which just happens to lead the world in computer chip manufacturing, we’ll soon see if the globalism that we’ve faced is as fatal to the fate of nations as it was to so many million middle-class jobs in the United States. When we (by default) import Bangladeshi labor along with the millions of illegal aliens that we destroy, we (by default, eventually) import the Bangladeshi lifestyle.

Pardon me, I need to research how to cook spider webs.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We At War? and Invaders

“Maybe we’re at war with Norway?” – The Thing

I’m sad, because 6:30 is the best time on a clock. Hands down.

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

Volume V, Issue 5

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

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 – At War Already? – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Invaders – 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 815 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

At War Already?

This month I had a post up titled 14 Signs Of An Unfree Country. One of the responses I received is below:

It’s a very fair question, and one that deserves some thought and a response.

One of the first issues discussed on the early Civil War 2.0 Weather Reports was the idea that Civil War 2.0 would likely not resemble Civil War 1.0 with opposing armies in uniform moving across open battlefields. No, in my opinion there might be some military trappings, and some form of “regulars” on either side, but for the most part this Civil War will be very different, and a large part of the action will take place via individual and small, only loosely coordinated groups.

But the question remains – are we at war?

The January 6 prisoners would certainly say so. The concept of justice for most of them has been a farce, they’ve been sent to prison in some cases for their political beliefs. The Left fully castigated the GOP for releasing all of the tapes which showed much more of the reality – and causing the ridiculous Buffalo guy to get released immediately.

In some cases (at least!) the prisoners have been treated in conditions that the Left would normally call inhumane. For the January 6 prisoners? No indignity has been spared them.

And no indignity has been spared on the heritage Americans. Our one virtue when it comes to the Left has been our ability to provide the backbone of the United States military. Now that traditional military families are opting out since, well, the country hates them, the idea of a draft is now embraced by people who ran to Canada to avoid it when it didn’t suit them.

What about the sacred right to vote? Well, again, that’s a sacred right only if you vote for the Left-approved candidate. They absolutely oppose voting for anyone not on the Left, and, guess what? While you were out keeping the economy going or serving our country, they infiltrated the governmental entities that count the vote. California is even going to ban manual vote counting and mandate only machine counting be legal.

What about the people who are being humiliated by watching the history of their nation erased, statue by statue, name by name, and child by child as they are drip-fed estrogen from the age to three to be turned into weird abominations that will be consigned to a tormented life as neither man nor woman.

So, the legal system is a fiction, and the cultural situation is grim.

Violence is at a high, as well. I keep warning people to get out of the cities. The latest murders in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia of Leftist enablers provide a glimpse of the decline of those cities – they weren’t hidden like the everyday horrors of the average father or grandfather or child killed at random by groups of murderers who believe that they won’t be punished because they haven’t been punished for (in some cases) over 50 felonies.

Are we at war already? If, like me, you live in a Red state? No, not really. Here in Modern Mayberry it looks a lot like it did thirty years ago, except for the rot that Leftism and globalism has done to the economy.

If you’re on the Right and live in a Blue state, or if you challenge in any manner the power of those who would rule?

It looks like that answer is, “yes”, they’re at war against you.

Violence and Censorship Update

There is no way on Earth that the United States was more racist in 2015 than it was in 1970. Zero ways. I would suggest that in 2008, when the United States voted in a black guy as president that would have ended that forever. Especially since the 1990s in the United States were probably the least racist decade of any country on the planet, ever. But the push is in: everything is racist. This is used, primarily to shut down actual discussions of actual problems.

Why would a Leftist leave a weapon on the battlefield after they’ve won the battle? Elon Musk rustled all the jimmies when he bought Twitter®, um, X™. So what’s the solution? Stop anything Musk does.

Okay, this didn’t officially happen, but I’m thinking that most of his staff thought it:

Apparently selling soft drinks in Russia is bad:

As is using the word “female”.

But that’s okay, kids should be taken from their parents for any old reason.

And the press should just ignore the “why” of a story.

And also the “who” of a story.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Looks like Biden is going for the record. Who says he never gets anything done?

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 up again, again slightly – I was expecting more during a long, hot summer. I’m guessing that people don’t even notice it anymore.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, up. I expect December to be a time when this starts to head upward, significantly.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back down again this month, but I expect October will be a bit more interesting after earnings reports.

Illegal Aliens:

The border numbers are up only slightly, and I think that (shockingly) the government may just be lying or that the Border Patrol is being told to leave the illegals alone. Why would I think that? That’s what the next story is about.

Invaders

It is now abundantly clear that the people in Washington and New York now view heritage Americans as I view an infestation of rabid squirrels. We’re pests.

The idea is to replace us with people who will work cheaply forever and are okay with living in a repressive regime as long as they have ramen and soccer on TV. They want slaves.

The other part of this plan is increasing taxes and injecting feminism (and LGBT) directly into the brains of the youth to slow down birth rates. They really don’t care what this does. The elites can live anywhere that is nice. They’ll live in the most favorable places with all the stuff they could imagine needing.

It’s also interesting that everywhere except for Europe and the United States that booting illegals out is considered “Tuesday”. Even before Hamas went kinetic on Israel, they were getting ready to boot out any black people. Probably to Europe, sure, but they were getting ready to boot them. Can we have the same illegal immigrant (invader) policy as Israel?

Well, not with Biden. They cut the razor wire because . . . ? Who cares what the reason was. The Border Patrol now just wants to get more immigrants in. I call this the “Biden Plan”, but really it was also the Bush plan and the Clinton plan, too.

How bad is it? A developer has created a base for over 75,000 illegals. They live there, have gangs there, and sell drugs from there. We know where this is. If any administration was serious about this, the developer would be in prison, and the deportations would start . . . last week. Instead? We have a place where the laws of the United States don’t really apply and any illegal can settle.

We know where they are. We’re doing nothing. We are the carbon the globalists want to reduce, since we keep asking such inconvenient questions as our country is invaded.

And it’s not just Hispanics. It appears that all of Africa is streaming across the border.

And why not? Africa is growing at an astonishing rate despite having exactly the same ability to feed itself as a drunken toddler.

The upshot is that this will be the last generation of heritage Americans, ever, unless the tide changes.

But, it looks like Blue state people are (finally) waking up:

Which way, America? The solution is, still, very simple. When will we adopt it?

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1703658363542700433

https://twitter.com/i/status/1701238979557761319

https://twitter.com/i/status/1707364236077277309

https://twitter.com/i/status/1705460875472052712

https://twitter.com/i/status/1703043847037587892

https://twitter.com/NewportBeachNBT/status/1702853152276717830

https://twitter.com/i/status/1705623045254057994

https://twitter.com/i/status/1700257920112644268

https://tvpworld.com/73183231/us-three-leftist-activists-killed-in-separate-incidents-in-one-week

ONE GAL

https://twitter.com/k0ssed/status/1709252993512861804

https://nypost.com/2023/10/02/philly-motorcyclist-stomps-on-back-windshield-of-nikki-bullocks-car-video/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12588897/I-just-wanted-protect-kids-Fearless-mom-bravely-faced-biker-thugs-one-stomped-car-smashed-rear-window-children-5-2-backseat-speaks-out.html

GOOD GUYS

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12594639/Cody-Heron-motorcyclist-smash-windshield-Philadelphia-arrested.html

BODY COUNT

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4218666-ai-girlfriends-are-ruining-an-entire-generation-of-men/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12437519/Gender-affirming-surgeries-US-nearly-tripled-pandemic-dip-study-finds.html

https://admin.americanaddictioncenters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Substance-Abuse-Estimates-by-City.jpg

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12484069/US-deaths-mortality-richest-countries.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/covid-vaccines-causally-linked-to-increased-mortality-resulting-in-17-million-deaths-scientific-report-5499001?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=CFP&src_src=epochHG&src_cmp=CFP

https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1703540571598368901

https://twitter.com/i/status/1702400933928304652

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1706442804258296082
https://news.yahoo.com/many-people-mexican-drug-cartels-180057725.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/773022b3-8b34-4da0-850b-bfcaa8e7a28a_867x449.jpg?itok=ExPuHvoW

https://twitter.com/PaulHook_em/status/1706832820033692084

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/border-birth.jpg

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199417599/immigrant-population-us-foreign-born-census-bureau

https://www.dailywire.com/news/inside-colony-ridge-the-fastest-growing-development-in-the-u-s-is-a-magnet-for-illegal-immigrants

VOTE COUNT

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fjustthenews.com%2Fpolitics-policy%2Felections%2Ffbi-denies-foia-request-docs-investigation-possible-nationwide-voter

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/09/22/google-search-engine-sways-millions-of-voters-in-one-direction/

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/09/25/whos-responsible-for-georgias-disastrous-2020-election/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/bias-or-bad-search-engine-optimization-biden-challengers-nearly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/05/zuck-bucks-grift-was-born-in-wisconsin-voters-must-ban-it-in-2024/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/now-we-have-proof-tgp-exclusive-massive-2020/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthemessenger.com%2Fopinion%2Fdemocrats-2024-magic-bullet-mass-mail-in-voting

CIVIL WAR

https://academic.oup.com/publius/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/publius/pjad035/7271459?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/9/7/sorry-trumpers-there-wont-be-a-us-civil-war-for-2024

https://thewire.in/world/america-is-on-the-brink-of-another-civil-war-this-one-fuelled-by-donald-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/03/the-only-us-civil-war-will-be-a-war-on-democracy/51c6e488-4a54-11ee-bfca-04e0ac43f9e4_story.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-second-american-civil-war-has-begun/ar-AA1dS2tp

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4187490-republicans-just-cant-stop-calling-for-civil-war/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ray-dalio-says-mccarthy-ouster-another-step-away-from-democracy-and-toward-civil-war/ar-AA1hO2PG

https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-greg-gutfeld-suggests-190456184.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/who-are-the-americans-who-support-secession/ar-AA1h4qrE

https://studyfinds.org/dont-trust-us-government-doomsday/

https://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1699596057678606451
https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1700996328799773109

The Big Short – The Next Step Down

“Our investment-strategy was simple. People hate to think about bad things happening so they always underestimate their likelihood.” – The Big Short

If you live in a haunted house, you’re not alone.

I watched The Big Short the other night. It’s about the financial system and the shenanigans that led to the near collapse of the Western financial world, but presented with elements of light-hearted comedy, so, of course I enjoyed it. And having Margot Robbie sitting in a bubble bath describing mortgage-backed securities, subprime loans, and credit default swaps while drinking champagne was genius.

The premise of the movie is that several groups of people figured out that the housing market was fraudulent, and that any human with a heartbeat (and, as described in the movie, at least one dog) could borrow enough money to buy a house.

Why not? House prices only go up.

I’m no Margot Robbie, but when I’m naked in the bathroom, at least the shower gets turned on.

There have been many people who have done excellent pieces describing the sheer insanity of the housing market and the incestuous relationships between the lenders and rating agencies that kept the party going with cheap money far too long. You can read them, but they don’t feature a picture of Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

In my personal experience, a bank that rhymes with Hells Rarmo offered me a loan for over six times my annual income with only my stated salary as the basis. My response, “You know, I could never afford to pay that back. Why would you offer a loan that big to me?”

“I know, but I’m required to tell you about it,” was the answer from the uncomfortable voice on the other end. Even I could see the con from there, especially since they offered to lend me my downpayment.

The next home loan I got (after the collapse, in 2009) required enough personal information from me that I had to hire a proctologist to help me fill out the paperwork.

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas? Car.

The result of the Great Recession that followed was a retooling of the industry, bankers and people from the ratings agencies went to prison for fraud, and the government decided to create a system of sound money so these sorts of manias were tamed. Okay, you can laugh now, because none of that really happened.

The government just shoved so much money down the throats of the banks that they got even richer for manipulating the system in ways that would make Al Capone’s scar twitch.

What I saw during the run up to the disaster is that the economic taint (heh heh, I said taint) from the housing bubble spilled everywhere. The place I noticed it first was that waitresses became worse. Why? During the bubble, everyone upgraded their job, and good, smart waitresses became, (spins wheel) mortgage brokers and realtors. The mark of a really good economy is crappy customer service.

She don’t lie, she don’t lie . . . romaine.

I wrote a couple of weeks back about how I can see this happening in restaurants locally here:

The Invisible Recession

People are hurting, and the first thing to cut are the luxuries. Some people take eating out at McDonald’s© as a luxury versus heating up leftover lasagna, and now they’re bringing the lasagna. Garfield® would be proud, but McDonald’s® rarely makes money from cartoon cats.

Add in gasoline prices that are so high they make prescription drugs look cheap, and the squeeze is here. CarMax© just recently announced that they’ve taken a 10% hit last quarter in number of cars sold. People don’t buy cars when they’re worried about choosing between day-old lasagna and a McChicken™ sandwich.

At least one of you will enjoy this one.

The biggest tension in The Big Short came from the fact that the guys who saw the fraud went all-in. In one case, Micheal Burry put $1.3 billion into “insurance policies” that would pay multiples of the invested amount if the mortgages bonds started collapsing the way that Burry was sure that they would.

Burry made a $1.3 billion bet, and on top of that, he had to pay monthly premiums in the millions to keep the policy in force. Yet, even as the housing market started to fail, the housing bonds weren’t failing. If those bonds didn’t start falling Burry and his fund would be buried. John Maynard Keynes famously said that “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” proving that he was at least occasionally right.

Economics jokes are like bank bailouts. Most people don’t get them.

They did fail, and Burry made his investors rich, just in the nick of time before his fund became insolvent. Burry (according to rumors) ended up making over $800 million during the financial crisis.

All this brings us to where we are today. I might be wrong, but what I’m seeing everywhere I look are people that are at the end of their rope. The reason? Because we never took the pain and we didn’t clean up the financial system and make it a servant rather than a master.

But I have a plan. Maybe Margot Robbie could explain our way out of this one?

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Mental Health

“Who is Poppy Adams? After graduating Harvard Business School, Adams was briefly held for serious mental health issues before disappearing without a trace.” – Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Every day I tell my family I’m going out for a jog and then I don’t. It’s my longest running joke.

FYI – minimal humor and memes in today’s post due to subject matter – it just didn’t fit.

We’ve driven the kids nuts.

I don’t necessarily mean you or I, but the change in society has caused a great decline in the mental health of the kids. It really started showing up in 2009 or so, when the emergency room visits for kids started a sharp uptrend. The kids (ages 10-19) were going to the hospital due to self-harm spiked by over 60% in a single decade.

For girls it was worse – it spiked nearly 100% – doubling in that time period. The rates of depression doubled in that time frame as well.

What I’ve seen when I talk to kids is that many, many of them have huge anxiety issues. Many are on psychoactive drugs. Many are visiting therapists regularly.

I look back to when I was that age, and I’m not sure I knew even a single Gen X kid who was seeing a shrink. I’m sure that it wouldn’t have been something they’d have shared, but it was a school, so that would have gotten around. Also, as far as I know, there was only one girl on any medication, and as I recall there had been some significant family tragedy.

Suicide? Only one kid tried it in the decade I spent in that age group. And I knew a lot of kids. But, to be fair, something like 30% of kids with mental health issues drop out of school so I never would have seen them. However, the numbers really do show that this is certainly the most mentally ill generation in the history of the country.

What’s changed?

Luxuries are available today that would have boggled the minds of my generation when we were growing up. Kids today can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Listen to any song. Watch concerts of their favorite bands. Yet, with all the information, connection, and amusement available, something is horribly wrong.

My first guess at a major factor is a simple one – the iPhone™ came out in 2007. Given two years for smart phones to become more or less everywhere among the teen set, that correlates pretty well to the start of the increase in mental issues.

The designers of social media and games aren’t stupid – they absolutely manipulate the way the apps work to make the user addicted. “Someone read my FaceGram© or InstaSpace® and liked it! I’ll go check and see who it was! I Tweeted®, er X’d™. Did someone repost it?” The system is designed to make sure there are small, frequent doses of dopamine kicked out by whatever is in the human brain that kicks out dopamine.

This shorter-term focus, the smaller “bite size” ideas make something that was typical decades ago, like reading a book, seem like forever. Not being able to tune out and relax can’t be good.

Social media also has another insidious function – it is designed so people show off only the glamorous and nice things that happen to them. Who spends a lot of time posting about their pain, and sorrow? In the end, it makes a certain segment of the population feel that everyone is doing great except for them. Me? With my friends we spend as much time talking about the rough bits in our life as we do the great things.

Online friendships are also shallower, so the real bonding that kids get when they’re on adventures is lost. Add in that porn of the vilest types is available to most any kid with a phone? How are they not messed up in ways that no other generation has ever been?

2009 was also the dawn of Obama. Obama started defending traditional marriage and ended in full Pride® mode. Gender confusion wasn’t really something that was very big when I was growing up, except for Dee Snider. Now people are talking about transitioning toddlers, and somehow these people are being taken seriously and not being strung up on telephone poles.

To be sure, not all kids are a mess, but enough are that there’s a very big problem – I’ve seen one statistic that 44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness. That’s a big number – I do think that, perhaps, the kids see some of the same things coming that we do – I do know they look at the economy and think, perhaps correctly, that they’ll never do as well as their parents.

I’m not sure how to fix those millions of kids that have already passed through their teens and are now in their 20s. From the outside, the one thing I’ve seen with most psychiatrists/psychologists is that they never really cure their patients, they just keep coming back, week after week to pay for the therapist’s BMW®. And I’m exceptionally skeptical of many psychoactive drugs. Yes, I know that some of them work very, very well for certain conditions with a physical cause.

What now?

The solutions to preventing a lot of these issues in the first place are fairly simple, but a big step for many:

Religion gives life a greater meaning. I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that as church attendance declines, mental health problems increase.
Be involved.
Technology control (i.e., limit the damn phones), especially for young girls who seem to be more impacted.
Remove the gender confusion – homeschooling or a decent religious school would be good options.
Make sure they learn skills that allow them to be useful. Start small, and build up. Don’t coddle them or walk them through every step. Make them work for it.
Make sure the boys are involved in sports, especially if they don’t want to be. Get girls involved in something like 4-H or the church youth club.

The Zoomers (Gen Z) have had a tough time of it, and this will be another factor (along with their horribly messed up dating and sex lives) that is already impacting the economy.

Let’s not screw up another generation.

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Sex

“I don’t know much about geopolitics, but that is one cool name for a country: Chad.” – Norm Macdonald Live

Ever notice you never see Chad with Chad in Chad? Hmmm.

Technological change has been very difficult for the kids of today – it has changed entirely the way that they relate to each other, how they spend their time, how they are rewarded, and the very nature of the male-female relationship. Since I’m writing this post, it’s about as positive as Biden’s impact on the economy.

Of course, technology had changed the way that previous generations lived. When I was a kid, our entertainment on a Friday night was cruising main. We’d get in cars, and ride up and down the street, listening to loud music, revving engines.

Why?

To see each other. To find out what was going on. To meet girls. The girls would go to meet guys and chatter and drink some occasional peppermint schnapps snuck into a Big Gulp® cup. Often the girls and boys would do no more than flirt. Sometimes, though, well, more would happen.

This was an in-person interaction that was natural. The technology of the car and cruising Main were just minor adaptations of behavior that was certainly as old as the concept of the very first city – boys wanting to watch girls, and girls wanting to be watched.

Does mentioning cruising Main make you feel old yet?

This in-person interaction gave us the dopamine hits of the day. And, even at the breakneck speed of 25 miles an hour, there was an absolute limit to the number of boys a girl could see in a night of cruising Main of, maybe, a few dozen.

The reality is, of course, that we all have a finite number of choices of people to date (and mate) with. Cruising Main was a dance that was as old as time. In this dance, the woman offered her youth and beauty in return for the commitment of a good man. The man offered his commitment for the youth and beauty of a woman. And, when I was much younger, if I stayed up late enough I could watch it all on Cinemax® after my parents were asleep.

Those trades are, generally, good trades. They create a stable society, and provide a woman the chance to find, marry, have children with a man and raise them. Women tend to try to date and mate upwards in socio-economic status. Men? Well, you know.

Hey, derpy girls need love, too.

Now, for many, the meeting place is Tinder©. In Tinder™, women have infinite choices – they are the commodity to be possessed, and they swipe left or right, alternately accepting or rejecting hundreds of men in a minute. In this new bargain, the woman now trades her youth and beauty for endless one-night stands with Chad Tinderchuck. Example:

Chad always has a date, since girls always swipe to talk to him. In this, Chad ruins women. Chad’s a 10, but when it’s 2am at the bar, Chad’s fine with the average 4 or 5 or 6. In this way, that 4 (Flora Foura) thinks that, for the rest of her life, she deserves a Chad Tinderchuck in the prime of his life. She is a widow, forever pining for that man that she thinks she deserves. Don’t believe me?

Wait, is that a lunch lady from 1983? And she’s calling anyone mediocre???

The actual 5 or 6 guy Flora should be with? Well, after Chads marry and disappear, and younger Chads start ignoring her, she’s ready to “settle” for that 5 or 6 Andy Average. And, she’s angry about it every day that she sees Andy, since, deep down, Flora knows that she’s good enough for Chad.

But we’re seeing now that Andy Average isn’t quite so interested in Flora Foura after she’s spent her twenties on a revolving carousel of men, maybe picking up a child or two.

Let’s be fair – most of the things that most men do (especially young men) is to get quality females. If those aren’t available, Andy Average shuts down. Why work overtime when Xbox® is cheap? Why pump iron when Flora puts him on ignora?

¡Jeb! is always on ignora.

Men then go NEET – Not in Employment Education or Training. Why work hard? Why try to get great education? Why work at all? One segment of men has gone beyond MGTOW – they’ve gone full NPNW. I’ll let you sort out what NPNW means.

And who can blame men? When I was in high school, women liked men taking charge. Men were supposed to try, and women were supposed to put up a struggle so they didn’t feel like tramps. To be clear, I never engaged in any behavior that the young fräulein didn’t enthusiastically support, and when she said “stop” and meant it, I did.

It was well ingrained in women that they didn’t want to look like tramps, so they had to pretend they didn’t like or want to make out. Meat Loaf’s song trilogy Paradise by the Dashboard Light is a perfect description of a healthy sexual dynamic of the type that produced . . . me, and probably you, too.

We now live in a world of #MeToo. Russell Brand (who I don’t know because he doesn’t return either my emails or my calls) is being accused of, hear me out, having sex with (really!) a girl who wanted to have sex with him, who was (drumroll) of legal age. The cad! If a multimillionaire celebrity can be accused and lose a couple of million dollar a year of income for doing legal things, well, what chance does Andy Average have, especially since the average woman don’t need no man?

This is, perhaps the biggest lie. Women who don’t have children or a husband in their 40s are, perhaps, the unhappiest demographic on the planet. And, as I noted earlier, women want to marry up. The big paradox is women want to get a college degree (skip having children) and earn a lot of cash.

Women won’t marry men who make less than them, so they die childless and alone.

But, hey! At least they got to make cool PowerPoints™ between boxes of chardonnay and the trip to the vet for Sir Buggles Von Fancypants. I’m not exaggerating. Check this out:

When you sold your family, soul, and children for Internet likes.

Did I mention this is ruining the economy, the family structure, and the future?

The good news (for me) is that I wrote my notes on this post, and I’ve only touched a third of them. That means probably the next two Wednesday posts will be around this theme.

The bad news is that there are two more posts. As much as I’d like to say the kids are alright, they’re most definitely not. This has tremendous impacts on the near-term economy, as well as the future of the West.

But, hey, at least Biden’s still Building Back Better!

Oh. That didn’t age as well as a cat lady.

Dunbar At The Fall Of Nations

“Dunbar, not Dumb Bear.” – Dances with Wolves

If beer makes you smarter, that didn’t work out for Budweiser®. (meme not mine)

People are funny. And I’m not talking, “John Wilder after fourteen beers at Chili’s when someone mentions that we’ll have to give up PEZ™ to meet CliMAtE ChAnGE GoALZ” funny. No, I’m talking about the way that we’re wired to react as people, and yet pretend we’re not.

Out of all of the aspirations of the way that we want to think about ourselves, there are some constants. Except for Mark Zuckerberg, we all need air to breathe. We all need food. We all need something to drink. I’ve heard some people drink water, but I keep wonder why they do that when mankind made civilization so we could have a nice beer.

The other thing most of us need is . . . people. Although everyone is slightly different, there seems to be something hardwired into us as to how we deal with people.

I told the doctor I didn’t trust him to stitch me up. He said, “Fine, suture self.”

Robin Dunbar (Grad student for Dr. Batman® Von Unterober) is a British Psychologist. He looked at the various sizes of primate brain, specifically the neo-ocasio-cortex. Er, just the neocortex. Sorry. The neocortex is the most recent delivery to the brain, and allows humans to do complicated things like talking, brewing beer, heating up frozen pizzas in the oven, giving each other chlamydia, and writing columns while drinking beer.

Dunbar sliced up a lot of primate brains, and compared the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate tribe. There was a correlation. Dunbar then said, “Hey, humans are primates, even though we are so very sexy, so what size would a human tribe be?”

His result based on math and brain size, and, I’m guessing a few pints of Guiness®?

Stable human tribe sizes should be about 150 based on Dunbar’s math, and this number is called Dunbar’s Number. I wrote about this before in this post (LINK) where I have the original (as far as I can see) hypothesis that some mental illnesses might have helped small groups survive back when we were killing mammoths to survive, and I write a bit more about Dunbar’s Number in that post.

My friend’s wife is leaving him because of mental illness. Or at least that’s what his cat told him.

This 150 person (let’s be generous and say it’s somewhere between 100 and 250) group size seems to show up wherever I look. Huge corporations may have tens of thousands of employees, but each of the actual operational chunks is small. Most that I’ve seen have been . . . less than 150 people. Even operating locations I’ve been to that have 500 people or more break down into groups. Office staff versus day shift versus night shift, or people who forgot their pants versus people who always remember them, or something similar.

Many folks might say, but Wilder, my country has hundreds of millions of people in it. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t seem to apply. Dunbar himself theorized that this number would only be exceeded when those groups faced extreme survival pressures, like invading Huns or women wanting to vote.

I’ll toss in a different theory here: larger groups than Dunbar’s number can exist when there’s a great degree of wealth that requires cooperation to maintain. My theory was (and is) that civilization was formed so we could make beer (LINK).

So why is it so big now?

How is Alexa® like my ex-wife? She tried to listen to everything and pretended to know it all.

Wealth, technology, and order allow Dunbar’s Number to get immense. If every small town in the United States has a McDonald’s®, then life gets simpler. We have built around an economic “sameness”. Similarly, people watch the same NFL™ teams or NCAA© college teams based on regions. This economic homogeneity is based on wealth and technology.

If you’re a fan of {INSERT SPORTS TEAM HERE} then if I’m a fan of the {SAME EXACT TEAM} we’re not so different, we’ve created a commonality. Dunbar’s Number is short-circuited, and a shallow trust is created.

But what happens when wealth (and the hope of having it) goes down?

I think we’re seeing it. Trust shrinks. People we once put inside our group are now put outside our group because the competition for resources increases. An example is probably in order: if everyone has a job and all of the PEZ™ and Hot Pockets© they want and big houses with swimming pools, having the odd illegal immigrant doesn’t bother them much. But when times get tight and jobs are scarce and Hot Pockets® cost $10 each, the “in-group” shrinks.

The Mrs. cringes every time I call them “Squat Pockets®”.

The greater the stress on the people, the smaller the group gets. Who do I trust? In my circles, it’s my family first. That number is small. Then my close friends – those that I know, based on experience, that I can trust. That number is bigger, but still pretty small. Then there are those who I have strong reason to trust. Then those in the neighborhood. Then . . .

Well, you can see, the tougher the situation, the smaller the circle. If we go back to our history, this is what we find – somewhere between 100 to 250 of us in a group trust each other, and can work as a group. When times are good, technology is in place, and the NFL® is playing that number can certainly be bigger.

I tend to think we’re past the point of Peak Dunbar. As things get tougher, you can see the friction already started as violence has escalated. As jobs disappear, and as hope disappears, this will increase.

But at least right now, I can still have fourteen beers at Chili’s™.

The Invisible Recession

“1000 points of light . . . recession bad, recovery good . . . I think I’ve got that.” – The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear

Inflation has really started to bite here in Modern Mayberry. I’m not sure about the Big Cities, but I’ve begun to notice it around here. Today at lunch I made a trip to McDonald’s®. It’s rare, most of the time (if I eat lunch at all) I eat at home. It’s more convenient, and I really, really hate lines, but this was a late lunch and I could drive straight to the window. But hey, for me, it’s the McChicken®.

The prices at McDonald’s® have gotten silly. Whereas there used to be enough value in a Big Mac™ to make one of them (occasionally) worth it, it’s just not the case nowadays. I didn’t spend too much time pondering the price on any of the burgers, since I could get nearly a pound of steak for the price of the average burger-fries-drink combos. But again, for me, it’s the McChicken™.

What a fun, cool, happening place, if you can get 3-for-free!

Why are people not going out?

The prices are silly.

I think (and I might be wrong) that our local McDonald’s™ just has to match the prices that are (more or less) nationally set by some sweaty accountant in Chicago wearing a Grimace™ costume and questioning the life choices that led him to have to report every day to Stacy, who is forced to wear a Hamburgler© costume. I can’t see the labor around Modern Mayberry costing nearly as much as in a bigger city. The food, I would imagine, costs exactly the same as in the bigger cities.

The result? I’ve noticed that the lines are much shorter at the local fast-food restaurants, even at peak hours. One of the regional chains hasn’t raised their prices, since all of their restaurants are just scattered around Upper Lower Midwestia and they don’t have to worry about the price of a Quarter Pounder™ in Manhattan. Their lines are the longest in town, so I follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded.”

Since COVID, my favorite local restaurant has closed. It was a bona fide restaurant, great service, great food. Supply chain issues coupled with labor oddities and lower business slowly torpedoed them. They liquidated before they lost a lot of money – they saw what was coming and wanted to go out on their terms.

I’ve been told that McDonald’s™ was sued once for bugs in their food. They won the case – no one on the jury believed they used any natural ingredients.

And our world got a little bit smaller, so we now have dinner somewhere else. It’s cheaper, but I notice that both of the places that we normally go aren’t very busy anymore. And the waitresses that work there aren’t changing jobs anymore – the good ones are keeping their jobs now. Something tells me they’re a little harder to get now.

So, if you’re counting restaurants and the people who work there (and those that used to own them) Modern Mayberry definitely has fewer restaurants. The revenue in the town might be the same, but there are (my guess) 20% fewer customers.

This is the invisible recession.

I always carry some McDonald’s® fries when I walk the dogs in winter. Fries go great with chilly dogs.

It’s invisible because I’d imagine that, even though McDonald’s® is (visually) selling less McFood©, they’re charging more. So, higher prices times lower volume is probably about even. But the value created to the consumer is far, far less even though revenues might be neutral. Unless you count eating healthier food than McDonald’s™ makes as value. Heck, Ronald has killed more people than Pennywise.

I suspect this is going on everywhere. Wages are certainly not keeping up with daily expenses, and those who are less fortunate haven’t had raises that have kept up with inflation. And why should employers pay more? In a recent month, a net 1.2 million jobs were “created” but 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. They were replaced by immigrants (illegal or legal).

Thankfully, corporate profits were saved!

It’s better than when he ran the farm using Artificial Intelligence and had to reboot it all before the power outage – AI, AI, Oh.

Interest rates are up, and I expect they will continue to go up because there is no semblance of any fiscal adulthood in Washington, D.C. on either side of the ball. The Democrat mantra of “spend more” is always followed by the Republican response of, “Well, okay, but not quite that much” as the dance of the destruction of the currency continues.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is based on the bet that politicians will continue to be weak and craven, and that 2024 is an election year. What do politicians like during an election year? A good economy with low inflation. Failing that, politicians like distractions and spreading money out like AOC on a Saturday night. If you can’t make a good economy, fake one.

More money floating around means . . . more inflation. But if wages aren’t going up because there’s a massive influx of illegals?

Just more misery, especially for those at the lower end of the pay scale. All of the typical Leftist voting blocks will be rewarded, of course. The standard Leftie professor at the average Leftie college (but I mostly repeat myself) will get raises because the Left takes care of itself and funds itself. The Left believes in the state and uses it as a propaganda and funding arm. Why do drama programs get special federal funds?

Because they vote Left.

I guess the finale was shot before a live audience.

But real Americans that aren’t tied into the ecosystem of government gimmes are seeing their difficulties multiply. Me? I’ll still mainly skip McDonald’s© and save a few bucks and have more steaks and fewer fries. But the invisible recession is already here, at least in Modern Mayberry.

But, hey, for me? It’s the McChicken™.